Every artist may be said to have a certain recurring theme, or motif, or obsession, which seems to haunt their work. Jorge Luis Borges, for example, couldn’t get his head out of the library, and a great number of his stories took on this setting. Alfred Hitchcock featured birds prominently in all of his films. Dr. Seuss liked hats. Similarly, what haunts much of Kanye West’s oeuvre may seem obvious to anyone familiar with his work — he is clearly obsessed with himself. I would argue, however, for a no less flashy alternative: West has a thing for lights.

A preoccupation with lights and light imagery is evident in nearly every artistic project conceived by West, from his music to his live shows to his album rollouts. In songs like “Flashing Lights,” “Street Lights,” “Highlights,” “Low Lights,” “Ultralight Beam,” and, of course, “All of the Lights,” West’s lyrics address this theme explicitly. His 2008 “Glow in the Dark Tour” created a literal light show to accompany many of these songs. In 2013, as part of a marketing campaign for his upcoming album Yeezus, West lit up 66 buildings around the world with a black-and-white projection of his face. He returned on tour in 2016, this time aboard a stage that floated above his audience, undergirded by a “lighting rig, a rectangular truss designed to carry Kanye’s chariot, exploding in deep oranges and reds, blasting earthquakes of bass and hyper-focused light beams.” All of these examples speak to the strong sense of thematic unity that is characteristic of West’s art, but they also stir up questions regarding the personal significance of this theme. Why are the “cop lights, flash lights, spot lights, strobe lights, street lights, all of the lights” of such lasting interest to West? Is he afraid of the dark?

In Dark Matters: On the Surveillance of Blackness, Simone Browne offers a reinterpretation of the ways bodies have been surveilled, made “visible” and thus controllable, throughout American history. Specifically, her study traces the history of social control enacted upon black bodies, beginning with their transport from Africa to America as the human cargo of slave ships, and continuing today through the use of biometric technologies, commodified and branded “blackness,” and discriminatory security practices. Of particular importance here is Browne’s concept of “black luminosity,” which she defines as “a form of boundary maintenance occurring at the site of the black body, whether by candlelight, flaming torch, or the camera flashbulb that documents the ritualized terror of a lynch mob.” Through the use of light, or any other technology that ensures the visibility of its target, a black subject is illuminated as a known, objectified, racialized, and regulated body. This practice is closely related to Michel Foucault’s discussions of “panoptic power” in Discipline and Punish, describing subjects who are policed by an internalized sense that they are being observed at all times. As Browne argues, however, “this is a light that shines more brightly on some than on others.” For the black subject, the illumination of one’s body becomes an apparatus of white power and racial control. For West, an artist of considerable fame and public visibility, such a “play of lights” upon one’s body becomes an even more complicated issue.

As a black man enveloped in the blinding light of spectatorship, West manages to both reflect and resist the white gaze fixated upon him. Through this negotiation of the black public figure as both seeing subject and seen object, as both being seen and seeking to see for himself, West demands that the “panopticon” and other theories of surveillance be problematized. As Browne recognizes, “In using Foucault’s schemas of sovereign power, discipline, and normalization, as well as the concept of panopticism, I am mindful of their limitations for theorizing…the making and marking of blackness.” However, close investigation of these surveillance practices as they are enacted on the black body also assist in “offering a critical reinterpretation” of panopticism and other concepts related to surveillance studies.

In order to illustrate West’s negotiation between seen object and seeing subject — between black luminosity and the Glow in the Dark light show — I will analyze West’s subjection and resistance to the social control imposed on him by a “racist mass media” apparatus. This will be carried out by a critical review of performances throughout his career, including his music, lyrics, album art, live performances, and appearances on television and the internet. Specifically, I will investigate three significant phases in West’s career: the release of his debut mixtape, the release of his critically divisive record Yeezus, and his recent and controversial responses to the Trump Presidency. Through these various instances of black self-expression and self-construction, I hope to paint a more nuanced picture of West as a particular artist and subject, while also expanding our understanding of black visibility in the public realm.

Back cover of West’s Get Well Soon… mixtape

I arrive slowly in the world…I crawl along. The white gaze, the only valid one, is already dissecting me.

-Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks

I argue that Kanye West, as we now collectively know him, was born on October 23rd, 2002. On this night, two weeks after signing to Roc-A-Fella Records, West was involved in a car crash on his way home from a studio in Los Angeles. His jaw was fractured by the impact, and reconstructive surgery was performed at a nearby hospital. This turn of events, however, did not impede the work that he had been focused on that night. Following his release from the hospital, his jaw still wired in place, West quickly returned to the studio. There, he recorded “Through the Wire,” a song recounting his accident’s aftermath in slurred speech and graphic detail. The song, originally released on a mixtape and later as part of his debut The College Dropout, became his highest charting single as a solo artist thus far. What Spin magazine now calls a “foundational element of his origin myth,” the accident and its subsequent retelling helped establish West as a young artist to watch.

West, aware of the national headlines reporting on his accident, likely recognized the star-making potential of his next release. This came in the form of a mixtape entitled Get Well Soon…, which featured “Through the Wire” along with 35 other tracks. As Complex magazine writes of the project, “At the time, Kanye was only known for being a producer, so the Get Well Soon… mixtape was his introduction to the world.” If this release was meant to introduce West to the broader public, it does so in a surprisingly graphic way: The back cover of the mixtape features a close-up photograph of West, most likely taken soon after his accident. He is in a hospital gown, his face horribly swollen, his eyes half-closed. He would appear unconscious if not for his uplifted hand, which is holding a golden angel pendant. As a companion piece to West’s music, the image lends a shocking human face to the larger-than-life story of “Through the Wire.” As a response to the media coverage of his accident, the brutal image and its accompanying song also allow West to recover the story as his own. The first instance of a career-long battle with the mainstream media, Get Well Soon… evidences West’s early efforts to claim authorship over his life, to present a narrative on his own terms. Rather than an instrument of social control, the “camera flashbulb that documents” his accident is here in the hands of a trusted friend or relative.

Within the larger scope of African American history, West’s image in the hospital also recalls another, far more tragic story: the 1995 lynching of Emmett Till. Under the wrongful accusation of whistling at a white woman, Till was kidnapped from his home by two white men, beaten, shot in the head, and abandoned in the Tallahatchie River in Mississippi. Upon recovering Till’s body, his mother, Mamie Till Bradley, elected to display his “mutilated corpse” in an open casket. Bradley then distributed photographs of her son’s body to newspapers and magazines for publication, claiming that “[people] would not be able to visualize what had happened, unless they were allowed to see the results of what had happened.” When the photographs were rejected by the mainstream media, Till’s mother turned to African American presses for their publication. As recounted by Maurice Berger for the New York Times, “The publication of this image incited a revolution, rousing thousands of young African-American men and women…into actively joining the civil rights movement.” Bradley’s insistence that the public “visualize what had happened” to her son disrupts the function of black luminosity as a mechanism for white power and control.

By distributing the image of Till’s corpse, forcing it into public visibility, Bradley here offers a counternarrative that foregrounds the violence of white supremacy in the South. Like West’s reclaiming and reframing of his accident, the photograph of Till also poses the black subject to “look back” at their observers. As bell hooks describes this kind of resistance and critique: “Subordinates in relations of power learn experientially that there is a critical gaze, one that ‘looks’ to document, one that is oppositional.” By practicing a form of sousveillance, “looking at themselves” and documenting their bodily suffering for others, West and Bradley impose a painful narrative of black subjecthood that counters prevailing images of blackness in the media.

While the parallel between West’s car accident and Till’s lynching may seem far-fetched (or even offensive) West apparently found it quite fitting. The comparison is made explicit in “Through the Wire,” as he raps: “just imagine how my girl feel/On the plane, scared as hell that her guy look like Emmett Till.” West, through these lyrics and the accompanying image of his swollen face, seems intent upon relating his incident to that of Till. And perhaps the two events had more in common, in terms of anti-black violence, than “Through the Wire” lets on — as West revealed in an interview one month after the accident: “I was completely in pain and completely racially profiled and harassed…They did three or four tests on me for alcohol. After the first test [it should be clear] that I’m not drinking alcohol.” West goes on to describe that police and EMS workers questioned him repeatedly before giving him medical attention, and later dropped him out of a stretcher, resulting in worsened injuries to his jaw. The violent and discriminatory treatment of West here echoes, for one thing, the failure of the judicial system in the trial of Till’s murder — in which his lynchers were found innocent by an all-white jury. In each case, the black subject is cast as “guilty” for their own suffering, responsible for and deserving of the violence perpetrated against them.

Whether or not West’s mistreatment by police can be appropriately equated with Till’s murder (it can’t), a meaningful conclusion may be drawn from West’s lynching analogy. So writes Philip C. Kolin, examining the ways that Till’s life and death have been portrayed in music: “the emphasis in ‘Through the Wire’ is not on racial crimes or their perpetrators…but on Emmett Till as connoting a talented young African American man’s fear of disfigurement. Though [West] mentions Till only once, he shares Till’s personal nightmare — having his body mutilated, his life and career erased.” The threat of disfigurement would be a lasting paranoia throughout West’s career: a fear of being deformed in a bodily sense, sure — but also of being wrongfully represented by a white world that now watched more closely than ever.

To the real question, how does it feel to be a problem? I seldom answer a word.

-W.E.B. DuBois, The Souls of Black Folk

By 2013, West had forcefully cemented his place in hip-hop — and perhaps recent American — history. As summarized in a New York Times exposé from that year, West had thus far “had the most [unique] hip-hop career of the last decade. No rapper has embodied hip-hop’s often contradictory impulses of narcissism and social good quite as he has” while simultaneously offering himself as a “lightning rod for controversy.” Following his televised condemnation of President George W. Bush, his interruption of Taylor Swift’s acceptance speech at the VMAs, and his labeling as a “jackass” by sitting President Barack Obama, West’s visibility in the American cultural landscape had reached an all-time high. Amidst these public controversies, West had also managed to release his most critically acclaimed album to date, My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy, hailed as “the first album in which he’s truly lived up to his potential in every way — as a rapper, as a lyricist, as a songwriter.” As he geared up to release his next project, the omnipresent spotlight intensified around West like never before: What will that jackass do next?

His answer came in the form of Yeezus, a record that seemed to confront and reject its audience’s expectations at every turn: musically, lyrically, and visually. A surprising divergence from the rich maximalism of his previous My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy, the album swaps “the lushness of his earlier songs for abrasive minimalism” — including distorted 808 kicks, screeching synths, and sudden cuts to silence. With half-rapped, half-screamed lyrics about sex, racism, and classism, West’s songwriting here ranks “among the most serrated and provocative of his career.” Even the record’s album art plays up the impudence, forcing its viewer to question what exactly they are looking at: The cover is not quite a cover at all, but rather the glaring absence of one (aside from a strip of red tape).r With only a blank CD visible under the record’s clear plastic case, the bare-faced aesthetic of Yeezus is announced immediately. As one review from The Chicago Tribune puts it, the album as a whole is “the latest affront from an artist who keeps inventing ways to tick people off.” The “people” referred to here, I argue, constitute a system of white spectatorship and control that has long tracked West’s creative output.

For Frantz Fanon, the construction (and deconstruction) of the black subject begins with one’s recognition of the white gaze. As he recounts in Black Skin, White Masks, “I appealed to the Other so that his liberating gaze, gliding over my body suddenly smoothed of rough edges, would give me back the lightness of being I thought I had lost.” But this appeal to the white gaze, according to Fanon, ends in “betrayal.” He merely ends up “fixed,” a still reflection of the racist assumptions and prejudices pinned against him . For West, this white gaze seems to take the form of a “public eye” that consumes and critiques his work. Further, this is a surveilling public that operates by, according to Amy Elizabeth Ansell, “a form of racism that utilizes themes related to culture and nation as a replacement for the…old racism.” This “new racism,” as she calls it, seeks to normalize or repress racial difference in order to preserve the “economic, socio-political, and cultural vitality of the dominant (White) society.”

In a 2013 interview with the New York Times, West discusses how this surveilling public came to direct his creation of My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy (from here on referred to as MBDTF): “I was like…‘Let me show you guys what I can do, and please accept me back. You want to have me on your shelves.’” West’s most critically beloved album, then, was a strategic attempt to win back favor in the public eye. In the aftermath of his numerous celebrity scandals — pitted against established white faces like George Bush and Taylor Swift — he sought to recapture the “liberating gaze” of mainstream acceptance. MBDTF was a success, in this respect. It would later be described by some publications as West’s “comeback” record, with even its rollout taking pains to reconcile his previous antics:

Ultimately, when it came time to premiere a 36-minute super-music video for MBDTF, he did so on the same network where the Taylor Swift debacle took place…he was on the verge of winning the public back, one soulful, lovable move at a time. (via Woolf)

Despite the success of MBDTF, as West admits in a later interview, he soon sensed a betrayal familiar to Fanon: “Even a Kanye West has compromised. Sometimes you don’t even know when you’re being compromised till after the fact.” As West explains, his winning appeal to the public came at the price of his autonomy as an artist. His compromise to white mainstream authority was a compromise of himself. It’s no wonder that an alternate cover of MBDTF features a crowned West with a sword through his head.

The subsequent release of Yeezus brought about a far more polarizing public response. The project was either pegged as “the best album of 2013,” or “a willing act of musical and commercial suicide,” with little room in between. I would argue, however, that West created an album that demands both of these reactions. As a record that effects its power through the brutal, suicidal deconstruction of the artist we once knew, Yeezus is a necessarily unsettling performance. In many ways, it presents itself as a corrective to his earlier appeals to the mainstream — a project that spurns every expectation that MBDTF met so masterfully. As public anticipation built prior to the release, as West again felt the pressure of the white gaze upon him, he looked back. The public can do nothing but watch as West’s most contentious album, according to one enthusiastic review, “instructs them to gather up everything they hold dear and familiar and go fuck themselves.”

Nowhere is this statement more evident than in West’s Saturday Night Live performance of “New Slaves,” the fourth track on Yeezus. West stands on center stage. He is surrounding by darkness, aside from a video being projected directly behind him. As he raps the song’s opening lyrics — “my mama was raised in an era when/clean water was only served to the fairer skin” — the video projection flashes through images of old-school price tags, perhaps from the Jim Crow era of his mother’s childhood. One of these images, however, stands out from the rest: a yellow sticker that reads “NOT FOR SALE” (it also appeared behind West in his performance of “Black Skinhead” earlier that night). As the performance continues, the video flips to a broadcast of West’s face in real-time. The video is specifically focused on his eyes, zoomed-in and grainy, staring into the camera. His voice becomes more charged as the song goes on, self-censoring his curse words into growled slurs: “You see it’s broke n — a racism, that’s that ‘don’t touch anything in the store’/and it’s rich n — a racism, that’s that ‘come and please buy more.’” The song ends suddenly, and the stage falls into darkness, except for a spotlight on West’s face. He stares silently at the camera for ten more seconds.

The video projection that frames West’s performance usefully illustrates his transition from MBDTF to Yeezus. The cuts from consumer goods to West’s eyes, from vintage price tags to the “NOT FOR SALE” sticker, exhibit a definitive shift in his sense of freedom and agency. Where he had earlier compromised with the public — “sold out” to the mainstream — he now steps onstage to turn this compromise on its head: the video suddenly cuts to West’s eyes, surveying the studio, creating the impression that the viewing public is now under surveillance. This massive projection of the performer-as-spectator creates a reversal of the usual relations of power, as the “seen” West finally becomes the “seeing” subject. Spoken lyrics thus become a secondary source of sight, a record of what he now can see: the systems of social control that surround all of us, specifically the “new racism” of capitalist and consumer society. As he raps in the second verse: “They throwing hate at me/Want me to stay at ease/F — k you and your corporation/Y’all n — s can’t control me.” These lyrics assert West’s awareness of those that seek to police him, and his resistance to their efforts at economic, cultural, and racial control. While exposing the white gaze as such, West also asserts his own freedom as an artist. Neither he nor his art will be compromised. In what Simone Browne may call a “performance of freedom,” West emphatically rejects the demands of his onlookers and his place within their racist system. Through the public performance of this liberated state, West seeks to identify himself “not as slave or fugitive or commodity,” not as object or product, “but as human.” In other words, he is not for sale.

At the conclusion of the performance, West delivers his final line in the form of a question: “What the hell they gon’ say now?” He seems to trip over these words — and for good reason. According to the album version of the song, the line is supposed to be “What the fuck they gon’ say now?” As previously mentioned, West is barred from using obscenities like “fuck” on the live television broadcast of SNL. Instead, many of these curses (and there are many) are delivered in an angrily mumbled, unrecognizable form. That is, West’s frustration with exactly this kind of censorship and constraint — both on television and throughout his career — is here distorted into snarling, incomprehensible bursts of human emotion. In many ways, Yeezus takes the same approach. In an attempt to expose the racist systems of control that oversee him, and thereby assert his artistic freedom, West is forced to hastily reconstruct himself and his art. By rejecting all that he deems “appealing” to the mainstream public, he is left with a record that appears shocking and unrefined to the white gaze. Again, the result of West’s exercise in freedom is reminiscent of Fanon’s: “I explode. Here are the fragments put together by another me.”

Not only did my ancestors and Kanye’s ancestors survive, they managed to make a way to make a new culture, remake family and faith. And in the process, make a culture so formidable that it continues to change the world.

- Blair L.M. Kelley (@profblmkelley)

Thus far in his career, West has demonstrated a keen awareness of the expectations and constraints placed upon him by the mainstream public, while also regularly evading and effacing these pressures in the pursuit of artistic freedom. However, meeting a public in the midst of great social, political, and technological changes, West’s efforts at freedom seem to have become more singular, more narrowly focused: this is a specific kind of freedom, perhaps leaving no room for the black community that initially brought him into the limelight. Following the release of his 2016 album The Life of Pablo, West’s most recent performances — particularly on the social media website Twitter — suggest that the white gaze of the public is not so simply escaped. Perhaps, in fact, it is only so long before this oppressive gaze grows so familiar to the black artist, so enduring, that it risks becoming a part of the performance itself.

Since his earliest activity on Twitter, West has stirred up controversy with his bold, unpredictable tweets. In January of 2016, during one highly publicized Twitter rant, he targeted fellow rapper Wiz Khalifa for his lack of creativity. In another tweet, he inexplicably declared the innocence of comedian Bill Cosby (whose sexual assault allegations had only recently surfaced). In other posts, he used the platform to apologize to musicians Beck and Bruno Mars, who he apparently “used to hate on.” He also aired his grievances toward the Grammy Awards, the fashion industry, and airline food. West’s erratic and candidly controversial behavior on social media would reach its peak, however, when he began voicing his support of then president-elect Donald Trump: In late 2016, a video surfaced of West interrupting his own concert, stopping the music to announce that he “would have voted on Trump” (if he voted). West received immediate public backlash for this comment: Some saw the Trump endorsement as contradicting his earlier support of Hillary Clinton’s presidential run. More damagingly, however, the comment seemed to isolate West from the larger black community, who were vocal in their disapproval of Trump’s racially-charged politics. Some audience members at the concert booed. Other spectators, who had either been at the concert or had seen footage of West’s rant online, took their complaints to Twitter. Later that year, West disappeared from social media entirely.

Public reception of West’s behavior was neatly summed up, by none other than West himself, on a standout track from his 2016 project The Life of Pablo. In “I Love Kanye,” West spits an acapella verse from a variety of perspectives, each expressing different and often contradictory opinions of “Kanye.” The track seems to evidence West’s awareness that public perceptions of him — and perhaps his own self-perception — are shifting over time. As the song progresses, opinions on West range from “I miss the old Kanye” and “I used to love Kanye,” to “I hate the new Kanye.” The song concludes with the reassurance that, in spite of it all, “I still love Kanye.” It’s unclear, however, whether this final line is told from the perspective of the public or from West himself.

Returning to Twitter almost a year later, amidst philosophical quotes and images of his clothing line, West finally updated the public on his Trump stance: “You don’t have to agree with trump but the mob can’t make me not love him…I don’t agree with everything anyone does. That’s what makes us individuals. And we have the right to independent thought.” As of early 2018, West also tweeted his appreciation for Candace Owens, a conservative black activist and critic of the Black Lives Matter movement; tweeted pictures of a Trump-signed “Make America Great Again” hat; and tweeted pictures of worried text messages from friends, advising that he stop tweeting. Even Trump has acknowledged the artist’s recent political turn, tweeting that his support is “very cool!” West, intentionally or not, has since emerged as an unlikely ally of the conservative “alt-right” movement — an apologist for the very forces of social control and black repression that he had once denounced.

Twitter has long been a popular space of public discourse online, particularly among young members of the African American community. In what has been termed “Black Twitter,” a subculture of mostly black and brown internet users has taken residence on the social media platform, creating a network of intersecting and interacting minority voices. Through common, rapidly distributed memes and hashtags — such as #Ferguson, #SayHerName, and #KanyeShrug — the loosely defined group has generated massive social trends and movements both online and off. As The Atlantic’s Jeff Guo writes, “The Black Lives Matter movement started as a Twitter hashtag before it became a full-blown political movement and a major issue in the 2016 presidential race.” This hashtag and the movement it spawned, Guo claims, found its origins among the Black Twitter community.

Because of the network’s potential to ignite real-life social change, especially in response to anti-black violence and surveillance, Marc Lamont Hill has theorized Black Twitter as a kind of “digital counterpublic”: an online space that “enables new and transgressive forms of organizing, pedagogy and, ultimately, resistance.” As a “counterpublic,” this community space is able to exist outside and against dominant (white) forms of public discourse. Very important to Hill’s study of the Black Twitter counterpublic is its use of smartphone technologies, which “enable Black citizens to surveil State agents and institutions, thereby holding the State and its apparatuses accountable for practices of anti-Black violence and other forms of social injustice.” Smartphone recordings of anti-black performances (as in the wrongful killing of Michael Brown by #Ferguson police) can then be taken up as shared texts, distributed through the Black Twitter network and interrogated by its numerous users. However, more mundane performances are just as often shared and interrogated by the community. For example, the 2018 premiere of the film Black Panther saw many Black Twitter users “expressing the importance of the flick with the viral hashtag #WhatBlackPantherMeansToMe.” In this way, Black Twitter and its involved technologies put forth a “reconstitution of the relations of surveillance,” while also creating a marginal space of shared spectatorship. This implies, therefore, a certain reversal of the panopticon — a communal act of “looking back.”

As West’s tweets became more overtly racialized and political, aligning the artist with an agenda that was “actively harming people who look like him,” Black Twitter was quick to intervene. The group took particular interest in one problematic rant by West, which was first broadcast on the entertainment news program TMZ and later reiterated on Twitter. In the initial TMZ interview, West stated: “When we hear about slavery for 400 years — for 400 years? That sounds like a choice.” West’s unfounded assertion that “slavery was a choice” prompted numerous Black Twitter users to respond to, correct, and satirize its lack of historical veracity. Popular among these responses were tweets incorporating the hashtag “#IfSlaveryWasAChoice,” which humorously depicted African American slaves “choosing” whether or not to take part in their own enslavement. For example, one Twitter user posted an image of a black woman squinting, which was captioned: “Me staring at the rest of y’all in the field wondering why you didn’t just say no…#IfSlaveryWasAChoice.” While criticized for turning “black pain into a joke,” the hashtag and its related premise also mark an attempt by Black Twitter users to delegitimize and interrogate West’s comment. By appropriating his harmful words from the mainstream media outlet TMZ and recontextualizing them within this digital counterpublic space, the Black Twitter community is able to “generate critical racial political discourses outside the gaze of the White mainstream.” As a counterpublic discourse that is hidden (or at least symbolically removed) from the white gaze, these hashtagged responses offer resistance to the racist mainstream discourse while also re-authenticating black history itself.

Complicating this incident is West’s own response to his TMZ comment, which he posted to Twitter the following day. In a now-deleted post, West explains that “I know that slaves did not get shackled and put on a boat by free will…My point is for us to have stayed in that position even though the numbers were on our side means that we were mentally enslaved.” In perpetuating the anti-abolitionist myth of the “contented slave,” the black subject whose mental faculties prevented them from resisting enslavement, West again allies himself with an anti-black agenda familiar to American history. As Blair L.M. Kelley, a historian at North Carolina State University, tweeted in response to West’s comments: “a milder version of the ‘slavery is a choice’ argument is made by uninformed people all the time…Slavery wasn’t their choice at any step…resistance was their choice when they couldn’t escape.” Once again, Black Twitter (I am using this term loosely to refer to Kelley) has focused its counterpublic gaze on West and his tweeted performances. In another powerful instance of “looking back” — looking back upon West’s anti-black rhetoric, looking back at the mainstream media, and looking back at history itself — Black Twitter demonstrates its resistance to a totalizing white gaze. West’s performance in this space, however, is less easily evaluated. It is at this site (pun intended) of both resistance and control that West enters the most complex phase of his negotiation between “seen” object and “seeing” subject.

Ta-Nehisi Coates writes in “I’m Not Black, I’m Kanye” that West’s recent output recalls “the propaganda that justifies voter suppression, and feeds police brutality, and minimizes the murder of [civil rights advocate] Heather Heyer. And Kanye West is now a mouthpiece for it.” In this way, his tweets represent damaging anti-black performances, carried out on a highly publicized platform of some 28 million Twitter followers. In allying himself with racist narratives, discourses, and public figures, West has thus built himself into an extension of the racist state — a willing instrument of the white gaze (well evidenced by his co-sign from Trump: “very cool!”). This is a significant departure from the West whose mixtape “looked back” at its first listeners with the likeness of Emmett Till, and later rejected the mainstream gaze with the faceless Yeezus album cover. This is certainly not the same West who decried the last two sitting presidents, and censored his curse words into black creation stories. Rather, West’s tweets now represent a “free thinker,” as Coates puts it, “championing a kind of freedom — a white freedom…a conqueror’s freedom, freedom of the strong built on antipathy or indifference to the weak.” For Coates, it is West’s indifference toward those that once championed him, a failure to see the young and the black, that has brought about this change in character. This is also, I argue, the same demographic of young and black voices that comprises the Black Twitter network of resistance — a counterpublic that now surveils and rejects West’s performances of white, anti-black freedom.

West is therefore, at this critical moment, a black subject both looking and lost. In his long chase for “free thought,” for artistic boundlessness and innovation, West seems to have run himself into a corner: between a hatred and a love for the spotlight, between the marginalized community that birthed him and the mainstream white public that consumes his work. In his contributions as a musician, a designer, a performer and now a political activist, West has remained largely unpredictable — and therefore untraceable. Perhaps this is a survival mechanism for those in the light of extreme visibility. The potential to deconstruct and remake oneself — whether from MBDTF to Yeezus, Clinton to Trump endorsements, “old Kanye” to “new Kanye” — is a necessity in West’s case, in confronting a white public that “fixes” the black subject in its gaze. However, it seems that the danger of such constant remaking is an alienation from and blindness to one’s history: As Coates says, West’s evident distancing from his black “history, traditions, and struggle” may be to blame for his ignorant tweets and appeals to the white gaze. Put another way, it is exactly the community discourse, evocation of history, and grouped resistance of today’s Black Twitter youth that seem to be missing from West’s recent and problematic output. Perhaps it is a denial of his artistic roots as well, his crash landing into hip-hop and his mixtape origins (a kind of counterpublic all its own), that has left him in this state of “untethered hurt.” In any case, many must now mourn the result of West’s self-alienation, as the tweet typically goes: “I miss the old Kanye.”

While West continues to navigate his surveillance by the mainstream public as well as the counterpublic, between the exploitative white gaze and those interrogative “black looks,” it is unlikely that any of us can predict what he will do next. Under a spotlight this blinding and multifarious, it’s unlikely he can see that far ahead either. With this in mind, it is important also to acknowledge my own surveillance practices in the research and writing of this paper. As Browne recognizes early in Dark Matters, regarding her research on transatlantic slavery: “It gets a little tricky when I do this looking, seemingly an aerial reconnaissance mission of the archive of surveillance and of slavery.” My own investigation of West and his career, carried out behind the screen of a laptop and reinscribed onto a Word document, grants me the power to “represent while escaping representation.” Research such as this poses the risk of reducing the black subject, again, to a distant spectacle or an examined object, while posing the researcher to merely replicate the white gaze. However, by approaching our own surveillance practices and those of others in a spirit of “critical vigilance” (to reinterpret bell hooks’s phrase), we may offer a self-reflexive gaze that is generative rather than reductive. The Black Twitter community is itself evidence that such a critical practice is both attainable and transformative to the real world. In my present research, by analyzing West as a black subject whose performances are both structured by and resistant to the white gaze, it is my hope that we will come to better negotiate this double bind in our own lives: as both producers and consumers, the gaze and the spectacle, illuminating and luminous.

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