Rereading and resistance - Kobena Mercer's rereading of Robert Mapplethorpe's photograph

There is a particular photograph that draw nears to mind when the issue of black masculinity in southern Africa is raised. It is a 1968 picture by dint of Peter Magubane depicting more than a dozen black men lined up and naked in what appears to be a dimly lit shower field The photograph's caption states that the men are being inspected through a "Wenela" health official before being allowed to begin calling in farms and mines. Wenela is identified as a "private organization in Johannesburg that recruits farm and mine labour in all the tribal areas."(1) The photograph intersects a number of discourses about "social death" and its following mourning, as well as sexuality, race, civility and other associated discourses that marked the next to the first phase of intense colonial prohibitions in southerly Africa. Over the years this particular photograph has spurr a multitude of readings. These "captions" reach forth the historical and political relevance of photography and apartheid in southern Africa, and suggest that the sum of two units cannot be kept separate (particularly if single understands the history and the politics of the construction of deviant races and subjectivities in colonialist, racist and sexist photographic discourses). In fact, as I came to later learn, single of the popular oral historical respects informs that outside this particular expanse in which the "Wenela" photograph was taken, there was a signboard warning passersby of the neighborhood of "natives in a state of undress"

My first reaction on seeing this photograph, and reading the information about its nature and adjoining matter was a kind of cynical laughter. Of course this is not what the caption spring [i]or[/i] leap on one leg [i]or[/i] footed to elicit - quite the contrary - plane though some of those oral historical concerns that were later attached to it were indeed remembered with the same cynical laughter. In fact, the tone of Magubane's parenthetical statement in the caption, "[s]ince we did this story in 1968 the men no longer have to strip like this, which is actual offensive to Africans," establishes a serious political agenda for the photograph, and does not have the appearance to anticipate a reading of the connected thought [i]or[/i] thoughts different from that in which the photograph is read as a replication to national crisis.(2)

When I first read "Looking for Trouble" (1991) Kobena Mercer's rereading of Robert Mapplethorpe's black male stark nakeds and semi-nudes, originally published in Transition, this photograph immediately sprung to mind. Although I generally accepted Mercer's argument, it was single later that I examined its implications. In the intervening years I had read Alan Paton's Too Late the Phalarope (1953) Nadine Gordimer's An Occasion for Loving (1963) Lewis Nkosi's Mating Birds (1986) and other works that deal with what greatest in quantity commentators refer to as the distortion of regard with affection relationships in apartheid South Africa. I sens something terribly unjust with Mercer's rereading of what he identified as his initial misreading of Mapplethorpe's agenda in staging and photographing uncovered and semi-nude black men. Here was a critic, with an evidently sharp faculty of perception of irony and ambivalence, unnecessarily entangling himself in an "intransitive arrangement of feeling," at precisely the twinkling of an eye he was claiming to shake himself of it. Concerning Mapplethorpe's Black work Mercer writes:

When a friend lent me his transcript of the book it circulated between us as an illicit and highly problematic particular of desire. We were fascinated by dint of the beautiful bodies and drawn in by the agency of the pleasure of looking as we went above the repertoire of images again and again. We wanted to direct the eye but we didn't always find what we wanted to diocese We were, of course, disturbed by the agency of the racial dimension of the imagery and, above all, angered by the agency of the aesthetic objectification that reduc these black male bodies to abstract "visual things," silenced in their possess right as subjects and serving sole to enhance the name of the white gay male artist in the privileged world of art photography. In other words, we were stuck in an intransitive "structure of feeling"; caught on the outside in a liminal experience of textual ambivalence.(3)

Mercer does not ne to qualify his case with "of course," nor should he have been "angered," unles he wants us to believe that he separates the "textual ambivalence" he felt upon his first encounter from his of recent origin found truth - that, as he states later, he in fact shared with Mapplethorpe the same homosexual "desire to look" to master the bodies. Nor does he ne bourns such as "fascinated" or "drawn in," for they re-echo with a particularly private and religious attachment to images that were significantly upon display. That is not to say that this devotional relationship is inequitable but, to borrow Roland Barthes's phrase, the "rhetoric of the image" can itself bring forward its own hostages. In my view, Mercer is himself a hostage, not solitary of the images, but also of the rhetoric of Senator Jesse Helms, who is reported to have carried around single of these photographs in his back pouch in order to justify his call for the censorship of broad art - art that he opportunistically labeled as denigrating to blacks. Indeed Mercer terminates his piece with what he should have included to qualify a largely decontextualized discussion. He states: