Blackness, music, and activism in Janelle Monáe's Afrofuturistic world

Musician, performer, actress, android, Afrofuturist, activist, intellectual. The list could go on and on and it still would not be enough to describe all the many, creative facets of Janelle Monáe. This year, December sounds particularly promising for her. While celebrating her 37th birthday, on the first day of the month Monáe shared on Instagram a sneak peek of her new song, stating that “it’s float season.” In a few days, on December 23, we will see her on Netflix in Glass Onion – A Knives Out Mystery, alongside Daniel Craig, Edward Norton, and Kate Hudson, to name a few. While waiting for both the song and the movie, why not evaluate one of her latest songs in terms of advocacy for the Black Lives Matter movement and Afrofuturism?

The song in question is “Say Her Name (Hell You Talmbout)” (2021), with which Monáe created a collaborative project to denounce and shed a light on the deaths of sixty-one black women by the violence of the US police. The seventeen-minute-long protest song is an extension of “Hell You Talmbout” (2015) and sees the participation of many female black artists and personalities, amongst which Alicia Garza, Alicia Keys, Beyoncè, Zoë Kravitz, MJ Rodriguez, and Kimberlé Crenshaw. The song was released in emotional and financial support to the #SayHerName campaign, that aims to spread conscience and knowledge about these deaths, which mostly went unreported by the US press.

The lyrics video for the song is essential and powerful, referring to both the protests of the Black Lives Matter movement and to the fact that the deaths of the remember women went unpublished in the news. On a black background, a protester comes in frame, marching and showing a sign with the name of a black dead woman; then, the protester disappears and leaves space to a newspaper’s page with the picture and the story of the woman, after which the protester comes in again, now accompanied by another one, bringing another sign, another name, another death. The same frame sequence is used for every name that is shouted, sometimes in a different order but always resulting in a crowded march for every verse that ends, with several signs all screening the same motto: #SayHerName. Finally, before the hammering phrase from the chorus comes in frame, black on white, the verse ends with a quite strong invitations to speak up, with “won’t you say her name!” written in big, bold, red letters.

The song represents well the role of the “digital griot” that has been attributed to Monáe by Cassandra L. Jones, who describes her as “an intervening figure who unites the past, present, and future, refuses the digital divide as a barrier to black engagement with technology, and utilizes a specifically African American rhetoric.” Such a definition of Monáe permits further considerations of the artist as an Afrofuturist, specifically in view of Kodwo Eshun’s discussions of it. Claiming that music and sound have the same potential for speculation as literary science fiction (the direct child of Afrofuturism), Eshun highlights how Afrofuturists’ works of art are created in a condition of personal, political, and social struggle in order to correct the history of the future and at once “chronopolitically” subvert the present (Eshun 2003). Going further, he states that Afrodiasporic subjects feel on their skins the alienation that science-fiction writers predict. This very condition of alienation, though, is the “psychosocial inevitability” that Afrofuturist artists use to create alternative worlds that permit the process of dis-alienation (Eshun 2003, 298). Here, though, Monáe’s Afrofuturism is not incarnated in the posthuman, robotic figure of android Jane 57821 of Dirty Computer (2018). Rather, "Say Her Name (Hell You Talmbout)" densely engages with the past, present and future of the US black community, while Monáe, as a “digital griot,” guides the revolution. Past and present intertwine with the pictures and names of the dead women and, at once, the voices that shout their names, digitally marching in the video frames. The future, instead, is represented by the participating artists themselves, that sing their hymn of sisterhood and thus create a unite frontline against the suffocation of racism. Hopefully, their strenuous fight will bring to just one more death on the battlefield: racism.

Works Cited

Eshun, Kodwo. 2003. "Further Considerations of Afrofuturism." The New Centennial Review 3, no. 2: 287-302. https://www.jstor.org/stable/41949397.

Jones, Cassandra L. 2018. "'Tryna Free Kansas City': The Revolutions of Janelle Monáe as Digital Griot." Frontiers: A Journal of Women Studies 39, no. 1: 42-72. 2018.

Further Readings

Apata, Gabriel O. 2020. "'I Can’t Breathe': The Suffocating Nature of Racism." Theory, Culture & Society 0, no. 0: 1–14. 2020. DOI: 10.1177/0263276420957718.

Hassler-Forest, Dan. 2022. Janelle Monáe’s Queer Afrofuturism: Defying Every Label. Rutgers University Press.