Gestural Refusals, Embodied Flights Janelle Monáe’S Vision of Black Queer Futurity
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The Black Scholar Journal of Black Studies and Research ISSN: 0006-4246 (Print) 2162-5387 (Online) Journal homepage: https://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rtbs20 Gestural Refusals, Embodied Flights Janelle Monáe’s Vision of Black Queer Futurity Aleksandra Szaniawska To cite this article: Aleksandra Szaniawska (2019) Gestural Refusals, Embodied Flights, The Black Scholar, 49:4, 35-50, DOI: 10.1080/00064246.2019.1655371 To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/00064246.2019.1655371 Published online: 07 Oct 2019. Submit your article to this journal Article views: 476 View related articles View Crossmark data Full Terms & Conditions of access and use can be found at https://www.tandfonline.com/action/journalInformation?journalCode=rtbs20 Gestural Refusals, Embodied re-awakens from the shackles of stillness and Flights conformity, alienation and despair, ready to begin a revolution in her Afrofuturist city of Janelle Monáe’s Vision of Black Queer Metropolis. Futurity This essay attends to Janelle Monáe’s queer performance by foregrounding the role her ALEKSANDRA SZANIAWSKA body plays in enacting a vision of Black queer futurity. Instead of focusing on sound and the verbal forms of communication n October 18, 2013—or rather 2719, as present in her lyrics, I ask what kind of gestural O the poster advertising Janelle Monáe’s vocabulary of Afrofuturism we can arrive at if performance reveals—the legendary Apollo we pay close attention to her body in motion. Theater in New York City’s Harlem became Existing scholarship on Monáe largely exam- an Afrofuturist meeting ground of desire, ines her projects through the lens of her queerness, and the future. Enter Janelle music, lyrics and sound organization, in Monáe aka. Cindi Mayweather. She arrives relation to the narratives of Afrofuturism, 1 on stage carried on a hand truck and bound visuality and representation. This essay “ ” in a straightjacket. Her eyes are closed and explores ways in which to read resistance she appears frozen and inanimate until she written within the body itself. For that ’ is brought into a fully vertical position center reason, I analyze Monáe s construction of an stage. As soon as her lips touch the standing android in her Metropolis saga, her live per- microphone, she quickly opens her eyes and formances, selected emotion pictures, as explodes the theater with the sound of her well as her recent short film titled Dirty Com- voice and the power of her movements, puter. Focusing on the potentialities of the chanting against the erasure of Black moving, breathing, and insisting Black body women’s subjectivity in the dominant dis- allows one to think through those forms of col- course. During one of the most forceful perfor- lective queer desire that remain in constant mative moments, which accompanies her flight from, and thus challenge those domi- “Come Alive (War of the Roses)” piece, nant narratives that historically have policed Monáe’s body erupts into a performance of Black bodies in motion. I wish to make mani- losing her mind. She sways around holding fest how attending to non-verbal forms of ’ on to her standing microphone and spins out meaning-making present in Monáe s gestures, of control and “out of place,” only to collapse movements and alternative embodiments on stage as if getting lost from the logic that allows us to imagine a gestural vocabulary pushes Black queer desire into societal of Afrofuturism that puts under duress norma- margins. With the help of the audience tive categories of race, gender and sexuality. who actively participate in this performance Born in Kansas City, Kansas and influenced of “resurrection” by pouring energy into by the Atlanta music scene, Janelle Monáe is a her convulsed body, Monáe’s persona concept artist whose performative projects © 2019 The Black World Foundation The Black Scholar 2019 Vol. 49, No. 4, 35–50, https://doi.org/10.1080/00064246.2019.1655371 engender the Afrofuturist vision of Black community that challenges commodity cul- empowerment. Afrofuturism is a term coined ture’s objectification of Black artists, and by Mark Dery in his seminal article titled allows Monáe to remain in control of her “Black to the Future” (1994), a conversation own music and performance projects. with Tricia Rose, Greg Tate and Samuel Monáe’s Afrofuturist performances, her R. Delany. Drawing from historical memory music, film appearances, as well as activism and ancestral genealogy, Black futurism pre- and multiple forms of social engagement, dates this particular moment, and has func- imagine the presence of Black women in tioned as an artistic aesthetic, a framework spaces that historically have denied their for cultural theory, and a way to imagine the existence. She is a storyteller whose Afrofutur- future through the lens of blackness. Having ist projects invite a re-thinking of what it co-founded her own production company, means to live as a Black queer woman in con- an independent collective of artists called temporary America. As Monáe explains in the Wondaland Arts Society, Monáe released one of her interviews, “sci-fi is a great four concept albums under the Wondaland vehicle because it allows me to talk about label: Metropolis: Suite I (The Chase) the present in future terms.”3 The past, (2008), The ArchAndroid: Suites II and III present and future intermingle in Monáe’s (2010), The Electric Lady: Suites IV and V creative projects. She works in the spirit of (2013), and Dirty Computer (2018). Monáe’s Black speculative fiction writers such as concept albums, music videos/short films, Octavia Butler, Nalo Hopkinson, Nnedi which she refers to as “Emotion pictures,” Okorafor, Tananarive Due and N.K. Jemisin and songs, which she calls “space ships,” who have imagined complex worlds in create a multisensory experience in imagining which multidimensional Black women not the contours of Black queer futurity. The only occupy the center of the plots, but Wondaland collective brings together artistic whose bodies transcend their physical capa- creators, such as musicians, performance bilities and engender transformative powers artists, illustrators and screenwriters under a of love, respect and healing. Monáe similarly shared vision of queer sociality, as becomes creates spaces that linger between traditions clear from their artistic statement: of the past and technological futures. Her vision of Black queer futurity follows in the We believe truth can be broken down with footsteps of artists such as Sun Ra, George the following formula: Truth = Love x Clinton, Grace Jones, Erykah Badu, Jimi Imagination. We believe songs are space- Hendrix and Prince who time and again ships. We believe music is the weapon of have stepped into the future to explore the the future. We believe books are stars.2 present-day Black experience. Monáe’s reworking of temporality invites the audience In this statement, they articulate the revolution- to follow a futuristic tale, which nonetheless ary powers of art in creating a “loving” future as rings close to home as it parallels the story a refuge from present-day inequalities. The col- of the underprivileged Black community in lective positions itself as an alternative the present-day United States. 36 TBS • Volume 49 • Number 4 • Winter 2019 Black performance studies scholars, such Her gestures of spinning, falling and thrashing as Hershini Bhana Young, Stephanie her body in a convulsed-like manner indicate L. Batiste, Thomas DeFrantz, Daphne a desire to move away from the dominant nar- Brooks, Amber Jamilla Musser, Nicole Fleet- ratives that have commodified and sexualized wood and Uri McMillan, explore the role of Black women’s bodies. While this perform- the Black body as an archive of knowledge, ance alludes to the scenario that subjects the a locus of cultural memory and a site of Black female body to violence, it concomi- agency, which exceeds the verbal language. tantly rewrites it through an exploration of They scrutinize the processes that make the the body’s kinetic potentialities. Attending to body “speak” and suggest ways in which we those forms of desire that are written in the can read the Black body as a source of poten- body itself allows us to read the body as a tialities. This essay is deeply grounded in site of agency. these theories while contributing to an Gestures and movements constitute a under-theorized meeting ground of Afrofutur- certain vocabulary, a pulsating repertoire of ism and Black queerness through an explora- Black diasporic performance, which carries tion of movement vocabularies. Monáe’s a potential to fashion a counter-narrative to performances fashion a system of communi- the incipient policing of blackness, gender cation, a form of talking by dancing, which and sexuality. My own reading gesture Black performance and dance scholar moves away from an attempt to translate the Thomas F. DeFrantz calls “corporeal multifaceted meaning-making gestures of orature.” He argues that “dance is performa- desire and freedom present in Monáe’s per- tive, mirroring the way in which speech may formances. Instead, I am interested in explor- be equated with action. Dance movements ing the processes that make her body “speak,” convey speechlike qualities that contain and how her body in performance allows her meaning beyond the formal, aesthetic to enact a vision of erotic subjectivity. For, as shapes and sequences of movement detailed Juana Maria Rodriguez pointedly observes, by the body in motion.”4 Just like speech “[s]ometimes the point of gesture is that it makes meaning beyond the sound, tone and can register what cannot or should not be timbre of voice, so dance movements too expressed in words. And sometimes it tell stories beyond visual aesthetics that signals what one wishes to keep out of capture the body in between forms and sound’s reach.”5 Those kinetic movements, positions.