Rereading and Resistance

Abstract

There is a particular photograph that comes to mind when the issue of black masculinity in South Africa is raised. It is a 1968 picture by Peter Magubane depicting more than a dozen black men, lined up and naked in what appears to be a dimly lit shower room. The photograph's caption states that the men are being inspected by a health official before being allowed to begin employment 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 consequent mourning, as well as sexuality, race, civility and other associated discourses that marked the second phase of intense colonial prohibitions in South Africa. Over the years this particular photograph has spurred a multitude of readings. These captions extend the historical and political relevance of photography and apartheid in South Africa, and suggest that the two cannot be kept separate (particularly if one understands the history and the politics of the construction of deviant peoples and subjectivities in colonialist, racist and sexist photographic discourses). In fact, as I came to later learn, one of the popular oral historical references informs that outside this particular room in which the photograph was taken, there was a signboard warning passersby of the presence of natives in a state of undress. My first reaction upon seeing this photograph, and reading the information about its nature and context, was a kind of cynical laughter. Of course this is not what the caption hoped to elicit - quite the contrary - even though some of those oral historical references that were later attached to it were indeed remembered with the same cynical laughter.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 very offensive to Africans, establishes a serious political agenda for the photograph, and does not seem to anticipate a reading of the context different from that in which the photograph is read as a response to national crisis.(2) When I first read Looking for Trouble (1991), Kobena Mercer's rereading of Robert Mapplethorpe's black male nudes and semi-nudes, originally published in Transition, this photograph immediately sprung to mind. Although I generally accepted Mercer's argument, it was only 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 books that deal with what most commentators refer to as the distortion of love relationships in apartheid South Africa. I sensed something terribly wrong with Mercer's rereading of what he identified as his initial misreading of Mapplethorpe's agenda in staging and photographing nude and semi-nude black men. Here was a critic, with an evidently sharp sense of irony and ambivalence, unnecessarily entangling himself in an of feeling, at precisely the moment he was claiming to shake himself of it. Concerning Mapplethorpe's Black Book, Mercer writes: When a friend lent me his copy of the book it circulated between us as an illicit and highly problematic object of desire. We were fascinated by the beautiful bodies and drawn in by the pleasure of looking as we went over the repertoire of images again and again. We wanted to look, but we didn't always find what we wanted to see. We were, of course, disturbed by the racial dimension of the imagery and, above all, angered by the aesthetic objectification that reduced these black male bodies to abstract visual things, silenced in their own right as subjects and serving only 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 out in a liminal experience of textual ambivalence. …