O fantástico negro sem asas (ou o insustentável voo da borboleta): itinerários das masculinidades negras em to pimp a butterfly, de Kendrick Lamar

Abstract

This thesis is the result of the second phase of #TheGangstaProject, a scientific research project on black masculinities in the Hip-Hop culture of the United States of America, this time temporally focused on the first decades of the 21st century. From a dense investigation process on the audiovisual work of rapper Kendrick Lamar, it is possible to decode and analyze the configurations of representations about black masculinities present in the narratives of Gangsta Rap video clips, a musical subgenre that subverted and redefined the iconographic system of representation of black men, a tradition inherited from the slave-holding colonial past reinvented in the American collective racial imaginary from the New Racism phenomenon. Through an intersectional theoretical-methodological perspective, established between the History and Historiography of Slavery and Post-Abolition in the United States, Black Feminist Thought, Radical Black Thought, Black African Philosophy and Arts, a sequence was developed of symbolic disassembly exercises, imagery deconstruction and cultural criticism about the series of video clips from the album To Pimp a Butterfly (2015). Activating iconographic systems as devices of domination, control, expropriation and violence of racialized and masculinized bodies and subjectivities, this thesis travels through an inter and multidisciplinary itinerary to understand the operational dynamics of representation practices, from the social markers of identification and differentiation of subjects (especially the race-gender-class triad), as well as diagnosing its effects and, above all, consequences for the politics of black masculinities in the present time.