Janelle Monae Research Articles

Review: The Dreamer and the Dream: Afrofuturism and Black Religious Thought, by Roger A. Sneed

Review: <i>The Dreamer and the Dream: Afrofuturism and Black Religious Thought</i>, by Roger A. Sneed

Afrofuturism and the Law

Long before the film Black Panther captured the public’s imagination, the cultural critic Mark Dery coined the term “Afrofuturism” to describe “speculative fiction that treats African-American themes and addresses African-American concerns in the context of twentieth-century technoculture.” Since then, the term has been applied to speculative creatives as diverse as the pop artist Janelle Monae, the science fiction writer Octavia Butler, and the visual artist Nick Cave. But only recently have thinkers turned to how Afrofuturism might guide, and shape, law. This special issue, “Afrofuturism and the Law,” features articles that explore the many ways Afrofuturism can inform a range of legal issues, and even chart the way to a better future for us all.

Black Feminist Wondaland

Janelle Monae’s, Dirty Computer, tackles issues like feminism, racism, sexuality, Black womanhood, self-assurance, and growth. Each song on the album is presented from a first-person point of view, offering a unique insight into a story that shares an intimate portrait of what it means to embrace authentic Black womanhood. Monae’s lyrical storytelling brings to life stories of love, loss, fear, and celebration, offering an experience that cannot be ignored. Still, the numerous ways Black women experience joy and celebration are often overlooked in higher education. Thus, in this article, we center Monae’s album and offer the framework, Black Feminist Wondaland (BFW), to account for how Black women reckon with the misogynoir enacted against us, celebrate ourselves as an act of radical resistance, and reclaim our joy in a society bent on keeping us in a state of sorrow.

The Senses of Science Fiction: Visions, Sounds, Spaces Conference

156 SCIENCE FICTION STUDIES, VOLUME 47 (2020) The Senses of Science Fiction: Visions, Sounds, Spaces Conference. On 5-7 December 2019, the Speculative Texts and Media Research Group, based at the University of Warsaw’s American Studies Center and headed by Pawe³ Frelik, held its first international conference. “Senses of Science Fiction: Visions, Sounds, Spaces” began with a Thursday evening screening of Dead Slow Ahead (Mauro Herce, 2015) that was introduced by Mark Bould. It continued on Friday and Saturday, offering eighteen sessions and two keynote lectures devoted to aesthetics and sense perception in a variety of works of sf (understood broadly). Taking place at a similar time of the year as 2018’s “Worlding SF” conference in Graz, “Senses” reunited many of the last year’s participants and offered another proof that early December is a good time for a midsize sf-related scholarly event. The topic proved specific enough to allow for a clear thematic consistency but also invited a broad range of perspectives. The presentations addressed the call to reclaim the place of the sensory in science-fiction cultures and called attention to the specificity of sf aesthetics across different media and lesser acknowledged sense perceptions. The presentations engaged with sight and sound but also other senses, including smell, touch, and taste. Topics included investigations of the aesthetic overlap between science fiction in representations of Mars and narratives of virality, the futurity of contemporary music videos, the role of aesthetics in representing asexuality, the connection between the culture of drug use and the development of sf literature, Lo-Fi Sci-Fi aesthetics in contemporary Brazilian cinema, and a cross-media aesthetic analysis of adaptations of The Handmaid’s Tale. Of note was a stream of panels entitled “Ab-Sense: Sensation, Sense-Making, and the Absent in Science Fiction,” co-organized with the London Science Fiction Research Community and headed by Francis Gene-Rowe. The panels successfully managed to open up the topic of the conference even further by exploring various homonyms of “sense” while still staying close to the tenor of the event. Both keynote lectures were highlights. Coming from two distinct sensibilities and offering very different theoretical perspectives, both managed perfectly to take advantage of the keynote format. Amy Butt’s talk about the spaces of science fiction was richly rooted in her experience as an architect and impressive in its textual scope, theoretical relevance, and—last but not least—the beautiful economy of her presentation slides. Erik Steinskog’s appeal to conceptualize science-fictionality in aural rather than visual terms, illustrated by a number of examples ranging from Sun Ra to CopperWire’s Earthbound and clipping’s Splendor and Misery, to Janelle Monae’s Dirty Computer, was passionate, intellectually stimulating, and ambitious in its aim to splice together various theoretical perspectives. Largely due to the high quality of the contributions, the conference proved to be informative, inspiring, and aesthetically pleasing. A full program of the event is available at .—Filip Boratyn, University of Warsaw, Poland (Re)Thinking Earth: From Representations of Nature to Climate Change Fiction, 22-23 April 2020 in the National Library of Portugal, Lisbon. ...

The Senses of Science Fiction: Visions, Sounds, Spaces Conference

156 SCIENCE FICTION STUDIES, VOLUME 47 (2020) The Senses of Science Fiction: Visions, Sounds, Spaces Conference. On 5-7 December 2019, the Speculative Texts and Media Research Group, based at the University of Warsaw’s American Studies Center and headed by Pawe³ Frelik, held its first international conference. “Senses of Science Fiction: Visions, Sounds, Spaces” began with a Thursday evening screening of Dead Slow Ahead (Mauro Herce, 2015) that was introduced by Mark Bould. It continued on Friday and Saturday, offering eighteen sessions and two keynote lectures devoted to aesthetics and sense perception in a variety of works of sf (understood broadly). Taking place at a similar time of the year as 2018’s “Worlding SF” conference in Graz, “Senses” reunited many of the last year’s participants and offered another proof that early December is a good time for a midsize sf-related scholarly event. The topic proved specific enough to allow for a clear thematic consistency but also invited a broad range of perspectives. The presentations addressed the call to reclaim the place of the sensory in science-fiction cultures and called attention to the specificity of sf aesthetics across different media and lesser acknowledged sense perceptions. The presentations engaged with sight and sound but also other senses, including smell, touch, and taste. Topics included investigations of the aesthetic overlap between science fiction in representations of Mars and narratives of virality, the futurity of contemporary music videos, the role of aesthetics in representing asexuality, the connection between the culture of drug use and the development of sf literature, Lo-Fi Sci-Fi aesthetics in contemporary Brazilian cinema, and a cross-media aesthetic analysis of adaptations of The Handmaid’s Tale. Of note was a stream of panels entitled “Ab-Sense: Sensation, Sense-Making, and the Absent in Science Fiction,” co-organized with the London Science Fiction Research Community and headed by Francis Gene-Rowe. The panels successfully managed to open up the topic of the conference even further by exploring various homonyms of “sense” while still staying close to the tenor of the event. Both keynote lectures were highlights. Coming from two distinct sensibilities and offering very different theoretical perspectives, both managed perfectly to take advantage of the keynote format. Amy Butt’s talk about the spaces of science fiction was richly rooted in her experience as an architect and impressive in its textual scope, theoretical relevance, and—last but not least—the beautiful economy of her presentation slides. Erik Steinskog’s appeal to conceptualize science-fictionality in aural rather than visual terms, illustrated by a number of examples ranging from Sun Ra to CopperWire’s Earthbound and clipping’s Splendor and Misery, to Janelle Monae’s Dirty Computer, was passionate, intellectually stimulating, and ambitious in its aim to splice together various theoretical perspectives. Largely due to the high quality of the contributions, the conference proved to be informative, inspiring, and aesthetically pleasing. A full program of the event is available at .—Filip Boratyn, University of Warsaw, Poland (Re)Thinking Earth: From Representations of Nature to Climate Change Fiction, 22-23 April 2020 in the National Library of Portugal, Lisbon. ...

(Re)Thinking Earth: From Representations of Nature to Climate Change Fiction, 22-23 April 2020 in the National Library of Portugal, Lisbon

156 SCIENCE FICTION STUDIES, VOLUME 47 (2020) The Senses of Science Fiction: Visions, Sounds, Spaces Conference. On 5-7 December 2019, the Speculative Texts and Media Research Group, based at the University of Warsaw’s American Studies Center and headed by Pawe³ Frelik, held its first international conference. “Senses of Science Fiction: Visions, Sounds, Spaces” began with a Thursday evening screening of Dead Slow Ahead (Mauro Herce, 2015) that was introduced by Mark Bould. It continued on Friday and Saturday, offering eighteen sessions and two keynote lectures devoted to aesthetics and sense perception in a variety of works of sf (understood broadly). Taking place at a similar time of the year as 2018’s “Worlding SF” conference in Graz, “Senses” reunited many of the last year’s participants and offered another proof that early December is a good time for a midsize sf-related scholarly event. The topic proved specific enough to allow for a clear thematic consistency but also invited a broad range of perspectives. The presentations addressed the call to reclaim the place of the sensory in science-fiction cultures and called attention to the specificity of sf aesthetics across different media and lesser acknowledged sense perceptions. The presentations engaged with sight and sound but also other senses, including smell, touch, and taste. Topics included investigations of the aesthetic overlap between science fiction in representations of Mars and narratives of virality, the futurity of contemporary music videos, the role of aesthetics in representing asexuality, the connection between the culture of drug use and the development of sf literature, Lo-Fi Sci-Fi aesthetics in contemporary Brazilian cinema, and a cross-media aesthetic analysis of adaptations of The Handmaid’s Tale. Of note was a stream of panels entitled “Ab-Sense: Sensation, Sense-Making, and the Absent in Science Fiction,” co-organized with the London Science Fiction Research Community and headed by Francis Gene-Rowe. The panels successfully managed to open up the topic of the conference even further by exploring various homonyms of “sense” while still staying close to the tenor of the event. Both keynote lectures were highlights. Coming from two distinct sensibilities and offering very different theoretical perspectives, both managed perfectly to take advantage of the keynote format. Amy Butt’s talk about the spaces of science fiction was richly rooted in her experience as an architect and impressive in its textual scope, theoretical relevance, and—last but not least—the beautiful economy of her presentation slides. Erik Steinskog’s appeal to conceptualize science-fictionality in aural rather than visual terms, illustrated by a number of examples ranging from Sun Ra to CopperWire’s Earthbound and clipping’s Splendor and Misery, to Janelle Monae’s Dirty Computer, was passionate, intellectually stimulating, and ambitious in its aim to splice together various theoretical perspectives. Largely due to the high quality of the contributions, the conference proved to be informative, inspiring, and aesthetically pleasing. A full program of the event is available at .—Filip Boratyn, University of Warsaw, Poland (Re)Thinking Earth: From Representations of Nature to Climate Change Fiction, 22-23 April 2020 in the National Library of Portugal, Lisbon. 157 NOTES AND CORRESPONDENCE Earth Day was first celebrated in the United States on 22 April 1970. It now mobilizes citizens and communities worldwide, representing the first massive expression of public concern with the ecological sustainability of our planet and launching the modern global environmental movement. As much of the world celebrates the 50th anniversary of Earth Day in 2020, our symposium, “(Re)thinking Earth,” aims to bring together plural perspectives under the collaborative interdisciplinary model of the environmental humanities. We invite papers on a range of topics that may include nature writing over time and space, global voices in ecopoetics, affect and ecocriticism, climate change in contemporary fiction, reimagined pastoral landscapes, space and scale in environmental writing, agro-ecological storytelling, the anthropocene, representations of environmental science in literature and film, the climate change crisis in visual culture, ecomedia and environmental science, climate change in utopian and dystopian literature, postcolonial and indigenous representations of environmental collapses, sf/fantasy and environmental crises, film and televisual representations of climate change, environmental ethics, and environmental education/literacy. Submit a 250-word...

Gestural Refusals, Embodied Flights

On October 18, 2013—or rather 2719, as the poster advertising Janelle Monae’s performance reveals—the legendary Apollo Theater in New York City’s Harlem became an Afrofuturist meeting ground of des...

Agency in the Afrofuturist Ontologies of Erykah Badu and Janelle Monáe

Abstract This article discusses the visual, textual, and musical aesthetics of selected concept albums (Vinyl/CD) by Afrofuturist musicians Erykah Badu and Janelle Monae. It explores how the artists design alternate projections of world/subject relations through the development of artistic personas with speculative background narratives and the fictional emplacement of their music within alternate cultural imaginaries. It seeks to establish that both Erykah Badu and Janelle Monae use the concept album as a platform to constitute their Afrofuturist artistic personas as fluid black female agents who are continuously in the process of becoming, evolving, and changing. They reinscribe instances of othering and exclusion by associating these with science fiction tropes of extraterrestrial, alien lives to express topical sociocultural criticism and promote social change in the context of contemporary U.S. American politics and black diasporic experience.

Remnants of Venus: Signifying Black Beauty and Sexuality

Remnants of Venus examines popular representations of the big booty, often associated with and serving as a stand-in for black women's sexualities. This essay calls into question whether such representations, embodied through racial appropriations by non-black women or satirized by black women like Kara Walker and Nicki Minaj, can exist beyond signs of sexual excess or whether they can be mobilized toward black sexual freedom and an aesthetic of black beauty, as other artists have attempted, from Janelle Monae to Beyonce to young women twerk dancing.

“Okay ladies, now let’s get in formation!”: Music Videos and the Construction of Cultural Memory

Abstract This paper explores strategies for constructing and perpetuating cultural memory through music videos, using Beyonce’s Formation (2016) and Janelle Monae’s Many Moons (2008) and Q.U.E.E.N. (2013) as case studies. The medium’s idiosyncrasies create unique ways of communicating and remembering, explored here within a framework of Cultural Studies and Memory Studies. Easy dissemination and the limited length of most videos ensure a large, diverse audience. The relative freedom from narrative constraints enables the director to create original imagery, and most importantly, the medium allows an intricate blending of performance and performativity; while the videos evidently are performances, they are strongly performative as well, not only with respect to gender and ethnicity but in significant ways also cultural memory. A close reading of Beyonce’s video Formation shows how she explicitly does the cultural memory of the New Orleans flooding. The videos by Monae are shown to produce counter-memories, relying heavily on the strategy of Afrofuturism. As such, these densely woven networks of visual symbols become palimpsests of black lived experience and cultural memory, passed on to millions of viewers.

Race Towards Freedom: W.E.B. Du Bois and the Tradition of Fugitive Black Study

On the 2010 genre-bending debut album, “The ArchAndroid,” the critical social theorist, Afro-futurist, and soul-cybernetic organism named Janelle Monae aka Cindi Mayweather reminded her listeners o...

Freakifying history: remixing royalty

Afrocentric revisions of world history have given way to Afrofuturist imaginings of the future. In the 2013 video for the song ‘Q.U.E.E.N.’, black American artists Janelle Monae and Erykah Badu offer an Afrofuturist redefinition of queenliness. While visually and lyrically presenting themselves as queens, they repeatedly ask ‘am I a freak for getting down?’ The idea of being a ‘freak’ and its associations with sexuality, abnormality, and deviance has a long history within the African diaspora that centers on the intersection of different forms of spectacle and performances of (un)respectability. By situating the video within the context of Monae's Electric Lady album and a larger lineage of musical and visual performance, this article explores the relationship between remixes of royalty, respectability, and spectacle in black artists’ use of African diasporic and Afrofuturistic imaginaries, while arguing for the sociopolitical power of the conscious performance as a ‘freak’.

Fifty key figures in science fiction

Trouble with Quibbles. Mark Bould et al. Fifty Key Figures in Science Fiction. London, UK: Routledge, 2010. 288 pp. ISBN 9780415439503. $26.95 pbk.Reviewed by Ritch CalvinIn the 1967 episode of Star Trek entitled The Trouble with Tribbles, a trader gives Lt. Uhuru a furry little pet called a tribble, which she, quite predictably, brings aboard the U.S.S. Enterprise. However, the tribbles famously multiply at an alarming rate: bring one on board, and the next thing you know, you're up to your neck in them. Havoc ensues, but in the end, the tribbles redeem themselves by revealing a Klingon plot to poison a shipment of grain. A similar sort of multiplication takes place once you start thinking about objections to and criticisms of a book that purports to identify within the field of sf. And the more harmless they seem, the more they seem to multiply. does one find a balance between useful critique and mere quibbling? Could the quibbles serve a purpose, in the end?The very nature of the collection raises a number of questions. For one, why fifty, which seems a perfectly arbitrary number? What are the criteria for inclusion, or for exclusion? In a short introduction, the editors offer some answers to these questions and some insight into the process. Each editor created a list of fifty figures. When collated, they collectively had a list of roughly one hundred. After they winnowed that back down to fifty, the outside readers suggested a few other names. Eventually, the final list of fifty emerged. True, fifty is a round(ish) number, but so is sixty. So is seventy-five. Why not fifty-three? Sixty-nine? Should the number of entries be (predetermined by an arbitrary number, or on the quality and merits of the individuals being considered? Granted, a great many other criteria might have been involved in the decision (e.g., the total number of pages, or final cost of the volume). Nevertheless, we have fifty entries. Ah, but which fifty?Of course, the immediate and most obvious response to a book of this type will be: How could you have left out X? Or: If you've included Y, how can you not include Q? Here again, the editors attempt to forestall such criticism by way of the title of the collection. Those presented here are fifty key figures, not the fifty best, and not the fifty most important. Rhetorically and editorially, that makes perfect sense. Besides, the latter claims are fundamentally unsustainable. Nevertheless, the editors acknowledge that many significant and beloved figures have been omitted. Their list of individuals who had been considered and then dropped includes the writers Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Lois McMaster Bujold, Bruce Sterling, and Pat Cadigan; editors John W. Campbell, John Carnell and Judith Merril; musicians George Clinton and David Bowie; scientists Copernicus and Wernher von Braun; performance artist Orlan; and actor Sigourney Weaver. However, even their list of exclusions excludes a great many. For example, no Sun Ra, P. Funk, or Janelle Monae? No Herbert Weiner or Ray Kurzweil? No Stelarc? To be fair, the introduction does not give a full list of those considered and dropped, so perhaps they were, in fact, included in the discussions.At 250 pages, Fifty Key Figures is a relatively short work as encyclopedias and reference works go. Perhaps the brevity leaves open the argument for including more figures. On the other hand, it also keeps the book's cost lower, thereby making it more accessible for students. While length and cost are slightly less of an issue for researchers in the field and for reference libraries, cost must remain a factor for students and general public use. As a point of comparison, Routledge Companion to Science Fiction (by the same four editors) runs twice the length (576 pages) and almost twice the cost ($49.95). (Both are also available in Kindle editions.)As a quick comparison, Routledge Companion to Science Fiction takes a different approach. …