«That’s why, my brother,
You and I
Shall be
Impressed with
Aeronautics and all such
Acrobatics when they
Bring us a
Breathing Martian or a
Ten-eyed
Hairy drummer from the Moon…»
These are the words of Sissie, the sharp-tongued, keen-witted protagonist of Ama Ata Aidoo’s ‹Our Sister Killjoy: or Reflections from a Black-eyed Squint›. The lyrical novel, published in 1977, but written in the space-travel-crazed decade that came before, follows a young Ghanaian student’s journey through Europe. While she may be gaped at, pointed at, disassembled into body parts («…her smile. Her nose. Her lips.»), Sissie tackles the threat of being reduced to a colonial version of herself with the biting precision of an equally taxonomizing eye – or wry commentary such as the one above. However, embedded in her sarcasm we can detect the speculative hope for an extra-terrestrial life form that explodes the Manichean order of things. An alien intervention of a similar kind is envisioned in Virginia Woolf’s ‹A Room Of One’s Own›, where the narrator muses on how nothing would be of greater service to humanity than «if an explorer should come back and bring word of other sexes looking through the branches of other trees at other skies».
Feminist writers like Woolf, and especially black feminist writers such as Aidoo, have always been acutely aware of how the rigid fictions of race, gender or sexuality arrest the human imagination. Left with no choice but to recognize the supporting role they play to the story of Man, imagining otherwise becomes so much more than genial expression, it becomes a vital necessity. At the heart of many of these writers’ creative efforts lies the search for another kind of human, an altered plot, a different tale.
Afrofuturism and feminism, in more than one way, share certain goals and premises; they operate with similar tropes even if they’re not explicitly realized in speculative fiction. If coupled however, they make for fabulous bedfellows. While any of Octavia Butler’s complex meditations on these intersections prove an apt example, these days it’s pop performer Janelle Monáe who carries that torch most visibly. Monáe is as much an outspoken feminist as these authors, and, in her own polymathic way, she is also a writer. In an interview with the ‹Guardian›, Monáe states: «I consider myself a wordsmith, and everything created through me is meant to provoke thought. And sometimes it’s not – it’s just meant to jam.» And indeed she owns her status as an exceptional contemporary pop star in equal parts to her genre-fusing, catchy tunes and her elaborate Afrofuturist narrative.
Two well established sci-fi conventions build the back-bone of the fanciful fictional universe of her albums: cyborg constructions and time travel. While her alter ego Cindi Mayweather is a fugitive android who is persecuted for breaking the laws of miscegenation in a dystopian city named Metropolis, both Monáe and Mayweather travel between our time and place, Cindi’s present of 2719 Metropolis and the mythical futurepast of the ArchAndroid, the promised land of BaBopByeYa. Sounds complicated? It certainly is. But as long as this saga is still in the making – the next albums with part 6 and 7 are yet to come – let’s suspend the urge to fully wrap our brains around the time warping narrative and look at the ways that Monáe and her Wondaland Arts Society allow it to unfold. Both sci-fi tropes permit her to do very distinct things with her story, but they also come with the kind of pop cultural footing that – for an African-American woman – can be just as limiting as it’s enabling.
In an age where female performers arguably rule su-
preme, pop-music’s limelight has witnessed the widespread emergence of female androids, cyborgs and fembots, clanking around on stage in their «Metropolis» inspired metal gear or shamelessly displaying their wired inner workings on various CD covers or booklets. Lady Gaga, Beyoncé, Kylie Minogue, Robyn, Erykah Badu, Christina Aguilera – at some point in the last decade almost every major female pop-act seemed to feature some kind of cyborg iconography or android artwork. When Monáe’s first EP ‹Metropolis: The Chase Suite› hit the scene in 2007, and even more so when ‹The ArchAndroid› appeared in 2010, cyborg constructions had become a fixed staple for female pop acts. Many of the singers seemed to use the cyborg as a good excuse for exuberant stage shows or avant-garde fashion choices. It was quite obvious that some artists had also plainly copied others and were picking up on a trend – the fast-paced visual demands of the culture and entertainment industry making them eagerly absorb anything that appeared to be «new», and offered an easily exploitable form of aesthetics. Yet even if the sheer quantity of it made it seem somehow extraordinary, these pop divas were reintroducing and quoting a theme that was neither entirely new to pop music, nor a particularly uncommon cultural concept altogether. Cyborgs, then and now, evoke instant recognition and signification; they have become a fairly worn cultural stereotype.
The metaphorical properties of the cyborg have made it a particularly productive site for thinking about attitudes towards technology and the body, the artificial and the natural. With one sweep of imagination the cyborg bundles apparently oppositional categories and creates highly charged nodes of interpretation. Cyborgs enable us to think about issues like assembled identity, boundary transgressions or domination and emancipation. To this effect the cyborg has played a significant role in feminist science fiction and theory. In 1985 Donna Haraway published her seminal ‹Manifesto for Cyborgs›, a half ironic, half auspicious «manifesto» for «socialist feminists» that straddled material and postmodern issues of feminism into the powerful theoretical image of the cyborg as a post-human mode of being that transcends conventional binarisms. Haraway’s Manifesto turned out to be an important strategic gateway for cyberfeminist and radical feminist theory; it was and still is extensively discussed. Even though, as Haraway herself conceded, «it’s usefulness as a tool for material change is yet to be proved». What became ever more transparent, in its various pop incarnations as well as in the broken promise of a liberating cyberspace, is the fact that the fusion of the human with technology may not be as effective for dismantling constructs like race or gender after all.
Haraway’s claims have been contested in that they prematurely dispose of the historical origins of the cyborg, which was created within the categories of race, class and gender, and that most representations of cyborgs hardly transcend these distinctions. Particularly stories of female androids have a very distinct undercurrent of meaning. Deeply rooted in Greco-Roman and Judeo-Christian narrative tradition, stories about crafty men that fashion women for themselves or others are age-old. Apart from the obedient «perfect» woman that fulfills man’s desires and serves him in a better way than a «real» woman, we also encounter the destructive artificial woman as the archetypical harbinger of evil in patriarchal creation myths. As «woman» is pitched in semantic proximity with the «natural» cast in the role of «mother earth» and perceived as inherently inexplicable, mysterious and potentially threatening, her artificial recreation denotes man’s attempt at not only (pro-) creating, but also controlling the mysteries of life. At the same time, this cultural legacy may be the root behind the productivity and potential of female cyborgs. The female form, always the stage on which the cultivation of the body has been preferably performed, seemed to highlight modernity’s anxieties around the nature / culture split most effectively. In ‹Reading Cyborgs›, Anne Balsamo argues that the image of the female cyborg, as opposed to overly masculine types like ‹RoboCop› or the ‹Terminator›, does more to challenge the human / machine dichotomy, because femininity is «culturally imagined as less compatible with technology than is masculinity». Thus, in most cases, the cyborg image in pop has been unambiguously gendered. Most female pop singers, albeit dancing under the guise of a futuristic sci-fi outfit, impersonated extremely traditional and stereotypical gender roles. Cyborg representation vacillated between naive fembots with cute antennas and remote-controlled sex toys in S&M gear. In line with the split identity of the robot Maria in Fritz Lang’s ‹Metropolis›, almost every popular representation of female cyborgs fell into the sexual stereotype of either the nurturing, innocent Madonna or the tantalizingly potent, outrageous techno temptress.
Nevertheless, artificial humans in feminist narratives can draw attention to the constructedness of gender and sexuality – no more, no less. At least in Haraway’s utopian vision, it is the realization and embracing of that constructedness, which promises true freedom and allows one to outgrow the girdle of cultural binaries. But this is fiction – no more, no less. What feminist science fiction writers have historically disavowed is how these ungendering, dehumanizing techniques were in fact used and utilized in the transatlantic slave trade – complicating the very idea of sexless objectification. What Hortense Spillers calls the «zero degree of social conceptualization» in her distinction between the «flesh» and «body» of the captive and liberated slave, already haunts the liberal tenets of Mary Wollstonecraft’s ‹Vindications› or the master-slave dialectic of Shelley’s science-fiction primer ‹Frankenstein›.
In her ‹Manifesto›, Haraway pays attention to the difference between a lived and imagined cyborg experience by naming two overlapping groups of texts that offer «insight into the construction of a potentially helpful cyborg myth: constructions of women of color and monstrous selves in feminist science-fiction». For her, a «woman of color» already operates like a cyborg identity, as an artificial category that, analogous to Chela Sandoval’s model of oppositional consciousness, is «born of the skills for reading webs of power by those refused stable membership in the social categories of race, sex, or class». In a way, Janelle Monáe’s cyborg narrative highlights the tension between the cyborg as a universal outcast figure and the particularity of a specific, historically rooted experience that both defies and enables the premise of this feminist science fiction trope. With a strong emphasis on the forging of cross-cultural alliances, Monáe constructs her android as an emblem of a particular uniqueness that nevertheless can be shared. Although she states that she is «trying to open doors for girls who look like [her]self», she is also careful to not limit her android to the experiences of black US women alone. «Cindi is an android and I love speaking about the android because they are the new ‹other›», she explains in one interview. «People are afraid of the other and I believe we’re going to live in a world with androids because of technology and the way it advances.» Stressing Cindi Mayweather’s eternal alliance with the marginalized und underprivileged, she identifies the timelessness of Fritz Lang’s ‹Metropolis› in that it is «about the battle between the haves and the have-nots» and explains the reason behind Cindi Mayweather’s signature black and white tuxedo with the simple fact that her mother was a janitor and her father collected rubbish, and «so [she wears] a uniform too».
While this explanation makes for good story, cultural commentators have suspected that there may be more to it. Kennedy Allen for example reads Janelle Monáe’s outfit and theatrical, slightly whimsical performance as a clever appropriation of historical minstrel shows: «On her body, in this era, the crisp black-and-white lines of a sharp tuxedo signify to her fans not a servant’s garb, but a professional’s – a VIP’s. Kids don’t recognize the difficult history she’s evoking; they just know she’s boss.» At the same time, Cindi’s androgynous garb, multiplied on the identical bodies of her various clones, points towards the reifying process of enslavement and technocratic reproduction, while highlighting the contrast to conventionally gendered cyborg representations. In a way, the overt constructedness of the cyborg still allows her to privilege the experience of blackness over the debate that race is a false social construct. Monáe appropriates the feminist science fiction trope of the cyborg, but her android is literally never quite and only ever «like man» and enters post-humanity via sub-humanity, minus the detour.
The peculiar role of Afrofuturism as both preemptor and neglected stepchild of science fiction has been well recorded. Similarly, Afrofuturist aesthetics disclose the «always already» of the postmodern condition. Or, as Mark Fisher writes in an article on Afrofuturism and hauntology: «Put bluntly, we might say that postmodernity and hauntology confront ‹white› culture with the kind of temporal disjunction that has been constitutive of the Afrodiasporic experience since Africans were first abducted by slavers and projected from their own lifeworld into the abstract space-time of Capital.» It is of course not surprising that in Janelle Monáe’s fictional universe, the apocalypse has simultaneously already happened, is happening, and will happen. Similarly, her musical style may easily be described as a postmodern pastiche, transcending not only generic timelines, but perhaps also color lines, through her skillful blending of R’n’B, Blues, Soul and Funk with «the historically ‹non-black› genres of rock, electronica, MGM musical orchestration, cabaret and folk music», as John Calvert observes. Yet her music isn’t simply the «new-old-shit», the endless return of the same in an empty time of progress. Instead of reveling in postmodern nostalgia, Monáe disrupts the flow of history by reactivating the lost hopes and struggles of another course in time. This is why time travel becomes such a powerful tool in her narrative.
As with the cyborg trope, Janelle Monáe’s Afrofuturism confronts this sci-fi convention with its own genesis and limitation. The question is not: How can Man technically travel through time? But: How can a people travel through a history that was not made for them, that they have been forced out of – or into, depending on the perspective. A similar move is made in Octavia Butler’s ‹Kindred›, where not one thought is wasted on the scientific explanation and probability of protagonist Dana’s travels into 19th century Maryland. Being lost, being out of time is a simple fact. Faced with the realities of this slave past, Dana must painfully realize how her historical knowledge and map reading skills neither help her to save her skin and flee, nor do they prevent her from internalizing the oppressive structures of slavery. What kind of future does time traveller Dana represent for the enslaved members of an antebellum South? Is her ability to read and write, to love and marry a white man a joyous portent of emancipation, of linear gradualism? Or does the closed circuit of Dana’s time travel, the fact that, in her own present of 1976 California, she has experienced the harsh realities of a minimum wage labor «slave market», rather signify a certain form continuation, an uncanny haunting? Read less pessimistically, this temporal simultaneity need not necessarily be experienced as claustrophobic, rather than necessarily connected. Dana could be, in a way, the redeemer of past revolutions; unsticking time from its predetermined outcomes.
Similarly, Janelle Monáe’s messianic ArchAndroid is a renegade of revolutions passed. Her task, as the booklet to ‹Metropolis› explains, is to «free the citizens of Metropolis from the Great Divide, a secret society which has been using time travel to suppress freedom and love throughout the ages». She needs to release the sleeping, potential futures of the past, because every present revolt is connected to a past revolt. Her weapon, not so surprisingly, is music, or rather: dance. The music video of Q.U.E.E.N, a hit single from her equally successful 2013 album ‹Electric Lady›, is set in the «living museum» of Metropolis, built to hold down «rebels who travel through time». Here, Janelle Monáe and other «legendary rebels from throughout history have been frozen in suspended animation». Until, of course, music awakes them from their slumber, setting free the revolutionary energies of our present in the future. Janelle Monáe’s revolution may sound innocuous, but it sure is infectious. She dances, she tells stories. In its elaborate straddling of the bodily and the virtual, the bios and the mythos, this android may well be the alien intervention that we’ve all been waiting for.