Tobias C. Van Veen

C ENTAU RUS GALAXY, D REAMS ARE COLD ER THAN D E ATH (DIREC TED BY A RTHUR JAFA , 2013), FRAME G RAB . LB IMAGE For Article “ROBOT LOVE IS QUEER” the Leopard Plaza apartment complex. The droid control marshals are full of fun 1 — caller to DJ Crash Crash on WDRD rules today. No phasers, only chainsaws Robot Love and electro-daggers! Remember only card-carrying hunters can join our chase Janelle Monáe’s debut EP of today. And as usual there will be no is Queer: cybersoul and spacefunk, reward until her cyber-soul is turned into Metropolis (The Chase Suite) the Star Commission. Happy hunting!3 (2008), commences with an open- Afrofuturism call for would-be death squads.2 This essay, itself an assemblage of Bidding good morning with cheerful concepts drawn from a constellation exuberance, the feminine voice of of Afrofuturist sources, is about and Alien the surveillance state calls for the love—about loving the other, and targeted murder, by bounty hunters, about loving an-other whose of android Cindi Mayweather: otherness transgresses all that is Love presupposed in the possessive of the Good morning cy-boys and cy-girls! I’m “whose”: an-other who is not a who, happy to announce that we have a star- but a what. These terms, and this crossed winner in today’s heartbreak fundamental distinction of Western sweepstakes. Android number 57821, metaphysics—of subject/object, of tobias c. van veen otherwise known as Cindi Mayweather, who/what—are troubled here as a has fallen desperately in love with a philosophical distinction of the Thing human named Anthony Greendown. And to the thinking Man. A philosophical you know the rules! She is now scheduled distinction that masks the for immediate disassembly! Bounty racialization of the Thing. Which is to hunters, you can find her in the Neon say this distinction is troubled by way Valley Street District, on the 4th floor in of an allegory of race that suspends 82 liquid blackness : volume three, issue six and surpasses allegory. And the Western metaphysics—problematizes of the nonhuman, if not the object, source of all this trouble, I assert, is the object, its perception, and its from the position of the othered. alien, android, and Afrofuturist love. discourse. Indeed, like Alexander Fanon hints at an-other form of Weheliye, I contend these discourses nonsubjectivity in which, under Such troubling has occurred owe a debt to black feminist, racialized duress, he “gave himself elsewhere in recent discourses, Afrofuturist, and postcolonial up as an object.”6 Wynter traces including object-oriented ontology, thought, as well as (French) feminist speculative realism, and alien the ways in which the “ethnoclass” 4 psychoanalysis, in thinking the 5 of white humanism “overrepresents phenomenology. But these object. In what follows, I turn to the itself as if it were the human itself.”7 discourses are not the first to rethink work of Sylvia Wynter, Kodwo Eshun, Ahmed’s queer phenomenology the Thing. Moreover, object-oriented Sara Ahmed, and Frantz Fanon, unpacks straight assumptions philosophy tends to neglect how who respectively pose the agency raciology—the “ethnocentrism” of concerning the orientation of “This essay is about love about loving the other, and about loving an-other whose otherness transgresses all that is presupposed in the possessive of the ‘whose’: an-other who is not a who, but a what.” liquid blackness : volume three, issue one 83 Robot Love objects—critiquing “the orientation of What connects their work is a critique videos of Janelle Monáe—that explore phenomenology” by asking “what it of white humanism/metaphysics as what it means to love the alien. means for ‘things’ to be orientated”— a historical construct that, despite while at the same time demonstrating its paradigmatic shifts, has become Loving the Alien their implicit racialization in a “world the unthought and default registry Janelle Monáe deploys the science 8 of whiteness.” And Eshun anticipates of authentic being. In this missive fiction trope of the enslaved android developments in alien and object my aim is to briefly connect their to address race, gender, and white philosophy with his inventory of innovative work with the theoretical supremacy, connecting her work to Afrofuturist becomings that reject and artistic assemblages of Afrofuturist thematics criss-crossing (black) humanism—to the point Afrofuturism—by way of the black the Afrodiaspora. Afrodiasporic where “African-Americans owe science fiction music and music posthumanist approaches range 9 nothing to the status of the human.” from Jamaica’s Lee “Scratch” Perry “Ex-appropriation, as Afrofuturist performative strategy initiates a becoming exhuman.” 84 liquid blackness : volume three, issue six Robot Love “Afrofuturist love...remakes alienation as Alien Nation [which] arises not by rejecting the alien but by ex-appropriating it for the project of decolonization.” and The Upsetters's reclamation fictional, fantastical, and mythical Afrofuturist performative strategy, of the racist stereotype of black tropes in the praxis of radical black marks an improper re-appropriation, über-animalia on their seminal 1976 ontogenesis, whereby the white conducted without propriety, of LP Super Ape to Grace Jones’s stereotypy of nonhuman black the nonhuman. At the limit of the alien, animalia and androidal identity is ex-appropriated by performative, it initiates a becoming performances—particularly as she animalia, android, and alien black exhuman, whereby the nonhuman flaunted the womanist black power becomings. Such ex-appropriation is weaponized as a speculative exit of her fierce, embodied athleticism, signals a deconstructive becoming from the white supremacist imaginary in her hula-hooping live performance that short circuits the dialectics through practices of signifyin’ love of “Slave to the Rhythm” at the of re-appropriation by improperly for an exhuman alien blackness. Queen’s Jubilee in 2012.10 mis-purposing the deprivileging terms of dehumanization. To Mark Dery’s coining of the term These are but two examples of this end, Derrida writes that “ex- “Afrofuturism” in 1993 to describe Afrofuturist cultural performance appropriation is not what is proper black futurist music, comix, and that stress the use of science to man.”11 Ex-appropriation, as arts connected to like concepts in liquid blackness : volume three, issue six 85 Robot Love “alien love itself [is] a potent force of black future visioning.” the work of Greg Tate, Tricia Rose, alienating conditions whereby speculative pedagogy of learning Samuel R. Delany, Amiri Baraka, “Black Science Fiction” becomes a to love the affects and tropes of Octavia Butler, and Mark Sinker, radical exercise in loving the alien. “alienation”: “The ships landed long among others.12 In particular, Mark Thus an Afrofuturist strategy arises, ago: they already laid waste whole Sinker’s work offers a tantalizing whereby “black American culture, societies, abducted and genetically lead for discussing Afrofuturist forcibly stripped by the Middle altered swathes of citizenry, imposed love, seeing as his short 1992 Passage and Slavery Days of any without surcease their values. Africa essay in The Wire magazine was direct connection with African and America—and so by extension provocatively titled “Loving the mother culture . has nonetheless Europe and Asia—are already in Alien.” By correlating the alien survived; by syncretism, by bricolage, their various ways Alien Nation.”14 abduction stories of Sun Ra to Public by a day-to-day programme of Enemy’s post-slavery observation appropriation and adaptation.”13 Afrofuturist love, then, is a love that “Armageddon been-in-effect,” Such adaptive appropriation names that paradoxically yet strategically Sinker set out to chart the historically the bricolage of ex-appropriation, remakes alienation as Alien Nation. which in Afrofuturism undertakes a Such love is improper, insofar as 86 liquid blackness : volume three, issue six Robot Love it loves the alien by way of the of hashtags, memes, and rapid digital the alien android, who is evidently ex-appropriation of alienation. It modes of cultural communication, thinking twice about being forced is a love that mis-purposes the AF 2.0 signals the perpetual into servitude to those who would white supremacist category of reinterpretation and reinvention unthinkingly declare themselves who. subhumanity and shapeshifts it of Afrofuturism by Afrodiasporic into radical exhumanity, signalling peoples. Afrofuturism, as love for the Cindi Mayweather’s flight from a chance for a novel collective love alien, also signals a planetary love for the authorities begins with a in the post-apocalyptic timeline. speculative approaches to blackness transgression of love: for in Alien Nation arises not by rejecting and for alien love itself as a potent Metropolis, androids are forbidden the alien but by ex-appropriating it force of black future visioning. from falling in love with humans. That, for the project of decolonization. in sum, the supposedly heartless, Robot Love is Queer “alien from outer space,” that what If Dery’s early concept of which has been built to serve—with Afrofuturism named a movement that But what does it mean to love the all of its science fictional, metaphoric, did not yet exist, today Afrofuturism alien? What does it mean, in Janelle and intertextual resonances with is a planetary movement everywhere Monáe’s vision of Metropolis, for The Wizard of Oz (Victor Fleming, redefining and remaking itself. In her an android to love a

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