“Have you ever been hunted? Have you ever had a target or bounty thrust upon your body without recourse? I am exhausted. It is a painful type of exhaustion that swells your lungs, tenses your reflexes, blurs your vision, and demands a special kind of cathartic release or, in other words, a redress for continued survival. Exhaustion is a wartime tactic that subdues the vibrancy and complexity of black men as they navigate the terrain of white supremacy, capitalism, and predetermined mythologies that registers their fleshy existence to a nightmare of contradictions—to be desired yet feared; to be invisible yet hyper-visible; to be consumed and yet discarded. Thus, the black male who simultaneously arouses fear and lust by simply being will perpetually find himself in flight, warped, and castrated.
The target thrust upon my body is tethered to a history of violence that oscillates between the phallus that hangs between my tatted thighs and the air production of my lungs, which keeps me breathing and, thus, still alive. Being targeted designates my body as a marked entity and serves as the inspiration for the digital performance, Meditations of a Marked Man. The phrase “marked man” has its origins in Old English, which means “one who is watched with hostile intent.” The implications of the phrase through a hegemonic lens subjugates the corporeal to a racialized designation. In a dermatological framework, the mark—dark melanin production—transitions the corporeal into a site of defect and transgression. Therefore, the sight of black skin, a stabilized marker of my existence, transmits a racialized and often incomplete depiction of who I am and what I might have. Or worse, what I might do.
Arising from a critical and exhaustive entanglement with the paradoxical realities and consequences of black male flesh in America, Meditations of a Marked Man gestures towards a kaleidoscopic investigation of the symptoms caused by living in a body that, from birth, inherits dangerous, unstable, and deadly markers. Although erected from the personal, the inscriptions and arguments made in Meditations stem from a discursive look at black male flesh across history and different temporalities. Additionally, as this project exists at the intersection of visual culture, performance studies, critical race theory, scopophilia, hauntology, Afro-pessimism, and appetite theory, one could consider Meditations to be a deliberate exercise in glitched voyeurism.
In America, both the objectification and subjugation of black male flesh function as apparatuses of capture. Rooted in colonial appetites to fulfill fetishized desires and to dominate the othered, this kind of capture, I argue, is intensely and primarily fueled by the ocular: a seething embodiment of racialized scopophilia. A hunting methodology undergirds this kind of capture; evidenced by the cyclical execution of black bodies by the state without consequence, the proliferation and monetization of the prison industrial complex, the lack of equal protection and justice for black citizens under the law, and the sexual commodification of black male bodies through colonial fantasies. This kind of capture also renders and reduces black males to a state of materiality versus personhood, or citizen. They become imagined as objects void of sentience, ultimately scripting the ways in which they are to be handled: surveilled and touched, but not heard or believed. In other words, black men in America are perennially eclipsed and reduced to a visual emblem, a commodity, an object for pleasure and dismemberment: a fleshy prize. Therefore, in life and death, the black male is to be a fleshy souvenir of capture. A prize historically won in spectacular performances of ecstasy and death. A prize disavowed from its humanity through racialized myths.
When will the black male be free from such exhaustive measures to control, fear, or kill him? What might his freedom from capture look or sound like?
So, when you examine my diary of meditative interrogations—my archive of tensions and testimonies— what do you see?
I, Too, Am America.
When exactly will my birthright to full citizenship take absolute form?
I am exhausted. It is a painful type of exhaustion that swells my lungs, tenses my reflexes, blurs my vision, and demands a special kind of cathartic release or, in other words, a redress for continued survival.”
— A Marked Man, Timothy Shacon Jones II
