Boge - Response to "Afrofuturist Aesthetics in the Works of Erykah Badu, Janelle Monáe, and Gayl Jones"

According Lillvis, how do Afrofuturist authors, singers, and filmmakers create recovered or alternative histories?

I found this chapter did a wonderful job providing deep engagement with the work of Erykah Badu, Janelle Monáe, and Gayl Jones. While I haven’t read or listened to everything that was discussed, I got a much better sense of what Afrofuturism can look like through differing modes of cultural production. This initial question is difficult to answer, in part, because the processes by which these artists and writers use temporality, aesthetics, music, rhythm, history, and many other elements to craft modes of understanding are abundant. However, it seems like there were two major ways authors, singers, and filmmakers develop recovered and alternative histories: through liminal temporalities and subjectivities (78). A quote that I think gets us into this can be found in the beginning of the chapter:

Afrofuturism, the cultural aesthetic of a specifically black posthumanism, contends that boundary crossings enable black subjects to connect to black history in the present and also find authority in the potentiality of the future. With this blurring of subjective and temporal boundaries, Afrofuturism endorses posthuman theory’s embrace of liminality, a threshold state or experience of occupying two positions simultaneously (58).

Artists and cultural producers rely on the past and the future as resources for imagining black worlds—spaces that acknowledge the past but are not overdetermining by historicity. The simultaneity of Afrofuturism allows for the possibility of the past to give way to new futures. Blurring the distinction between temporal containers (past, present, and future) affords Afrofuturists the freedom and agency to imagine blackness otherwise. For example, in Jones’ novel, for Ursa, “posthuman liminality offers a constantly renewing source of agency for Ursa, her family, and her community” (70). The narratives offered throughout the pieces studied in the chapter expand and disrupt representations of blackness. These, “formerly unarticulated histories,” work to “destroy master narratives—such as the liberal human subject—and tell pervious unheard or ignored tales” (63).

The manner in which artists went about embodying liminality across time and subject position varies. In Badu’s music videos, “she traverses different continents and time periods in order to transport black histories and futures into the present for the viewer. In the video for “Next Lifetime,” a song from her 1997 album, Baduizm, Badu travels through Africa and North American during several lifetimes” (65). In turn, “…Badu rejects a singular, stagnant black history or identity by intertwining historically situated ideas of blackness with projections of black futures” (65). For Monáe, the video “Q.U.E.E.N.” “takes place within a liminal setting, one simultaneously historical, contemporary, and futuristic” (66). Lillvis contends, “throughout the video for “Q.U.E.E.N.,” understandings of the past and present intersect with expectations of what the future will bring, prompting viewers to call into question the received histories of black identity” (66). Finally, in Corregidora, the author uses a remix of fiction and music to manifest new subjectivities. For Ursa, the main character, “the blues allows Ursa to bring the histories of her enslaved ancestors into being through song and also create a new vision for the future that shapes her understanding of her past and present experiences” (69). The temporal hybridity of these examples suggest that artists employ a diverse range of strategies to craft alternative histories. Blending various forms of music, cultural genre, images, artifacts, and so much more, affords Afrofuturists the ability to use time as a resource, a reservoir of energy to construct representations of blackness not beholden to oppressive temporalities that limit the existence (literally, trapped in a past or a present with no future) of black people. In turn, the futures that are produced through these cultural pieces change our understanding of history—giving birth to alterative/recovered histories.

What is the project of Black humanism?

I understood the project of Black humanism to involve a reclamation and intervention within liberal humanism. Lillvis contends, black humanism is “a theory of identity and community that developed in response to a history of black oppression and the denial of black humanity. Theorists intertwine traditional notions of the human with the liberal humanist subject, a being characterized by self‑control and self‑determination” (61-62). Black humanists argue the category of human—the category of Man—is ontologically premised upon the denial of blackness. Historical events, such as chattel slavery, denied humanity to the black subject. Thus, black humanists are working “to create what Sylvia Wynter identities as ‘different modalities of ‘human being’’” (62). This project is closely tied with the impulses and work of Afrofuturism. Black humanism “acknowledges both the hybridity” and “historicity of humanity” by “bringing together…the new and the old in order to determine a historically authentic—through always shifting—blackness” (62). Afrofuturism, as explained above, is dedicated to cultural production that imagines blackness in such a way that subverts and unsettles normative and totalizing understandings of Man. According to scholar Alexander Weheliye, the manner in which black humanists contextualize, and attempt to disrupt liberal notions of humanness that center white supremacy, “make the human a category worthy of ongoing consideration, one that he asks posthuman theorists to consider alongside their own readings of the black subject” (62). In other words, black humanism is, as Eshun states, “a perpetual fight for human status, a yearning for human rights, a struggle for inclusion within the human species” (62).