Abstract
This chapter explores J. Cole’s seductive cinematic music video “G.O.M.D.” in order to highlight how the black body is synchronically and diachronically ensnared in a matrix of antiblack sexual violence. More specifically, it shows how lynching, torture, and consumption of black males serve a specific function within white libidinal quest for self-affirmation. Rather than read “G.O.M.D.” as a visual and sonic montage of self-possession, as some have done, we use “G.O.M.D.” to explore the record of slavery’s consumptive practices. When we look at the music video, we see the socio-historical process of racial slavery’s cultivated aesthetic and existential appreciation that literally whets and slakes the appetite for blackness. This viewpoint permits a more robust appreciation for how Western civilization is formed through these rituals of violence, drawing attention to the parasitism underwriting the development of the modern world. In short, “G.O.M.D.” encourages us not to think of consumption as simply momentary acts, but as the extant ontological condition in which our relationships to one another must confront the meaning of various acts of ritualized consumption that is both literal and symbolic.