AfroGenius: Janelle Monae Interview with Afro-Punk

She's so cool.


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Jamaican Afrofuturism

In response to NBC's telemonopoly of the Olympic games, which left some countries unable to watch their athletes compete in real time:

"Some of us have called relatives in Jamaica to hold the phone by the TV. Some have gotten fancy by using hacker techniques to 'break' into BBC video," Barron Channer, board member of www.fastestnation.com, told The Gleaner from his home in South Florida yesterday afternoon. "I personally have visited websites in Korea, China, Syria, Russia, Canada, England and The Bahamas, all in desperation to share in the joy of my Jamaican people."(emphasis mine)

Indeed.

Click here. H/T the noble guys and gals of the Afrofuturist listserv

Andrea Hairston's Mindscape

X-Posted @ Firewalkers

"We still yearn for a Metatheory, a God who never lies, whose simple, absolute truth will guide us from nothing to everything without once falling down. Unfortunately truths are false and lies are true. Anything we are absolutely certain of doesn't matter and everything that truly matters is uncertain."
~~Vera Xa Lalafia

Finished. Really, really liked it. And since I am still stuck in the Lull and am apparently incapable of constructing a coherent paragraph much less a review essay, here are the bullet points. (Never fear--no spoilers ahead). Mindscape:

• Confirms for me that the best hard sci-fi is the kind that openly lusts for magical realism and leaps of fantasy.
  
• Confirms that science fiction looks very different when it takes takes seriously 1) that a hero can be female and still sexy, violent, flawed, vulnerable and triumphant 2) a female hero of color can be all of these without being junglefied or mammied 3) people of color can play roles that aren't just witty, "ethnic throwback" sidekicks or helplessly tormented victims.
  
  
• POC humanity can be fundamental parts of the plot without the story collapsing into racial polemics, masochistic Afrocentricity, ambiguous mestizaje, or a melting pot of Latinidad. Translation? The history, culture, politics, and, hell, the people-dom of people of African, Latina/o and Native American descent should not only be a part of the story that is told but that people-dom should be critiqued and created with the same rigor as majority (Anglo or European) societies. That means asking what is it that poc nickname God? Was it the color of their skin only? Was the rhythm of the drums/beat/scratch? Was it the distribution of political and social power between men and women, elders and age-grades? Was it the lyric and spiritual? The curve of clay forms? Was it a kind of prayer or a way of speaking? And where do you then place histories of slavery and genocide, how do your characters feel that as spectre even as they walk in worlds three, four or five thousand years ahead of today?
  
  
• You don't have to say your characters are any color for them to be that color. (Proof again that putting the humanity of people of color into sci-fi is more than just taking a brown crayon to your cookie-cutter hero or heroine)
  
  
• Just because you don't give your characters a color doesn't make them "everyman" or "everywoman" (Proof again....)
  
  
• Gender is as much a myth as race and should be interrogated and respected just as is explained above. Sexuality is the same deal. And the absolute best sci-fi out right now is flipping both of those way on their head and them thrusting them into another dimension before bringing them back and commiting them to paper.
  
  
• Ooooooh on the way that really, really good sci-fi can take things that are absolutely normal today, magnify them, and make them absolutely otherworldly and yet frighteningly prescient. (I can't say more without spoiling...but ooooohhhhhh!)
  
  
• Ooooooh on the way that afrofuturism deplores the happy ending. After all: "Anything we are absolutely certain of doesn't matter and everything that truly matters is uncertain."
  
  

That is all, at least until I am a real writer again. If you have free time, read the book. If I had free time I would start a TechnoAfroCats Book Collective or distro (yay, I just learned what that is!) or something.

Hmm. Actually, interesting thought. I might have to consider that....

Gnarls Barkley: Going On

Love, love, LOVE this video. Every time I watch it I smile.



H/T on vid: Lex by way of kameelahwrites

Others' thoughts and those inspired to write...

Janelle Monae's Cyborg Love

Mr. said Metropolis isn't a good album. He said it was "weird." He said its all about cyber love.

Metropolis is straight up Afrofuturism.

Metropolis is woman-centered. Perhaps even womanist.

Metropolis is also genius. And so is Janelle Monáe is--or, in Lex's words, a "post-human black girl genius."*

At UMCP Digital Diasporas 2008, Kara Keeling discussed how the meeting of digital media with the humanities could trouble the humanistic ideal. Digital diasporas can help us get to what she called the/a post-human. The multi-layered, anonymous, and constructive potential of digital African diaspora, or Afrofuturism, might possibly overturn the "human," the male, heterosexual, economically elite, classically educated subject of Enlightened modernity.

I mean, can you imagine it? A human that you didn't automatically assume was white and male and heterosexual? A human that you didn't have to spend time and energy converting into a black/Latino/indigenous/Asian female in love with women? What would she look like? Would she be black-skinned with kinky hair? Or would she be pale grey with dark grey tentacles and make love to you by massaging the nerve centers of your brain? Would "she" even be an appropriate moniker?

Would she--it--be a cyborg?

What else would disrupt the human so nicely but its extreme Enlightenment opposite? Mechanical. Emotionless. Clinical. Asexual. Literally "a product of the Man." ("Violet Stars Happy Hunting!")

And what would happen when that "product" decides its going to do its own thing? When it, *gasp,* falls in love with a human????

Cyborg love. Weird, huh?

Yeah, it is. Except that the idea that we (poc) are mechanical beings in "the Man"'s world isn't new for us. It's as old as genocide, as old as slavery. It isn't even a new idea in hip hop. Gnarls Barkley and Lupe Fiasco have both hyped their Go Go Gadget Flow.

Cindi Mayweather, the cygirl of Metropolis, is a similar take on the cyborg/mechanica theme. Cindi Mayweather is what would happen when that theme just happens to start coming out of a woman of color's mouth....

"Good morning cyboys and cyber girls! I’m happy to announce that we have a star-crossed winner in today’s heartbreak sweepstakes! Android # 57821, otherwise known as Cindi Mayweather, has fallen desperately in love with a human named Anthony Greendow. And you know the rules! She is now scheduled for immediate disassembly. Bounty hunters, you can find her in the Neon Valley Street District, on the 4th floor in the Leopard Plaza Apartment Complex. The droid control marshals are full of fun rules today! No phasers; only chainsaws and electrodaggers. Remember: Only card carrying hunters can join our chase today. And as usual, there will be no reward until her cybersoul is turned into the Star Commission. Happy hunting!"

Gnarls Barkley commits suicide on his human with every track. Lupe Fiasco randomly kills his human and then brings him back to life...to get killed again. Their subjects are men of color (although GB's may be questionable and questioning his race and sexuality and I refuse to count Fiasco's "The Streets"--her stereotyping is foolishness).

Their subjects are generally preoccupied with the Game and issues of Coolness--of conforming to stereotype and surviving an inherently destructive system. A system that makes you kill yourself, or gets you killed, over and over again.

They don't know their language/They don't know their God/They take what they're given/Even when it feels odd....

Monáe's unhuman is about conformity and Coolness too. But this cygirl is caught in the Game from a different angle.

It/She falls in love--but how when it/she's not allowed to? And then the questions roll in: Who are you to fall in love? Who are you to feel, to cry, to believe, to fight, to be bold, to be crazed, to grieve and to laugh? You're a cygirl, you're type-cast, your entire existence is regulated. Your soul isn't even yours--it belongs to the Star Commission. You were built to clock in, to work, to reproduce, to satisfy the Man sexually, and then to go home. Beyond that you don't exist.

(Are we speaking of mules and men?)

So Cindi dips. Why? Not just because she doesn't agree. If only. She dips because her particular brand of insurgency has been discovered. This cygirl is defective. She can experience emotion. And it's the most exalted of all human emotions--love. She must be taken care of: "They've come to destroy me...You know the rules." ("Violet Stars Happy Hunting!")

Cindi the cygirl isn't just resisting to resist. Cindi is outta there to save her own life:

"I can only speak for myself. But what I write and how I write is done in order to save my own life." (Barbara Christian, 1987)

She is outta there to reclaim/take back/create her own soul:

"The act of writing is the act of making soul, alchemy. It is the quest for the self, for the center of self, which we women of color have come to think as "other"—the dark, the feminine." (Gloria Anzaldúa, 1981)

And on the run, what does she discover? An entire community, a network of firewalkers, a purple wondaland....

"We want to breathe, but we're stuck here underground/And everybody tryin to figure their way out. Hey, hey, hey!" ("Many Moons")

...debating, critiquing, and arguing together. Fighting to breathe, to create soul, to live. Contradictions abound--"You're free but in your mind. Your freedom's in a bind...."

...and life is a struggle....but still, the rejects, the Goonies, are building together. And their combined challenge is clear--"Tell me are you bold enough to reach for love?!?"

Cindi is bombarded, or bombards it/herself, with a parade of American grammar that are the enemy: "Silhouette, silver wall, hood rat, crack whore, carefree nightclub, closet drunk, bathtub..."

And finds that it's no longer just about experiencing human love with a human being. It's about being in love with herself. Tell me are you bold enough to reach for love.

In the chorus is the chorus, the community of non-humans, rule-breakers, nonconformists, insurgents, artists, activists, fools. The support network.

When the world just treats you wrong/Just come with me and I'll take you home/Change, change, change, change your life....

What a predicament. The paradigm shift is painful. After all, at first, it was only about a carefree romantic ideal--I want you and I won't take no for an answer!--But now, it's about so much more. You're entire history and identity is on the line. You go into cybertronic overload, you're caught in a "Cybertronic Purgatory." Not really in and not really out. You're waking up. But you've got decisions to make. Every day.....

Do you stay? Do you go? Do you fight? Do you stop for awhile in order to survive the maelstrom?

Q: What do you do, Cindi?

A: You sing a black girl's song.

("Sincerely Jane.")

Metropolis is next generation, my generation. The hybrids. The artivist underground, banging against the glass door and screaming. It's what happens when we shed the skin we're in and use it slap the Man in the face. Its the possibility of reaching across boundaries, creating coalitions, building a movement. Weird? Definitely. But if weird is code for not-normal (just like normal is code for knowing & following the Rules), then weird works just fine.

Weird is an afrofuturist harvest.

Tell me--Are you bold enough to reach for love?

And what does radical love look like?

Steampunk

I was way out of the know on this one. And I'm kind of infatuated.

Click here.

Kanye's Afrofuturism Express

Click here.

Gotta Blog That: March of the Wolfmaster Lyrics

Because Janelle Monae's album Metropolis - Suite I: The Chase is getting slept on.

Because I used the lyrics in my final seminar paper and I couldn't find them online.

Because I kinda wanna be like her one day.

“Good morning cyboys and cyber girls! I’m happy to announce that we have a star-crossed winner in today’s heartbreak sweepstakes! Android # 57821, otherwise known as Cindi Mayweather, has fallen desperately in love with a human named Anthony Greendow. And you know the rules! She is now scheduled for immediate disassembly. Bounty hunters, you can find her in the Neon Valley Street District, on the 4th floor in the Leopard Plaza Apartment Complex. The droid control marshals are full of fun rules today! No phasers; only chainsaws and electrodaggers. Remember: Only card carrying hunters can join our chase today. And as usual, there will be no reward until her cybersoul is turned into the Star Commission. Happy hunting!.”

Enjoy.

Black Mexico: Noches de Candela

On the YouTube Africana Studies channel.



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(H/T: Email on Afrofuturism from Carlos Murrell)

More Inspiration

To survive,
Know the past.
Let it touch you.
Then let
The past
Go.

~Earthseed: The Book of the Living by Lauren Oya Olamina

in Parable of the Sower and Parable of the Talents
by Octavia E. Butler

More Afrofuturism-Category: Music

Video for "If I Don't" - Amp Fiddler with Corinne Bailey Rae
(Courtesy of Undercover Black Man who has the mp3 avail. for download si lo quiere)



(Nia the Bee, this one made me think of you...don't know why....)

~if you're on facebook, click "view original post" for the vid~

Invisible Universe Trailer II

A new Invisible Universe trailer has been posted. This one highlights what I suppose could be called horrornoir. But, again with Octavia Butler (yes!). And again I'm ecstatic and can't wait for the director, M. Asli Dukan, to make it happen:



On the film:

This doc explores the relationship between the Black body and popular fantasy, horror and science fiction literature and film and the alternative perspectives produced by creators of color. It features interviews with major writers, scholars, artists and filmmakers and explores comics, television, film and literature by deconstructing stereotyped images of Black people in the genres. It ultimately reveals how Black creators have been consciously creating their own universe. - M. Asli Dukan

Invisible Universe

So, so true. After all, haven't black peoples across the diaspora been "consciously creating their own universe" for centuries? Isn't that what the battle over African/American/Caribbean/Diaspora history is all about (who writes it, who researches it, who teaches it, who funds it)? Isn't that what Michael Hanchard calls Afro-Modernity--which I tend to interpret as what we create after discovering our "two-ness" but knowing that we must still live, work, play and dream in our respective societies?

Exploring these ideas and issues is why I love scififantasynoir.