Revising the Black decolonialization process: Kendrick Lamar’s DAMN. and the poetics of violence

Abstract

Frantz Fanon’s writings on decolonization have constantly been read as a call for violence against oppressive colonial rulings. The choice that the subjugated individual must make between remaining a victim or using the colonial violence against those who originally initiated it represents one of Fanon’s main arguments in The Wretched of the Earth. Drawing on Kendrick Lamar’s music album DAMN. (2017), this article aims to show how the rapper rewrites the decolonization process in a poetic way, using metaphors, hyperboles and allegories. The interactions between white and Black individuals that Lamar examines in his songs provide an answer to Fanon’s urge to choose. Moving beyond the Fanonian binary thinking (Black/white, colonizer/colonized), DAMN. provides an insight on how whiteness and Blackness co-inhabit a space full of violent encounters. While presenting an X-ray image of the present-day United States of America, Lamar does not offer an answer on the questions on racism, but he delivers a vivid picture of the outcomes of personal choices, collective failures and perpetual violence.