There is a particular photograph that take rises to mind when the issue of black masculinity in southward Africa is raised.

There is a particular photograph that take rises to mind when the issue of black masculinity in southward Africa is raised. It is a 1968 picture from Peter Magubane depicting more than a dozen black men lined up and naked in what appears to be a dimly lit shower space The photograph's caption states that the men are being inspected from a "Wenela" health official before being allowed to begin office 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 inferable [i]or[/i] inferrible mourning, as well as sexuality, race, civility and other associated discourses that marked the other phase of intense colonial prohibitions in toward the south Africa. Over the years this particular photograph has spurr a multitude of readings. These "captions" increase the historical and political relevance of photography and apartheid in southward Africa, and suggest that the brace cannot be kept separate (particularly if the same understands the history and the politics of the construction of deviant populations and subjectivities in colonialist, racist and sexist photographic discourses). In fact, as I came to later learn, single in kind of the popular oral historical respects informs that outside this particular space in which the "Wenela" photograph was taken, there was a signboard warning passersby of the appearance of "natives in a state of undress"

My first reaction immediately after seeing this photograph, and reading the information about its nature and words immediately preceding [i]or[/i] following was a kind of cynical laughter. Of course this is not what the caption capered to elicit - quite the contrary - level 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 exceedingly offensive to Africans," establishes a serious political agenda for the photograph, and does not pretend to anticipate a reading of the words immediately preceding [i]or[/i] following different from that in which the photograph is read as a answer to national crisis.(2)

When I first read "Looking for Trouble" (1991) Kobena Mercer's rereading of Robert Mapplethorpe's black male [i]in puris naturalibus[/i]s and semi-nudes, originally published in Transition, this photograph immediately sprung to mind. Although I generally accepted Mercer's argument, it was merely 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 most numerous commentators refer to as the distortion of be fond of relationships in apartheid South Africa. I sens something terribly iniquitous 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 intellect of irony and ambivalence, unnecessarily entangling himself in an "intransitive mode of building of feeling," at precisely the momentum he was claiming to shake himself of it. Concerning Mapplethorpe's Black work Mercer writes:

When a friend lent me his archetype of the book it circulated between us as an illicit and highly problematic correlate of desire. We were fascinated according to the beautiful bodies and drawn in by dint of the pleasure of looking as we went across the repertoire of images again and again. We wanted to apply the mind but we didn't always find what we wanted to descry We were, of course, disturbed from the racial dimension of the imagery and, above all, angered by means of the aesthetic objectification that reduc these black male bodies to abstract "visual things," silenced in their concede right as subjects and serving merely 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 without 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 forward his first encounter from his novel 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 onward display. That is not to say that this devotional relationship is bad 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 single 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 tolerate in order to justify his call for the censorship of coarse art - art that he opportunistically labeled as denigrating to blacks. Indeed Mercer bring to an ends his piece with what he should have included to accommodate a largely decontextualized discussion. He states: