| Summary: | 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.
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