On the Video Work of M. Lamar: A White Book for Decolonizing Queer White Fantasia on Black Bodies and Sexuality

Artist, countertenor, and composer M. Lamar uses his video work to expand upon the political critique and affective response to the historical denigration, abuse, and incarceration of and queer desire for Black bodies in his musical compositions and performances. Like Glenn Ligon, Isaac Julien, and other queer Black artists, Lamar explores this history and representation through the intersection of race, masculinity, and sexuality. In his visual iconography, Lamar draws upon a range of iconic images, including "Mandingo"-like¹ sexual tension between the plantation overseer and the Black slave; the post-antebellum south and the hanging, scarring, castration, and incarceration of Black men; and the Robert Mapplethorpe-like² fetishistic stereotypes of Black hyper-sexuality. In Lamar's work, the fear of and desire for Black bodies in these histories and images are connected.

In his live performances, Lamar includes a visual backdrop of hand-drawn images of abused Black bodies chained and crammed into the hull of ships and southern Black men hanging from a tree. In his music and vocal style, he draws upon negro spiritual and blues musical styles to evoke an aural affect of anguish and anger. In his video work, Lamar expands upon the iconography and affect from his live performances, pointing the spectator to a deeper set of analytical and visual tools to understand the surveillance, punishment, and eroticization of Black men in history and slave narratives; and the post-antebellum hangings, castration, burnings, and incarceration of Black men. For instance, in Badass Nigga (2014), Lamar's Goth persona drinks wine while reading Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit (1807), The Cornel West Reader (1999), and Toni Morrison's Beloved (1987). Then after leading the spectator to reflect on these critical texts, he locks nude white men in wooden stocks and forces his vulnerable prisoners to read these same texts to re-educate them in their misunderstandings and aberrant fetishization of the Black body. Lamar appropriates the iconography of queer S/M and the contemporary photography of such white artists as Robert Mapplethorpe to deconstruct white racism and queer pleasure in the Black male body. Through this Black goth persona that runs through his live performances and videos, Lamar reverses Michel Foucault's panopticonic effect, as set out in Discipline and Punish (1975), and reclaims a queer Black man's ability to gaze, analyze, instruct, and punish the dominant queer white perspective on Black bodies. Seemingly inverting Mapplethorpe's images of the fetishized nude Black body in the white photographer's Black Book (1986), Lamar gives us the reverse, a White Book of nude white men, objectified, controlled, and punished by Lamar's gothic spirit, who reclaims the phallic whip of punishment and penetration and becomes an instrument of Black queer revenge. The iconography in his videos plays with the objects of stocks, whips, and nooses that have historically been the instruments of white control over and torture of Black bodies, and in gay erotica, the objects of a fetishistic S/M aura, again as suggested by the photography of Mapplethorpe. Revenge is most pronounced in his video Yo Ma Cracka (2016), where the Black goth spirit materializes and punishes the white curator, who, like Mapplethorpe, seems to worship the Black penis and fetishize the overseer's/master's whip. Lamar, playing the goth spirit of Black revenge, whips the stripped white curator and penetrates him with the whip. In sum, Lamar returns agency to queer Black men and participates in theoretical and historical attempts to deconstruct, decolonize, punish, and liberate queer white obsession with the hypermasculine, oversexualized Black male body.