Résumés
Abstract
This article explores the work of Janelle Monáe through, and with, the words and images offered by Ruha Benjamin in Imagination: A Manifesto, arguing that these and other Afrofuturist texts provide us with tools for reconceptualizing the visible world as dense, textured, and never wholly legible, consumable, or commodifiable. This essay asks us to dwell, to practice a temporary suspension, in the visualizations offered by these artists, as they invent new fictions for us to inhabit – fictions that work against the dominant narrative of visibility that says we can be made fully readable and comprehensible to power through proliferating mechanisms of technological surveillance. This false but enduring narrative, which often feels deceptively natural and inescapable, works to infantilize and depoliticize imagination, to thwart creative disruption, and to produce collective despair. While this essay acknowledges the very real, violent power entwined within this fiction – and the need to, at times, use this very narrative as a shield for survival in the present – it also argues that we must simultaneously recognize this as fiction and create new fictions so as to open ourselves to a future in which survival and flourishing are not contingent on complicity in the constrictive narratives that frame us today. As we are shaped in both the real and the imaginary, this essay contends, projecting new fictions is a crucial practice for making more liveable futures.
Keywords:
- politics of visibility,
- fictions of legibility,
- imagination,
- surveillance capitalism,
- technocracy,
- futurity,
- Afrofuturism,
- social imaginary
Résumé
Cet article explore l’oeuvre de Janelle Monáe par l’entremise et au moyen des mots et des images proposés par Ruha Benjamin dans son livre, intitulé Imagination: A Manifesto, en soutenant que ces récits ainsi que d’autres textes afrofuturistes nous fournissent les outils pour conceptualiser le monde visible de nouveau, sous une forme opaque, texturée et qu’on ne peut jamais lire, ni consommer, ni commercialiser dans son intégralité. Cet essai nous demande de nous attarder sur les visualisations offertes par ces artistes, de nous arrêter temporairement pour ce faire, tandis qu’elles conçoivent de nouvelles fictions que nous pourrons vivre, des fictions allant à l’encontre du discours dominant de visibilité qui stipule qu’on doit nous rendre lisibles et compréhensibles de façon intégrale pour alimenter les mécanismes de surveillance technologique qui se multiplient. Ce récit inexact, mais immuable, qui nous semble souvent naturel, de façon trompeuse, et inévitable, s’efforce d’infantiliser et de dépolitiser l’imagination, d’entraver les perturbations créatives et de générer une impuissance collective. Bien que cet essai reconnaisse le pouvoir bien réel et violent, qui est inextricablement lié à cette fiction, et la nécessité, par moments, d’avoir recours à ce même récit comme bouclier pour survivre à la situation actuelle, il soutient également que nous devons simultanément reconnaître qu’il s’agit d’une fiction et créer de nouvelles fictions afin de nous ouvrir à un avenir dans lequel la survie et la prospérité ne sont pas conditionnelles à la complicité dans les récits contraignants qui nous encadrent aujourd’hui. Puisque la réalité et l’imaginaire nous forment de façon conjointe, cet essai soutient que prévoir de nouvelles fictions est une pratique primordiale pour concrétiser un avenir où il fait mieux vivre.
Mots-clés :
- politique de la visibilité,
- fiction de la lisibilité,
- imagination,
- capitalisme de surveillance,
- technocratie,
- futurité,
- afrofuturisme,
- imaginaire social
Parties annexes
Bibliography
- Ahmed, Sara. 2006. Queer Phenomenology: Orientations, Objects, Others. Duke University Press.
- Benjamin, Ruha. 2024. Imagination: A Manifesto. HighBridge.
- Bethea, Olivia Constance. 2021. “The Unmaking of ‘Black Bill Gates’: How the U.S. Patent System Failed African American Inventors.” University of Pennsylvania Law Review. 170 (1): 17–38.
- Bourdieu, Pierre. 1977. Outline of a Theory of Practice. Cambridge Studies in Social and Cultural Anthropology, Volume 16. Cambridge University Press.
- Coogler, Ryan. 2018. Black Panther. United States: Walt Disney Studios Motion Pictures.
- Cover, Rob and Rosslyn Prosser. 2024. Queer Memory and Storytelling: Gender and Sexually-Diverse Identities and Transmedia Narrative. Routledge.
- Dragojlovic, Ana and CL Quinan. 2023. “Queer Memory: Toward Re-remembering Otherwise.” Memory Studies 16 (1): 3–11.
- Ervin, Michael A. 2009. “Statistics, Maps, and Legibility: Negotiating Nationalism in Post-Revolutionary Mexico.” The Americas 66 (2): 155–179.
- Foucault, Michel. 1977. Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. Random House.
- Freeman, Elizabeth. 2010. Time Binds: Queer Temporalities, Queer Histories. Duke University Press.
- Grosz, Elizabeth. 1996. “Intolerable Ambiguity.” In Freakery: Cultural Spectacles of the Extraordinary Body, edited by Rosemarie Thompson. New York University Press.
- Hassler-Forest, Dan. 2017. “The Politics of World Building: Heteroglossia in Janelle Monáe’s Afrofuturist WondaLand.” In World Building Transmedia Fans Industries, edited by Marta Boni. Amsterdam University Press.
- Hassler-Forest, Dan. 2022. Janelle Monáe’s Queer Afrofuturism: Defying Every Label. Rutgers University Press.
- hooks, bell. 1989. “Choosing the Margin as a Space of Radical Openness.” Framework: The Journal of Cinema and Media 36: 15–23.
- Jemisin, N.K. 2013. “How Long ‘Til Black Futures Month?” nkjemisin.com. September 30.
- Jenkins, Henry. 2024. “Foreword: What We Mean by Transmedia.” In Imagining Transmedia, edited by Finn, Bob Beard, Joey Eschrich, and Ruth Wylie. MIT Press.
- Johnson, Rian. 2022. Knives Out: Glass Onion. United States: Lionsgate.
- Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. 1969. Visible and the Invisible. Translated by Alphonso Lingis. Northwestern University Press.
- Monáe, Janelle. 2018. Dirty Computer. Wondaland. https://vimeo.com/268498567
- Monáe, Janelle, et al. 2022. The Memory Librarian: And Other Stories of Dirty Computer. Harper Voyager.
- Monáe, Janelle. 2022. Smith, Jada, Adrienne Banfield Norris, and Willow Smith, hosts. “Janelle Monáe’s Hidden Struggles.” Red Table Talk. Season 5, Episode 1. Facebook Watch, April 20.
- Monday, Sydnee. 2018. “Janelle Monáe Is The 21st Century’s Time Traveler.” NPR, November 13.
- Paton, Fiona. 2010. “Monstrous Rhetoric: Naked Lunch, National Insecurity, and Gothic Fifties.” Texas Studies in Literature and Language 52 (1): 48–69.
- Peterson, Max. 2019. “Who Invents and Who Gets the Credit?” Smithsonian National Museum of American History: Lemelson Center for the Study of Invention and Innovation, June 25.
- Riggins, Adina. 2022. “Review of The Memory Librarian and Other Stories of Dirty Computer, by Janelle Monáe.” The American Archivist Reviews Portal, October 6.
- Ritskes, Eric and Jarrett Martineau. 2014. “Fugitive Indigeneity: Reclaiming the Terrain of Decolonial Struggle through Indigenous Art.” Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education & Society 3 (1): I-XXII.
- Rodgers, Josh. 2022. “Did Tesla Just Steal this Black Man’s Idea?” Afrotech, April 18.
- Schulman, Michael. 2023. “Janelle Monáe Peels the Onion.” The New Yorker, January 8.
- Womack, Ytasha L. 2013. Afrofuturism: The World of Black Sci-Fi and Fantasy Culture. Lawrence Hill Books.

