Search the archive.

LSA ’5 [Louisiana State Legislature; 2005; Governing body of the state of Louisiana; Louisiana State Legislature, “Legislative Glossary,” ]

Resolution

My perhaps minimal suggestion is recognition of this contradiction is the first necessary step. This returns us to ‘traditional’ problems of how we might intervene and negate the forms and forces of labor that mutilate and control our existence. Yet the discourses of the refusal of work or techno-libidinal fantasies of liberation from work do not operate. What are particularly absent are institutions and collective forms in which to engage the negation of work while considering the necessity and possibilities of sustainable existence. We encounter a capitalism that is, sometimes, quite happy to refuse us work while, at other times, to place extreme demands on us for work. A working solution, to be deliberately ironic, is to struggle for decommodification of our lives. Campaigns against privatization and for the return of privatized services to public control try to reduce our dependence on work by attacking the way work is supposed to account for all of our self-reproduction. These struggles are in parallel for struggles to defend public services, protect benefits, and sustain social and collective forms of support. While they may be unglamorous, especially compared to space travel, these struggles can negate the conditions of the impossibility of work by trying to detach ‘work’ from its ideological and material role as the validation of citizenship and existence. In relation to the Nietzschean rebels of absolute communism or absolute acceleration these struggles can be dismissed as reactive, but they react precisely to the contradiction in which we are currently bound. This is also true of the defence of workplace and employment conditions against new waves of privatization and outsourcing. The struggles at the University of Sussex over the outsourcing of support work, under much worse contracts and conditions, has forged an alliance of workers and students on the grounds of the precarity and impossibility of labor. It has also involved new experiments with forms and organizations against unresponsive unions and neoliberal management strategies. This impossibility of labor, I’m suggesting, does not simply mean abandoning work as an impossible site in the name of a dream of exit. Instead the negation of capitalist work can also be the struggle to free that true choice Timothy Brennan indicates by breaking our relation with constant ‘accelerative’ demand that we attend to the commodification of our lives.

It’s not news to anyone to say that black cultural, political, and socio-economic life in America has undergone a renaissance of sorts. An upwelling of fervor, dreams, insights, rage, creativity, vision, and determination have all marked the increase of black visibility in the public arena. And yet, this new reality, a cyclical reappearance of unapologetically black social currents in the media, in the streets, and in the public imagination are all born from the profound contradictions we have been forced to acknowledge. Two terms of America’s first black president alongside ritualized police murders of black-life, a rise of white apologism for an accumulating white supremacist violence that destroys black bodies. We saw a dramatic increase in deportations, the emergence of drone warfare, and an economic crises that prompted a new wave of political movements against inequity, followed by an uprising of black lead direct actions and black revolt. It is in these various contexts that the visibility of blackness is more present than ever before. The opportunities for expression, the platforms for protest, and the historically significant struggles we find ourselves within have inspired and ignited showcases of black life — real as well as creatively re-imagined. It is not a coincidence that this era has given birth to a resurgence of Afro-Futurism.

Afro-Futurism is the practice of constructing new ways of existing, retrieving the past ancestry of the black diaspora, inventing styles of presenting ourselves in the world, and projecting our visions of how we would like to see ourselves in the future. There are a number of figures who stand out in our collective memory as highly imaginative and sharply perceptive of what was their reality. Octavia E. Butler and Sun Ra are a few who have passed away only to have new generations engage and ultimately embody their work today. Despite this stirring in the cultural life of black americans, there exists a significant gulf — a distance between intentions and practices in this movement and I would like to focus my attention on those differences. In doing so, I hope to uncover some salient lessons and distinctions that lay beneath the surface of Afro-Futurism.

Intellectual Property include Patent, Trademark, and Copyright Law. Patent law focuses on the utility and design protection of novel inventions. Trademark law protection focuses on the establishment of a legally registered mark that identifies a manufacturer’s unique goods or services that protect them from counterfeiting and infringement. Copyright law focuses on the protection of original works such as authorship of literary, dramatic, artistic, and musical works. One of the biggest pitfalls black creatives fall susceptible to in starting a business, inventing a product, or creating work is failure to obtain proper protection of those creations. However, this isn’t always attributed to lack of effort in the black community; lack of access to intellectual property protection often is a result of an inequitable playing field. Legal assistance often can be costly and attempting to complete the process without legal help can lead to the forfeiture of those rights simply due to mistake. How can these pitfalls be avoided you may ask? Well first and foremost becoming familiar with the applicable legal field of your work is essential. The United States Patent Trademark Office (USPTO) provides eLearning modules on all areas of intellectual property law which can help familiarize yourself with the basic concepts of the law prior to seeking legal advice. Non-profit organizations and Law School clinics are another great resource for receiving free or low-cost legal assistance. These organizations can provide you with the preliminary work of protection eligibility as well as assist in the filing process of the application. Last but certainly not least you can tune in here monthly where I will go into detail about the fundamentals and core principles of each sector of the law. Black Businesses Matter and protection is essential so together we will make it happen!

Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs) have played a critical role in advancing intergenerational economic mobility for Black families and communities throughout generations. Additionally, HBCUs have been instrumental in fostering innovation and intellectual property development. Today, HBCUs continue to foster innovation among Black inventors and entrepreneurs with the help of Patent and Trademark Resource Centers (PTRCs) in partnership with the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO). PTRCs are part of a national network of public, state, and academic libraries designated by the USPTO to offer trademark and patent assistance to the public. These local centers support the intellectual property needs of the public by providing a human touch. PTRC library staff are local information experts trained by the USPTO on how to use search tools to access information and help people navigate their patent and trademark journey. Services include online resources, research consultations, and workshops to share information on the importance of intellectual property. “Patents and trademarks are key to establishing ownership rights to inventions and brands that bring tangible economic benefits to their owners,” said Kathi Vidal, Under Secretary of Commerce for Intellectual Property and Director of the USPTO, who designated three HBCUs as PTRCs in 2023. “We are committed to increasing the number of PTRCs at HBCUs and educational programs across the country to ensure that Black creators, inventors, and entrepreneurs have access to these key resources.”

One of the most prolific inventors of the golden age was Granville T. Woods, a black man who received more than 60 patents in the fields of electricity and telegraphic communications.37 Born in 1856, Woods viewed invention as both a means to acquire capital to invest in future projects and a way to implement the modernization of America.38 Woods was self-taught, having left school at age 10 to work in an Ohio machine shop. He studied electronics, machining, and blacksmithing while working full time.39 Woods received his first patent in 1884 for a steam boiler furnace.40 He would travel between Cincinnati and New York inventing, raising venture capital for, and selling his inventions.41 His inventions competed with those of highly regarded inventors like Alexander Graham Bell, Lucius Phelps, and Thomas Edison.42 His patented inventions included technology that improved trains, streetcars, and electrical communication systems, among other things. Upon his death in 1910, Woods had realized his goal of helping to modernize America. Along with Woods, Lewis Latimer was a premier black inventor at the end of the nineteenth century. Born free in 1848 to parents who had run away from slavery, Latimer learned about patent drafting as an office boy in a Massachusetts patent law firm.43 Latimer rose in the firm’s ranks to become a draftsman—a professional rarity for blacks during this period—and over time he not only helped others but also developed several of his own inventions.44 His inventions included toilet systems for railroad cards, carbon filament light bulbs, and the now-common threaded light bulb socket, among other things.45 Latimer worked with some of America’s most well-known inventors, including Alexander Graham Bell and Thomas Edison.46 His work helped make electric lights possible both in private homes and in public, and this transformed the way Americans lived and worked at that time.47 As the twentieth century was beginning, other black inventors were helping to make Americans safer with their inventions. Garrett Morgan, for example, received patents for what would become the gas mask in 1914 48 and the traffic signal in 1923.49 Morgan was formally recognized by the city of Cleveland in 1916 when he saved the lives of 24 men trapped in a tunnel beneath Lake Erie while wearing the mask he invented.50 His traffic signal invention became an indispensable component of both national and global traffic models.51 Morgan’s traffic signal invention is the grandfather of the type we use today.

Charles Richard Drew, a doctor in Washington, D.C., helped make medical gains by inventing a method for preserving human blood in 1942.52 Drew’s work saved thousands of lives during World War II, and he became the founding medical director of the United States Red Cross Blood Bank.53

Part of the revolutionary potential of Janelle Monáe as digital griot is her ability to layer these “competing and complementary beats” to critique previous historical moments and their continuing impact on the present. For instance, “Q.U.E.E.N.” recalls and critiques the nineteenth- century pseudoscience that sought to prove black inferiority by examining every body part. Indeed, the exhibit of the frozen bodies of the rebels echoes the display of Saartje Baartman.87 The positioning of Badoula Oblongata’s body at the beginning of the video further supports this claim. While she is positioned as the leader of the three revolutionaries she stands beside, clearly planning some sort of response, Oblongata’s back is to the viewing audience, and her buttocks thrust toward us. In this way we focus not her role as a leader within the organization but rather on her body. However, this anthropological discourse is disrupted by the music, inserting a revolutionary and technological narrative into the disturbed linear one. For instance, the skull is transformed from a marker of the anthropological gaze to a literal tool of liberation. It is the skull used as a record player that frees Monáe from the prison attempting to defi ne, sanitize, and contain her. This skull- as- record player, which features a golden tooth as the needle that translates the grooves into liberating vibrations, recalls the grill, a marker of the “thug.” This constitutes a radical reclamation of the gold tooth from marker of otherness to one of liberation. Where Van Veen argues that “the violence and capitalist bling of ghetto realism” that traps blackness into one confining identity and that Afrofuturism provides an “escape hatch” from this trap, by adopting the gold tooth as the mechanism for escape, Monáe does not seek to distance herself from the “bling of ghetto realism.”88 She reclaims and transforms that marker. Again, Monáe returns to the struggle to defi ne blackness as fully human. Pundits, such as Geraldo Rivera, have argued that markers of “thug” culture like the gold tooth or the hoodie, somehow divorced from race, are responsible for the loss of young African American lives.89 Those making this argument claim that it was not his race, but rather Trayvon Martin’s choice to wear a hoodie that resulted in his death, for instance. However, the hoodie, or the gold tooth, cannot be divorced from race. The importance lies in what the hoodie comes to represent, particularly when clothing a black body, a “thug.”90 According to arguments of this type any marker of thug life, be it a hoodie or baggy pants, is enough to cheapen the value of the life of the black man wearing it. The “Q.U.E.E.N.” video critiques this argument and other arguments made about blackness, about femininity, and sexuality via the repeating chorus that continually asks “Am I a freak . . .” What white culture might read as a marker of disposable life, the gold tooth in the context of the video is transformed from a marker of class and race that dehumanizes blackness in the eyes of white America to a tool of liberation. White America’s definition of the gold tooth does not constitute an identity to be escaped in this video. The tooth itself becomes a signifier that transmits a liberatory signal, a vibration that crosses synapses to connect the past and the present; a signal that demonstrates how technological engagement, when paired with knowledge of history, and an awareness of the present combine to create a force of social liberation. This marriage of the transformation of both technology and its attendant racialized narrative is the power of the digital griot.

Similarly to the struggle for narrative and rebellion in “Many Moons,” Monáe wages a battle for the control of the narrative that defines her in the video for her song “Q.U.E.E.N.” Technology features heavily in both the narrative at stake, blackness as anti- technological, and the means by which that battle is fought. Monáe traces the dangers of technology and their associated capitalist narratives as a means of literal and figurative imprisonment, echoing past uses of technology against black bodies. She also holds hope for technologies to be used against the systems that created them. While the audience is not privy to the apparatus by which they travel through time, technology is both the mechanism by which the rebels are imprisoned and their means of escape. The rebels have been momentarily detained physically by the museum’s animation suspension technology and rhetorically contained by its narrative, but they are not forever halted. It is the technology of the turntable and the musical extension of the DJ that connects them to the larger community that ultimately frees them from their imprisonment. Two young women who had been “touched” by the music storm the museum and play the record that frees the members of Wondaland. Part and parcel of Monáe’s use of community is in- group membership and the transmission of coded messages across synapses of time between “cells,” where cell refers both to a biological unit and to an individual group of “terrorists” in Monáe’s “freedom movements.” These messages are illegible to the outside world, decipherable only to in- group members. As the voiceover in “Q.U.E.E.N.” notes, “Researchers are still deciphering the nature of this program and hunting the various freedom movements that Wondaland disguised as songs, emotion pictures, and works of art.”47 These messages, transmitted through the music, are designed in such a way as to block access to their meaning by the researchers who, years later, still struggle to decode them. This allows the revolution to continue long after the original revolutionaries have been captured. Working beyond the temporal boundaries of their own lives in this manner enables the Wondaland crew to time- travel in multiple ways. This community’s identity is also a racially marked one. This is apparent in the contrast between the white cultural markers of the museum and the markers of blackness to be found on the bodies of the Wondaland members, in the lyrics of “Q.U.E.E.N.,” and in the imagery of the Wondaland exhibit. The museum is marked by whiteness in many ways: it is represented visually by a white woman who speaks with a British accent against a backdrop of classical music, indicating a cultural whiteness, while the space of the museum itself is a blizzard of a literal whiteness. In contrast, the Wondaland exhibit is equally marked by blackness. In addition to the blackness of Wondaland’s bodies and those of the black women who free them, the painted African tribesmen, the skull with the gold tooth, and Monáe’s music equally mark a cultural blackness. Activated through the musical impulses across the boundaries of space and time, this community liberates Wondaland and allows the cycle of rebellion to begin anew. The “musical weapons program” of Wondaland is the tool by which that liberation is made possible. Musical technologies have become weaponized, have become a tool in the fi ght for liberation. The weaponization of music so key to Monáe’s revolution in Q.U.E.E.N. has a long history in African American thought and certainly Afrofuturist thought. For example, Sun Ra’s 1974 fi lm Space Is the Place opens with the black science fiction icon’s discussion of the power of music as a tool of liberation. While wandering through the woods on a planet in a distant galaxy, Sun Ra notes: Th e music is diff erent here. Th e vibrations are diff erent. Not like planet Earth. Planet Earth sounds of guns, anger, frustration. . . . We’ll set up a colony for black people here. See what they can do on a planet all their own without any white people there. Th ey could drink in the beauty of this planet. It will aff ect their vibrations . . . for the better, of course. . . . We’ll bring them here through either isotope teleportation or transfelequization or better still teleport the whole planet here through music.48 Music, space travel, and utopia are deeply entwined in what Afrofuturist scholar Graham Locke refers to as Sun Ra’s “Astro Black mythology.”49 Whereas Sun Ra does not characterize music as a weapon, it certainly exists as technology that can connect to distant points and functions as a form of transportation between them. And similar to the racialized community in Janelle Monáe’s “Q.U.E.E.N.,” this is a community for black people and one that, according to the black separatist thought of the day, represents the potential to better black lives: “It will aff ect their vibrations . . . for the better, of course.”50 According to Sun Ra, once away from the infl uence of white people, black people may be able to achieve something greater, a utopian community made possible through musical vibrations. Undeniably, music is the core of his vision. Music, in Sun Ra’s cosmic philosophy and refl ecting the black nationalism of the era, functions not just as the means of transportation, but the “vibrations” of black people form their very essence. The music of the planet and connections built among the community through these musical sound waves are what will improve black lives. Music serves a similar function in “Q.U.E.E.N.,” uniting would- be rebels across time and space, but also dismantling the discourses that defi ne blackness as inferior.

In desperation, the South African government passed the Medicine and Related Substances Control Act. The law permitted “parallel importing,” so that South Africa could import pharmaceuticals from any source, including generic manufacturers, without the patent holder’s permission. But Western drug companies quickly filed a lawsuit, claiming that the law infringed on their patents, by allowing the importation and manufacture of generic drugs supplied by drug manufacturers like India’s Cipla. Cipla’s president, Yusef Hamied, offered to make low cost generic drugs available to South Africans by breaking patents if necessary. Cipla had re-engineered patented AIDS drugs to make its own cocktail, and the company asked the South African government for a compulsory license to start selling its generic version of the drug. The company was prepared to sell its three-drug cocktail for $350 a year. With Cipla’s offer pending and public pressure intensifying, the pharmaceutical companies were forced to drop their contentious lawsuit. These companies were vanquished by a powerful coalition of American advocates for AIDS patients, European doctors, African officials, and aggressive lawyers.51 The industry’s swift retreat was accompanied by steep drops in AIDS medicine prices. Cipla’s actions had set off a price war for supplying these antiviral drugs to Africa. Initially, in 2000 the Western drug companies had struck a deal to sell AIDS drugs with an 80 percent price cut but insisted that countries had to demonstrate they had an adequate infrastructure before getting the price break. But a year later, with no conditions attached, Merck agreed to sell Crixivan for $600 a year per patient, and Stocrin for $500; both are critical components of its cocktail therapy. These figures, Merck claimed, represented “no profit” for the company. The total wholesale price of Crixivan and Stocrin was $11,700. Glaxo offered to sell an annual dose of the Combivir cocktail for $1,330, well below its $10,880 price tag in the United States. Merck President Raymond Gilmartin spoke at the time about his company’s “evolving stance:” a refusal to discount prices, initial price reductions with strings attached, and then steeper price reductions. This is all part of “gaining experience” for how to handle such complex issues.52 These bold and dramatic price reductions, however, failed to bring the crisis to closure or to mute the criticisms of activists and African country officials. Observers complained that the drug manufacturers were still making money. Cipla had revealed, for example, that the active ingredients for making an annual dose of Combivir could be purchased on the international generic market for only $240.53 Also, despite the apparent magnanimity of providing these “break-even” prices, many Africans still could not afford the product. AIDS activists continued to demand lower prices, but over time a concerted world effort had begun to address the African AIDS crisis more comprehensively. In the wake of the AIDS crisis, the “Doha Declaration” was signed by WTO signatories in 2001, limiting the rights granted under TRIPS. The Declaration clarified the TRIPS provision on compulsory licensing. “The TRIPS agreement does not and should not prevent members from taking measures to protect public health. We affirm . . . WTO members’ right to protect public health, and, in particular, to promote access to medicine for all.”54 In cases of national emergency, countries have the latitude to manufacture their own generic version of medicine or import generic copies from other countries.

Kevin Green is a Professor of Law, Southwestern Law School. Greene, K.J. "Intellectual Property at the Intersection of Race and Gender: Lady Sings the Blues." American University Journal of Gender, Social Policy & the Law. 16, no. 3 (2008): 365-385. JrH24

Critical race theory is not a unified construct, but it does set forth four core tenets.7 First, it posits that “race and racism are endemic to the American normative order.”8 Second, it posits that legal structures are “part of the social fabric . . . [which] constructs and produces race and race relations . . . [in support of] white supremacy.”9 Third, it contends that the construct of “colorblindness” in legal jurisprudence “ignores and cements the racial caste system constructed in part by law,” and thus perpetuates inequality for subordinated groups.10 Finally, CRT proponents advocate that “[legal scholars should be] working toward a norm of ‘racial equality’ where different groups will not continue to suffer the oppression and subordination they have suffered.”11 CRT can also be defined via its opposition to at least three entrenched, mainstream beliefs about racial justice . . . [one,] that blindness to race will eliminate racism . . . [two,] that racism is a matter of individuals, not systems . . . [and three,] that one can fight racism without . . . attention to sexism, homophobia, economic exploitation, and other forms of injustice and oppression.12 Further, CRT advocates reject the use of “neutral” accounts of legal decision-making and focus on the perspectives of subordinated peoples, i.e., “voices from the bottom” of society.13 Finally, CRT embraces the use of story-telling “to expose discrimination and illuminate how the law often fails to account for the voices of outsiders.”14 CRT analysis has been applied to many diverse areas of law, including antidiscrimination law, law and economics, and taxation.15 CRT has spawned numerous theories of subordination within the law, including Latina and Latino Critical Theory, Asian-American critical legal theory, and Critical Race Feminism.16 Not surprisingly, CRT and its analogs have come under harsh attack from conservatives in the legal academy.17 This is expected since “conservative critics have long denounced feminism, as well as other civil rights movements, for promoting victimization.”18 Given the breadth of its subject matter, it is unsurprising that divisions over analytical approaches exist in the CRT movement.19 A. Intellectual Property, Innovation, and African-Americans CRT analysis has “provided important insights into the ways in which anti-discrimination law has not only failed to address, but [has] further entrenched, ideological and thus material forms of discrimination.”20 An insight that CRT offers to IP law is that its use in society and legal scholarship, like antidiscrimination law, also may have served to entrench material forms of discrimination. While individual black artists without question have benefited from the IP system, the economic effects of IP deprivation on the black community have been devastating. Intellectual property today is perhaps the preeminent business asset.21 Analysts recognize that blacks and other minorities in a market economy “cannot participate as equals unless they too can deploy the private power generated by ownership and control substantial business assets.”22 The three core protections of intellectual property at the federal level are copyright, patent, and trademark law.23 Copyright law protects creative output of authors, such as music composers, writers, and choreographers, by granting limited property rights in their creations. Patent law provides legal protection to inventors of useful inventions. Trademark law prohibits the use of a valid trademark by third parties where the unauthorized use is likely to cause consumer confusion in the marketplace. In the past, few legal scholars examined race or gender in the context of IP. It is only in recent years that scholarship exploring IP has examined it in the context of social and historical inequality. Only recently have scholars, such as Professor Sunder, recognized that IP serves not merely as a legal doctrine allocating rights, but “as a legal vehicle for facilitating (or thwarting) recognition of diverse contributors to social discourse.”24 IP scholars such as Keith Aoki and Shubha Ghosh are now validating the phenomena of the similar divestment of patent protection for black inventors.25 My scholarship was among the first to show how the structure of copyright law, and the phenomena of racial segregation and discrimination, impacted the cultural production of African-Americans, and how the racially neutral construct of IP has adversely impacted African- American artists.26 The long omission of an analysis of race in the IP context is glaring given the tremendous innovative contributions of black authors and inventors to society, and the salience of race “branding” in trademark law. The treatment of blacks in the IP system has been characterized by two dynamics that have import for racial and distributive justice. First, black authors and inventors have found their works routinely appropriated and divested. Second, appropriated and distorted creative works protected by copyright, and trade symbols and imagery protected by trademark, have promoted derogatory racial stereotypes that facilitate racial subordination.

Nettrice R. Gaskins “Afrofuturism on Web 3.0 Vernacular Cartography and Augmented Space”, Afrofuturism 2.0 The Rise of Astro-Blackness.

AFROFUTURISM AND TECHNO-VERNACULAR CREATIVITY Afrofuturism is not a black version of the early twentieth century Italian futurism since it is not solely concerned with the future. Instead, Afrofuturism navigates past, present, and future simultaneously. Afrofuturism is coun- ter-hegemonic and not concerned with representing the mainstream or the canon of Western art. Afrofuturism advocates for the revision of accepted, long-standing views, theories, historical events, and movements. It retells history, altering characters and/or the environment by re-using existing arti- facts, themes, and concepts such as quilt-based signposts, star charts, and even the heliocentric model of the universe. One such example of vernacular mapping is found on the cover of Sun Ra’s 1965 album, The Heliocentric Worlds of Sun Ra, Volume One. The album cover references heliocentric theory in which jazz musician and cosmic philosopher Sun Ra (Ra being the Kemetic/ Egyptian god of the sun) positions himself at the center of other known Western cosmic philosophers and scientists. Sanford Biggers defines Afrofuturism as “a way of re-contextualizing and assessing history and imagining the future of the African Diaspora via science, science fiction, technology, sound, architecture, the visual and culinary arts and other more nimble and interpretive modes of research and under- standing” (Sanford Biggers quoted in Castro 2012, 124). Afrofuturism un- leashes what theorist Arjun Appadurai identifies as the social imaginary, specifically a “technoscape” that embraces the “semantic, cultural, and creative aspects of science and technology” (1996, 31). In Afrofuturism, the technoscape is sustained through techno-vernacular creativity, and by extension, the cultural art and technology produced by African diaspora communities. Such work accepts that technological meaning is culturally and historically grounded and, as a result, becomes located within a larger social imaginary. Afrofuturism then, is an antecedent for techno-vernacular creative pro- duction. such as do-it-yourself (DIY) techno culture and the merging of cultural and religious traditions as in the case of syncretism, all of which highlight the interconnectedness of seemingly disparate practices. Techno-vernacular creativity consists of three methods. The first, reappropriation, describes how Afrofuturists reclaim cultural artifacts, often to counter dominant social or political systems. Artists in the African Diaspora reclaim and adapt traditional symbols and systems such as the cosmogram that is a cultural map of the Universe. This universal cultural glyph represents the cycle of life, or a crossroad between the spiritual and material worlds. The second method, improvisation, is the practice of performing, creating, problem solving, or reacting in the moment and in response to one’s environment and inner feelings. Improvisation results in the invention of new practices, artwork, and/or new ways of acting. Reinvention (of the self) is the third method. Identity refers to the self or essential being of a person. Artists often question commonly held assumptions and stereotypes, self-awareness, portraiture, and what it means to be an artist in their work. Sun Ra came up with the term “myth science” to explain how to re-create oneself in a place of oppression.3 Sun Ra explored reinvention of identity through the creation of an alternate personality or avatar. Afrofuturists often use digital and non- digital avatars as tools for transcendence, reinvention, or for existing in and moving between worlds or realities. Rayvon Fouché, a cultural historian of technology, formulated the con- cept of “black vernacular technological creativity,” otherwise referred to here as techno-vernacular creativity (2006). Fouché references James Brown’s 1969 musical anthem “Say It Loud, I’m Black and I’m Proud” as representative of the African American desire to reclaim, recover, and articulate self- claimed black identity and expression. Fouché references the late author and critic Amiri Baraka’s prescient 1971 essay “Technology and Ethos” as in- itiating the conversation about vernacular space. Baraka called for African Americans to rethink their relationships with technology and take action to make technology more representative of their culture. He further asserted that through black technological utterances rooted within black cultures and communities, technology would be more responsive to the realities of black life in Western societies (Baraka 1971, 157). Artist and scholar Duane Deterville further builds upon this contention by drawing on “continental African cultural ethos, contemporary technology, and artistic actuation in a self-de- termined, representational space” that he describes as the Afriscape.4 Fouché describes black vernacular technological as re-deployment (reap- propriation), re-conception (improvisation), and re-creation (reinvention) as a basis for creativity and innovation. Re-deployment reinterprets technology while maintaining its traditional use and form, such as using the Twitter social networking platform, otherwise known as “Black Twitters,” to focus on interests of African American communities. According to a 2013 Pew Research Center report, twenty-six percent of African American Internet users tweet compared to fourteen percent of non-Hispanic white American, online users (Duggan and Brenner 2013). Reappropriation counters the hege- monic practice of reabsorbing vernacular into mass culture through commod- ification. Twitter hash tags #SolidarityIsForWhiteWomen and #BlackPowe- rIsForBlackMen encouraged many users to engage in conversations about how ideologies such as feminism often omit the voices of women of color. Through the reappropriation of online social networking, Black Twitterers have redeployed the participatory Web 2.0 platform as a communication tool more representative of black culture. Re-conception is the active redefinition of technology that transgresses its designed function and dominant meaning. DIY techno culture and aesthetics reflect the myriad social and cultural fac- tors that shape access to technological resources. In African American and other historically marginalized communities, production reflects creativity and innovation within settings of limited technological resources. Brenda Dixon Gottschild asserts that “African American culture has always been subversive and improvisatory, by force of circumstance” (Gottschild 1996, 117). Black speculative fiction writer Octavia Butler’s novels re-conceptual- ize notions of utopia that hinge on the belief that the progress of technology serves to advance society to a state absent of inequality. Afropunk is a multi- genre platform for the African American experience and DIY technoculture is a foundation. Artist Cyrus Kabiru crafts Afrofuturistic pieces—most fa- mously his one-of-a-kind “C-STUNNERS” spectacles—from recycled waste and objects he finds on the streets of Nairobi, Kenya. For “Blossom”—a life- sized tree constructed with a piano emerging from it—Sanford Biggers re- conceptualizes the piano and programs it using a MIDI controller to play his improvisation of “Strange Fruit,” an anti-lynching protest song made popular by the Blues singer Billie Holiday. Kabiru and Biggers utilize the DIY meth- od of “making do” with found materials to create their artwork. Blossom and other examples demonstrate Afrofuturistic re-conception of and DIY improv- isation with technology in ways that mirror the past and present.

Section 4: The digital subject’s emancipation Having outlined the three main characteristics—radical subjectivity, collectivity, and contextuality—the following will look at the broader implications. More specifically, first, how the data subject is emancipated through ‘subjectification’ and second, how we can find universality in the specific and what ‘Blackness’ can mean. 4.1 Emancipation through subjectification What follows from the Afrofuturist data subject is an emancipatory approach to data through subjectification. The word emancipation has been used in multiple ways, for instance to describe the movement for women’s suffrage (Evans, 2013), the US-American Civil Rights movement (Branch & Edwards, 2013), or Marxist theory (Marx, 1843/1994). Yet, at the heart of the matter are power struggles, defined as “the process of giving people social or political freedom and rights” (‘Emancipation’, n.d.).8 What we see today is a digital continuation of the historical objectification that Black people have experienced for centuries. It can be argued that objectification is an inherent part of digital data management and does affect everybody as it “enframes the human subject in a new and different way […] [in] which an entity is recognisable and can be indexed” (Ansorge, 2016, p. 95). Yet, combined with the historic objectification as a denial of humanness, the current digital injustices suggest that the objectification via data sorting has a distinct character for Black people. Countering this doubled objectification requires subjectification, which means de- and re-constructing the data subject, reclaiming it and thereby transforming the ‘object’ into a subject. Afrofuturism emancipates both from a prescribed identity (Gipson, 2019, p. 102) and through the use of time; past, present and future (Eshun, 2003; Avanessian & Moalemi, 2018; Womack, 2013). Significantly, as Strauß (2019) highlights, escaping a prescribed identity poses an arguably more critical but also more challenging task in today’s digitalised world. Furthermore, subjectification does not have to be a process of individualisation but, quite the contrary, focuses on a collectivity that broadens the data subject. “[A]cts of preservation and self-defense are not simply expressions of the negative; they define a practice of differential articulation that refuses to be separated and contained.” (Applegate, 2020, p. 141). Correspondingly, activist groups such as ‘Data 4 Black Lives’ are preserving and giving voice to data subjects through their critical inquiry into whose data is being weaponised by whom. Likewise, as Black German Asa Awad-Bergström remarks, the Afro-census “empowers” (Deutsche Welle, 2020) Black Germany. A section within the Afro-census for instance takes stock of Black Germans “Selbstpositionierungen” (Aikins et al., 2021, p. 244). That is, the self-chosen terminology one identifies with, such as “Black”, “Afro-German”, “Person of Colour” etc. Arguably, both the Afro-census and Data 4 Black Lives are aiming for the production of knowledge that works toward the formation of subjects and subjectivities. Overall, it is an emancipatory approach to the entanglements of technology, race, and the political economy that makes Afrofuturism so powerful in reimagining data protection in ways which take into account its complexity. 4.2 Making the subjective universal? Importantly, another subtext of subjectivity is its deeply personal, and intuitionbased rather than fact-based character. A remaining question is then, what is the, for lack of a better term, universal9 in the extremely culturally specific of Afrofuturism and why is it insightful for data protection in general? In order to counteract the unique digital injustices affecting the data subject, we need to acknowledge the structural problems and intersectional differences. The Afrofuturist data subject is about what is made visible as well as what can be imagined based on the recognition that in the current conceptual models, certain things are invisible. Thus, as Benjamin (2019a, p. 10) remarked, deconstruction of a priori exclusionary categories benefits us all. Or as Dratwa (2017) pointedly framed it in the context of the security-surveillance nexus: “What do we want to secure and surveil? Why and how, and at what price? What do we want to make or keep safe? And who is in the ‘we’? This also traces the early connection between surveillance and citizenship, indeed between empowerment, participation and subjection.” (p. xix). Accordingly, the value of this deliberately subjective approach to the data subject, and data protection more generally, lies in the examination of who the most vulnerable data subjects are because, “[w]hen they enter, we all enter”(Crenshaw, 1989, p. 167). By the same token, ‘Blackness’ as the ultimately subjective aspect of subjectification can point towards the digitally marginalised more generally. But what exactly is ‘Black’ and what does its both intangible and at the same time very undeniable history of oppression stand for? As Steinskog (2018) remarks, in Afrofuturism “‘black’ does not refer to any universal entity, but is an umbrella term for a diversity of different positions all having in common that they are described or describe themselves as ‘black’.” (p. 21). Furthermore, “Sun Ra’s musical teleportation holds out the potential for everyone on Earth to become black. No longer merely a historical identity, blackness becomes a transformative effect of space music, the cultural means of inhabiting a new world. Blacks may be in the best social position to make the most of this opportunity, but Space Is the Place holds it open to others, too, at least theoretically. Astro-black mythology can transport people to a brave new black world.” (Youngquist, 2016, p. 213). Through searching for universality in the specific, Blackness can be the departure point to examine who is marginalised, in other words, identified as ‘Black’ in our society. 10 Painted with a broad brush, this analysis calls for further inquiry into the data subject. The argument brought forward in this article provides several avenues for further investigation. In fact, in many places it deserves more nuance than this scope can provide. A non-exhaustive list is, first with regards to contextuality, a further exploration of the possibility of an anti-racist critique within Helen Nissenbaum’s (2010; 2015) concept of contextual integrity. Particularly, the assessment process of a potential violation of the data subject’s information. This could for instance be an examination of structural disparities within the production, visibility, and evaluation of social norms and knowledge. Second, further research could focus on a more elaborate investigation into the protection of the data subject that does not rely on the subject/object binary. And third, future examinations should also particularly look into what Chude-Sokei (2016) calls “false universalism” (p. 168), that is, the dominance of the African-American context in discussions of Blackness and Afrofuturism. Despite potential similarities (see Chander, 2020), other diaspora and population groups face different challenges and discriminatory digital practices than in the United States. In order to prevent and act on digital injustices, we need a nuanced understanding of distinct cases such as the Afro-census. Indeed, “America possesses no monopoly on either blackness or death. A planetary perspective on black suffering and human subjugation would provide globalisation with a conscience irreducible to national identity or imperial ambition.” (Youngquist, 2016, p. 205). Nonetheless, theories of Blackness and the Afrofuturist data subject can teach us about marginalisation, defiance and empowerment. The value in this exercise thus lies in starting to reimagine and deconstruct the data subject, not in conclusively determining it now.

Introduction: “The data thief travels light. A small multi-functional flat black box, the size of a CD, is all s/he needs.” (Akomfrah & George, 2013) Central to the Black Audio Film Collective’s documentary ‘Last Angel of History’ is a time- traveling protagonist named the ‘data thief’ (Akomfrah, 1996). The movie is part of a phenomenon that has been called Afrofuturism, which is, broadly speaking, an aesthetic and philosophy that centres around themes of technology, diaspora, Blackness, and speculative temporalities. What is interesting about the figure is the positive connotation of the term ‘data thief’ and the accompanying emancipatory, that is, self-determined, approach to data. S/he travels through time to excavate fossils, collecting pieces and knowledge—data—of a past that has been lost to assemble a future which will be gained. Afrofuturism has its roots in response and resistance to persistent structural racism and the grim future that results from it. An, at first sight, unlikely match to that is the so-called ‘Afro-census’ (Aikins et al., 2021), a first nationwide survey of Black people in Germany published in November 2021, that aims “to obtain as comprehensive a picture as possible of the experiences of people of African descent in Germany” (Afrozensus, n.d.). I will later explore the connections between Afrofuturism and the Afro-census, by illustrating how an Afrofuturist data subject can guide a critical approach to data protection. Both Afrofuturism and the Afro-census find very distinct ways to oppose and question the status quo. Furthermore, what unites both is the re-imagination of the relationship to data in a positive manner in order to assemble a better future. In contrast to the liberated ‘data thief’ above, today’s digital reality is much bleaker. We are increasingly becoming aware of our data-saturated world’s dark underbelly, where, as for instance seen in the case of the Facebook-Cambridge Analytica scandal, data traded as a commodity can be transformed into a political weapon (Confessore, 2018). By the same token, it becomes more and more apparent that many injustices in the digital sphere share a very distinct common characteristic: racial discrimination. Algorithms and data are neither neutral nor objective. In fact, they are fed by and feed back into structural racism1 and are linked to forms of knowledge production, which are deeply situated in oppressive structures. Browne (2015) for instance delineates a genealogy of surveillance and data collection that builds firmly on race and Blackness. Equally important, Raval (2019) highlighted the colonial context of knowledge and data production in which “both colonial and postcolonial bodies are inseparable from the past and contemporary technoscientific innovation and production.” (p. 5) With this in mind, my aim is to call into question a crucial concept within data protection, that is, the data subject. The “subject[] of the right to personal data protection” (González Fuster & Gutwirth, 2017, p. 184) is defined by the European General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) as “a[] […] natural person […]; who can be identified, directly or indirectly, in particular by reference to an identifier” (Regulation 2016/6) and forms the starting point from where to search for an emancipatory engagement with data. Specifically, how can we rethink the data subject in light of current digital discrimination and racism? Examining the data subject makes it necessary to recognise long-standing notions of who counts as human and therefore enjoys protection within that category. In concurrence with Benjamin’s (2019a) call for rethinking the role of technoscience, Afrofuturism will aid to re-imagine data protection and form new narratives while building on the specific nature of the injustices. I argue that looking at Afrofuturism can help us move toward an emancipatory approach to the data subject in our digital age. In the following, I will, first, explore why our current digital working models are inadequate to address digital racism and injustices and how Afrofuturism may fill a conceptual gap. Second, I will sketch out an Afrofuturist data subject, guided by the main themes of collectivity, contextuality, and subjectivity, illustrated by the Afro-census, before, third, delineating how the Afrofuturist data subject emancipates through subjectification.

I had toyed with the idea of titling this review “Pynk Lemonade,” but that sounds terribly derivative and unfair to the unique and forward-thinking artist that Janelle Monae represents. After all, before pop star Beyoncé brought HBCU culture and aesthetics into the mainstream when she became the first Black woman to headline the Coachella music festival last month, Monae had already engaged these representations for her music video for the 2013 track “Electric Lady.” Before Beyoncé unleashed her “feminist manifesto,” her self-titled visual album linking politics with sex-positivity, Monae already told us: “Even when you edit me, the booty don’t lie.” And, while we will be forever grateful that Beyoncé used her larger platform and heightened visibility to raise awareness of Black Lives Matter with her “Formation” video and visual album Lemonade, Monae was already on the ground doing that protest-music work with her 2015 song “Hell You Talmbout,” a stripped-down call-and-response around the chant “Say Her Name/Say His Name” with a roll call of the numerous victims of police brutality. This is not to reduce these two Black women pop artists into a contest, as if we must choose one over the other. I already have ambitious plans to teach Beyoncé’s Lemonade in dialogue with Monae’s recent “emotion picture” Dirty Computer that premiered ahead of its album of the same name. Indeed, Monae extends the Black feminist vision of Lemonade in Dirty Computer with her own offering of queer desire, identity and what José Esteban Muñoz has called “queer world-making.” While Beyoncé’s visual album establishes a rootedness in history, ancestry and Southern Culture, Monae’s emotion picture is futuristic, eclectic in its cultural influences and far more nomadic. Monae’s character Jane 57821, already introduced to us from her classic 2010 sci-fi concept album The Arch Android, is constantly on the run, carefree and joyous in living her life, before she is finally captured by a high-tech surveillance state hell bent on erasing her memories. Both works of art center the “Black girl magic” power of community, with each artist surrounded by her posse of Black girlfriends, but Monae extends this collective to a wider multiracial queer community. They are nonetheless both committed to “smashing the patriarchy”—from Lemonade’s personal to Dirty’s political. Monae is not a chart-topper, and has often existed comfortably (or not) in the margins—or, as her infectious single “I Like That” expresses, being “left of center, the minor note you hear in major songs.” Perhaps this is why there isn’t the same feverish output of think-pieces that had followed the release of Lemonade two years ago. I had co-authored with Jessica Marie Johnson a Lemonade Resource list that assembled over 70 reviews, teaching aids, conversations, podcasts and even a #LemonadeSyllabus—so the difference in audience response is telling. Will we get a Dirty Computer syllabus? The jury is still out, as Monae, being off-center, is sometimes viewed as too quirky, too weird, too queer. With this latest artistic offering, Monae has eschewed being coy about her sexuality. She came out as “pansexual” just days before releasing her album, thus sparking an increase in searches for definitions of the word; she also unhesitatingly identified as a “queer young Black woman of America” when interviewed on CBS Sunday Morning. The same segment featured a clip of her extended version of her single “Pynk,” in which she declares in spoken word to her beloved—played by rumored girlfriend and actress Tessa Thompson—”I don’t want to hide my love.” The video, released ahead of the album, already invited commentary around its depiction of vulva-pants in an ode to the pleasures and desires of women-loving women, even as Monae reiterated that she was not engaging in gender essentialism and acknowledged that not all women have vaginas. Placed in the context of her emotion picture, the video is one of several “memories” that a totalitarian government tries to “erase” in attempts at “cleansing.” As Monae explains in the voice-over exposition in Dirty, humans in this futuristic environment are referred to as “computers,” and those who are too different—due to their race, sexual orientation and even political views—are referred to as “dirty computers” who must be “cleaned.” It’s a powerful metaphor for gay conversion therapy, or even in the ways that a racist state works to “whitewash” history. Monae presents a dystopian narrative, but then flips the script at the end, suggesting that our memories serve as acts of resistance. Tellingly, Dirty Computer follows two critically acclaimed films featuring Monae which explore similar themes. Academy Award for Best Picture winner Moonlight is a Black queer coming-of-age story, while in Hidden Figures, Monae portrays real-life “computer” Mary Jackson, who became the first African American woman engineer at NASA. While Monae has suggested the concept for Dirty Computer existed long before her first LP The Arch Android, we recognize how she blurs the lines between human labor and technology and the machine-like objectification of the Black female body—visually dramatized in the video “Take a Byte,” in which Monae’s character is surveilled both for the state and the medical industrial complex and shown hanging upside down, as if she were enslaved all over again. Long fascinated with science fiction—she recently appeared in Amazon’s Electric Dreams as an android—Monae engages an Afrofuturism that disrupts the linear narrative of time. Both in the emotion picture and on the album, 1980s pop confection merges with a 21st-century bass line. The influences of her late mentor Prince are detectable—from the “Kiss” guitar riffs in her pansexual-themed video “Make Me Feel” to the double doors opening her video for “Django Jane,” much like Prince’s music video for “When Doves Cry.” Even her bathtub in “I Like That” is a homage to that same video—except pink flamingos replace doves, and a peacock represents her self-love and self-actualization. There are other ’80s influences in Dirty—hints of David Bowie, Madonna, even Cyndi Lauper’s “Girls Just Wanna Have Fun,” leather punk and the Black Nationhood caps from hip-hop groups like Public Enemy and Salt-n-Pepa. Because of her close resemblance to Whitney Houston in her video for “Screwed,” which features a colorful artistic backdrop much like Houston’s music video for “How Will I Know,” and given the rumored bisexuality of Whitney Houston, seeing Monae invoke a queer version of the late pop star suggests that her project provides both futuristic and historic healing. Her songs “Crazy, Classic, Life,” “Take a Byte” and “Screwed” invoke the 1980s era in ways that allude to the Black Mirror episode of “San Junipero,” about an interracial same-sex romance—one that Monae has joyously tweeted as a major influence—but she also spits rap verses throughout in a constant upgrading and updating of the deliberately “dated” sound. While both Beyoncé and rapper Cardi B have engaged the more masculine sounds of trap music, Monae instead engages the more “bubblegum” femininity of these pop sounds. The effect is an airiness and sweetness, even while the more sultry sound of “Don’t Judge Me” and the contemplative “So Afraid” grounds the project in sobriety. In the emotion picture, “Don’t Judge Me” echoes in a dreamy beach scene where Monae frolics with both her female and male lover in a polyamorous triad defying heteronormativity and respectability politics. As she declares in “Screwed”—”I’m tired of hoteps telling me how to feel.” It’s a “memory” that feels both timeless and fleeting. However, the most obvious homage to the 1980s is her sci-fi narrative for the emotion picture. While riffing on Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, a heart-breaking love story about the consequences of erasing memories, the narrative evokes Bladerunner in reverse, in which replicants are implanted with “memories” to be more human. Even the score echoes the Vangelis theme. Touches of the future intersperse with images of the past, such as floating vintage cars and police-like drones that still target those who “drive while Black.” In the midst of this high-tech surveillance state, Monae and her friends are determined to live and love freely—and yet, when their party is interrupted by masked police with red lasers, one cannot help but also recall The Terminator, another 1980s sci-fi thriller, replete with its infamous Tech Noir club scene disrupted by violence. Of course, when one considers that Monae was born in 1985, it’s easy to imagine her as a time-traveler, much like the fictional John Connor sending his father Kyle Reese back to 1984 to impregnate his mother. If the presentation of her memories is a throwback to the earlier art form of the music video in the era of its inception, then we may be able to also recognizehow, in her extended “emotion picture,” Monae is indeed a “Black girl from the future.” Mostly, Monae asserts her status as both outsider and citizen in Dirty Computer. She embodies what Audre Lorde, Black lesbian feminist author of Sister Outsider, once stated: “If I didn’t define myself for myself, I would be crunched into other people’s fantasies for me and eaten alive.” Monae insists on self-definition and exists in the margins but asserts her American-ness—from her line “I’m not America’s nightmare, I’m the American dream,” in “Crazy, Classic, Life,” to her finale song, “Americans,” where she demands her citizenship in a nation that grants rights and equality across race, class, gender, sexuality and immigration status. In this regard, she suggests, as Melissa Harris-Perry argues in Sister Citizen, that “Black women’s experiences act as a litmus test for the nation.” (Or, to quote the Combahee River Collective’s Black Feminist Statement: “If Black women were free, it would mean that everyone else would have to be free since our freedom would necessitate the destruction of all the systems of oppression.”) It is no wonder that Monae, with both her lovers in tow, leads the revolution in the end. Her freedom precipitates the freedom of everyone else. It’s a triumphant message for an eclectic album and emotion picture determined to champion desire, love, joy, freedom—and, of course, liberation.

According to scholar Patrick Manning, black culture “renews itself repeatedly through new technology, new audiences, improvisation, and continued borrowing” (Manning 2010, 34). Other scholars have explored the cultural and historical underpinnings of black vernacular and creative expression, especially as it relates to technology. Beth Coleman argues that technology’s embedded function of self-extension may be exploited to liberate race from an inherited position of abjection toward a greater expression of agency (Coleman 2009). According to Coleman this function entails “the ability to move freely as a being—and it is not restricted to individuals but also in- cludes systems: it concerns how beings are subjected in systems of power, ideology, and other networks (Coleman 2009, 70). She frames the work of twentieth century Italian Futurists who attempted to destroy Western icons and replace them with altered systems through sound, images, or text. In this reconceptualization of technology, race becomes “denatured” from its historical roots and becomes a tool for creative expression. James Snead differentiated European artistic practices such as Italian Futurism from black cultural expression that he organized around two key principles, repetition and the “cut”: In black culture, the thing (the ritual, the dance, the beat) is “there for you to pick it up when you come back to get it.” If there is a goal in such a culture, it is always deferred; it continually “cuts” back to the start, in the musical mean- ing of “cut” as an abrupt, seemingly unmotivated break (an accidental da capo) with a series already in progress and a willed return to a prior series. (Snead 1984, 67) Snead’s work supports evolving modes of black techno-vernacular produc- tion—signs of change that are evident and cyclical in the art of the African Diaspora. Repetition, through techniques such as collage, sampling, and re- mixing, employ the “cut” as a tool to reuse portions of one or more sources as instruments and images in new work. Artists explore how what is cut away (as a subject) from dominant culture finds its way back into the picture through layering and repetition—the trans- formation through language and signification—and cutting that enable artists of the African Diaspora to piece together fragments from their past of histori- cal emigration (forced relocation), violence, and marginalization. The “cut” of blackness and the silhouette that remain are mobile, able to be collaged or layered with other things or repeated. For example, Kenyan-born artist Wan- gechi Mutu pieces together magazine imagery with painted surfaces and found materials to explore the split nature of cultural identity referencing colonial history, fashion, and contemporary African politics. She uses the term “augment” to describe her process of altering, disrupting, and layering images. 2

Improvisation, call and response, hacking, and tinkering elicit the active engagement and participation of the at-large community (audience). Call and response is a form of spontaneous verbal and non-verbal interaction between speaker and listeners in which all statements (calls) are punctuated by expres- sions (responses) from the audience. Riffs, vamps, thematic variations, and call and response are endemic to jazz, blues music, and the visual arts. In a Johns Hopkins University study, researchers who examined the neuroscience of jazz and the power of improvisation found that the brains of jazz musi- cians participating in spontaneous improvisation with other musicians showed robust activation in the same areas of the brain traditionally associat- ed with spoken language and syntax (Limb and Braun 2008). We hear these syntactic and semantic exchanges in the music of John Coltrane and Sun Ra (Rudolph 2010). In sum, combined with repetition and cutting, improvisation in music, art, and performance contributes to techno-cultural shifts that lead to the technoscape of Afrofuturism.

Black women’s resistance efforts are a treasure trove of contemporary historical inquiry. The interdisciplinary methods that must be used to shed light on their acts can only begin a discussion, as we follow the (non)disciplin(ed/ary) women themselves who devised fantastic responses to what Stuart Hall has named the “fatal coupling of power and difference” (17), more commonly referred to as racism. Ruth Wilson Gilmore documents the responses of women environmental activists to this coupling, arguing that they “join forces not only as petitioners to the state in the name of injuries sustained but also—and more provocatively—as petitioners to communities of similar people in the name of reconstructing space so that concepts of ‘safety’ and ‘health’ cannot be realized by razor-wire fences and magic bullet cures” (15). The themes of free speech, access to community or public space, and safety from physical and psychic assault, especially white supremacist violence, scaffolds much of the efforts of black women to construct alternative worldviews during the twentieth century. The Cold War, which roughly spanned the period between the frayed ends of World War II in 1945 and the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, saw the rise of a second Red Scare under McCarthyism (1947–1957) as well as an intense moment of (inter)national suppression of dissent in tandem with the consolidation of an organized black political public through a broad civil rights movement. Post-Berlin Wall, this moment has been imagined by black artists as a fruitful signifying site through which to investigate and rebuke the technologies of silencing that were developed and expanded by formal political and cultural actors during the long Cold War period.1 The lived experiences of and narratives by the African-descended are often replayed and reimagined in and through performance, and black women in particular have a tradition of representing and resisting the conditions of their lives through creative uses of the black body; black women’s performance traditions have centralized the body as evidence and epistemology. Daphne Brooks argues that black women “might put their own figures to work for their own aesthetic and political uses and ‘imagine their own bodies’,” thereby “invent[ing] ways to maintain the integrity of black female bodies as sites of intellectual knowledge, philosophical vision, and aesthetic worth” (8).2 Wondaland/Bad Boy recording artist Janelle Monae´ offers a twenty-first century version of this practice as she uses her body to critique and to resituate history, including the identities produced from and within it. The video for her single, “Cold War,” generates a unique alchemy of (re)presentation, positionality, and performance, and in so doing, puts under stress the dichotomies of black/white, inside/outside, past/present. In this way, Monae adds a postmodern edge to the modern performance ´ traditions described by Jayna Brown, in which black women performers and artists of the early twentieth century “combined intense intimacy and unbrookable distance [with] ... the ability to record what one saw or felt from above, below, inside or outside” (228). Self-described as a visual artist, Monae’s most prominent canvas ´ is her body. She has garnered significant attention for her black and white wardrobe, which often takes the form of a tuxedo, presenting an androgynous aesthetic even while the high contrast color-blocking represents her belief that “there’s no gray area with me” (Nylon Magazine TV).3 The stark simplicity of Monae’s wardrobe serves as a foil for a complicated gender ´ performance, yet it clearly reflects the demarcations of her own sociopolitical investments. This is her “uniform,” as she describes it, one that she proudly wears in solidarity with the working classes she was born into in Kansas City, Kansas, and alongside whom she now labors from her base in Atlanta, Georgia. This uniform refuses periodization as it incorporates the high collars and puffed shoulders of Victorian women’s wear with the saddle shoes and mod, slim-cut slacks of the 1950s, thereby demonstrating Monae’s Afro- ´ materialist ability to blur the aesthetic conventions of history and dismiss the transhistorical expectations of the female body by commenting on multiple past moments through one ensemble. Although she eschews color in her performance wardrobe, Monae´ describes her music as colorful, making an explicit connection between sight and sound within her work. She constructs what she calls an “emotion picture for the mind,” and attempts to develop a more comprehensive experience for the viewer/listener, one that engages on multiple sensory levels and that connects the mind to the body (NPR). Her explicit and rapt attention to the mind of her audience is one of her grand interventions within the pop music realm; this focus compels her to contend with historical forces within her layered productions, in the process allowing those who watch that battle to struggle alongside her, inducing a sense of identification that is based in social movement techniques as well as in the “freedom dreams” discussed by historian Robin Kelley—those maneuvers within the black radical tradition that recover historical methods to generate and mobilize futures of alternative possibilities.4 Surrealism is one such maneuver Monae´ employs in her aesthetic choices and in her insistence on the mind as a site of struggle and elevation. Through this process, which fuses social and cultural movements, Monae enters into the genealogy of what black feminist ´ geographer Katherine McKittrick delineates as “the place of black women in relation to various scales: in their minds, in their bodies, in their homes, in urban/rural centers [sic], and in the nation” (2000a: 126) Monae’s invention and use of scale is highlighted in the second ´ video release from her album The ArchAndroid, entitled “Cold War,” which she describes as “one of my most intimate releases to date” (Neon Limelight). At stake within this song—as a sound and sight production—is the reconfiguration and substantiation of the emotional and bodily planes of existence for marginalized and alienated groups. Monae’s employment of ´ the Cold War as both metaphor and subject disrupts the time, geography, and ideology that undergirds it as a hermetically sealed period defined by the contest among state actors over capitalism versus communism. This history is further disrupted by examinations of the contemporaneous struggles waged by the African-descended over the meaning, formation, and practice of the Cold War; the “Double V” campaign of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People and the high profile performances by artist-activist Paul Robeson after his 1950 passport revocation for suspicion of communist activity continue to demonstrate the exclusions within the Cold War narrative and the ways in which the national fears that characterized it make peripheral or dismiss other contests waged on a nonnational scale.5 These omissions occlude the varying levels of national (dis)identification that made the protracted engagement of the Cold War what it was: a multiply situated contest of wills and political maneuvering that was not brought to one final conclusion, but that led to numerous projects and ends, including foreclosures of international diplomacy, the manufacture of the “Third World” through the consolidation of world economic and cultural divisions, and the increased local surveillance and incarceration of activists on the Left. Monae’s use of the Cold War as a framework for ´ contemporary conditions of existence acknowledges the ways in which state powers continue to employ scale to enact competing world visions; in the process, she highlights the tenuous relationship between national discourses of freedom and their everyday practice. Within “Cold War,” Monae uses her own hypervisibility to compli- ´ cate that period and its aims by situating it as an ongoing phenomenon. This repositioning of history is not a dismissal, however. Monae is respectful of ´ and inspired by the past, and she demonstrates this in her borrowing from James Brown’s footwork, in her screening of civil rights iconography during her live shows, and in her use of Jimi Hendrix’s “Purple Haze” to introduce her entrance onto the stage. However, she articulates a distinct distance from this past by invoking it and then deftly outmaneuvering it by constantly challenging the narratives that fossilize that past. In “Cold War,” Monae is ´ able to perform time travel through the unique aesthetics and positioning of her body; for the first time in her “emotion picture” archive she completely abandons her retro uniform, stripping her body of the historical fixity that she also debunks within her lyrics. Her “Cold War” evocations are offered primarily in present-tense statements and questions that reshape historical inquiry by demanding a collective engagement with the Cold War as a frame for the quotidian brutalities of difference. Her refrain, which asks, “It’s a cold war, do you know what you’re fighting for?” disrupts the historical narrative of the Cold War by announcing its multiplication across time and space (“a cold war”). She additionally dismisses the sectarianism of the Cold War (Do you know who you’re fighting for?) and replaces it with a call to a cause (“[D]o you know what you’re fighting for?”). The perpetual battle of belonging and accountability that she references here remaps the Cold War terrain and its victims through the insertion of her body as palimpsest. The scene for her “Cold War” is a black box, which represents both a creative play on the fallout shelters that pervaded civil defense culture during the Cold War, and an abstracted “‘nowhere’ setting.” Like the dance music videos of the 1990s, this black box offers a “lack of perspective [that] is playfully futuristic,” yet, unlike these videos, Monae’s picture is not ´ “outside of and beyond mundane social relations”—in fact, she uses this unarticulated space to expose the myth of the mundane through evocations of her reality (Bradby). She begins with the visual; in this black box, the only color contrast is Monae’s skin, offering an incisive critique of binaries ´ and uncritical identity consolidation through the introduction of not one, but multiple, blacknesses. Here she uses our gaze to establish both the relation and the difference between her environment and her body. We look at Monae head on and seem to catch her off guard as she speaks with another ´ off-camera entity when we arrive at her scene. She looks back and forth and begins to remove her robe as the screen goes pitch black, announcing the reason that we are all here: “Janelle Monae, ‘Cold War,’ Take 1.” She returns ´ from the title screen bare and unaccessorized, setting the tone for a video that uses both visual and musical cues to heighten the crises that it draws upon.

Asare: Could you share more about afro-futurism? Crentsil: Afrofuturism uses science fiction to reimagine the history of those in the African diaspora and inspire a hopeful vision of an equitable future. It encompasses music, literature, cinema, and fashion. It can be used to explore questions about the earth, societies, and what exists beyond our planet. Examples include the film Black Panther, Janelle Monáe and Missy Elliot's entire musical anthology, and Octavia Butler's literary works. In the music video for Queen by Janelle Monáe, there is a place called ‘the great divide in Metropolis’, which erases past history and culture. Monáe plays a time-traveling rebel that provides faith and resistance for all oppressed peoples…in an effort to create a brighter future. Her tool of resistance is music and dance. Monáe mirrors the historical barriers that BIPOC individuals have faced and how they overcame.  Asare: How is afro-futurism used to help Black people cope with racism and trauma? Crentsil: Afrofuturism can help people cope with racism and trauma by giving them positive representation and a sense of hope and agency, which is not granted in the standard, white-washed K-12 curriculum. Traditional science fiction novels sometimes equate heroism to xenophobia and colonization or have a tendency to practice color-blindness…Afrofuturist works often champion differences in order to overcome issues that harm everyone. This genre also has given us room to express the alienation that [Black] people have endured as a result of colonialism, slavery, segregation, and racism. It allows us to reimagine the past and archetype possibilities of an equitable future. We can reinterpret what Blackness could have been, and what it could look like in the future, where it isn't a hindrance or trait to be diminished or extinguished…it unlocks discussions surrounding the political implications that science and technology have on us at every level. Even the overreliance on technology, and choosing the technological options over ancestral methods are precisely the kinds of decisions that are perpetuating inequality and pushing us away from democracy. For example, the introduction of AI in some cases can make hiring more efficient for companies, however, we shouldn't neglect that biases are essentially being automated. Specifically, algorithmic hiring practices disproportionately affect candidates with ethnic-sounding names, who didn't go to specific schools, or who don't have the ‘right’ personality since these systems are trained on historical data…the implications for neglecting the role AI will play are huge, to say the least. Asare: How do you think Afrofuturism can be infused into our everyday lives? Crentsil: Not all Afrofuturists were called Afrofuturists…they simply embodied what the movement represented, which was working towards a more equitable future, in the medium that suited them…most Black activists and scholars are inherently Afrofuturists and taking in their work is essential to understanding the perspectives that exist and using them in our personal and professional lives. Second, see everything as a tool. Afrofuturists define technology broadly—it is essentially anything that augments [a person’s] life. So, just as social constructs are tools of oppression, so too are the means we use to navigate around them. Third, act. Everyone is a creator within their own field and is endowed with a perspective and skill set that can contribute to change, whether short or long-term. If that means writing a blog post, designing an infographic, starting a room on Clubhouse, creating a course or workshop of your own, or recording a TikTok, express yourself in a medium that suits you and get involved. Ultimately, the greatest thing you can do is educate on this knowledge, since it's empowering and deliberately obscured for that reason. Lastly, take an intersectional and inclusive approach to not only evaluating problems but also when proposing solutions. Collaborate with others from different fields in the short term, but…with a long-term perspective of how this work will inform your field's trajectory, and continue to capitalize on opportunities for partnership. From that, you'll form a shared language and a larger pool of advocates that can advance the work into new places. 

R&B singer Janelle Monáe released a blistering 6 1/2-minute protest song on Friday called "Hell You Talmbout." The song's premise is simple, and that simplicity is the source of its power. The lyrics are the chanted names of black Americans killed by police and vigilantes, followed by the phrase "say his name" or "say her name." The chorus is an anthemic, gospel-leaning repetition of the song's title. Monáe is joined on the track by a drum line and the members of her Wondaland Arts Society collective: Jidenna, Roman GianArthur, Deep Cotton, St. Beauty and George 2.0. All of the vocals are raw, several to the point of breaking. None of the names are sung. "Hell You Talmbout" would be a striking piece of music even if it's your first exposure to Monáe, but is made more so when placed next to her prior releases. She's built a career around grandiose, psychedelic songs that tap into Afrofuturist philosophy and posit her at the center of a sci-fi-inspired musical universe of her own making, one not tethered to terrestrial concerns. Her aesthetic has been deliberate and impeccable, from her physical appearance down to the meticulous choreography of her shows. That cosmic Space Age aesthetic and considered delivery are completely absent in "Hell You Talmbout." It's a ground-level song in both concept and execution. "Say Her Name" is a tag line started on Twitter, stylized with a hashtag: #SayHerName. And there's nothing droidlike in how Monáe and her cohort perform the song. Voices crack and mics pop. Any creative distance between performers and audience has been eliminated, and what remains is an unadorned, visceral, undeniably earthbound piece of protest music.

A disturbing trend that does not get enough attention is the continued practice of taking work, ideas, and creative genius from Black women without properly crediting or citing them as the source. This is not a new practice, but with the advent of the internet, these pernicious acts are even easier to spot. Any aspiring anti-racist must understand the insidious ways that this pattern is able to continue and recognize how to intervene when it does occur. This article will unpack the appropriation in more detail, highlight some lesser-known instances, examine more popular examples of this erasure, and explore what Black women can do to protect themselves.In the 19th and 20th century, Black women like , , and  played a  in the Women’s Suffrage Movement. Despite this fact, their contributions were largely ignored and overlooked, with Black women having to march separately from their white counterparts at suffrage parades. Black women have been behind some of the world’s most pivotal social justice movements (e.g. ), yet there is a  of leaving their contributions out. There are several examples that are important to note. Before Rosa Parks, 15-year-old Colvin refused to give up her bus seat. Although Colvin is now being  as “the first to really challenge the law,” her story is not often talked about or taught in history classes. In 1969, the Stonewall riots took place and sparked the LGBTQ liberation movement. At the helm of the riots was , a Black transgender activist who is credited for starting the Stonewall riots but it wasn’t until after Johnson’s passing that her story and contributions became more widely known. In 2017, actress  encouraged those who had experienced sexual abuse to write ‘me too’ on Twitter. Milano’s tweet caused an influx of stories from users about their experiences. Milano tweeted the #metoo hashtag without citing , the Black woman who created the Me Too campaign. On social media, many users felt that Burke was being erased from her own movement. Black women are no strangers to the co-opting of their creative genius. A few recent examples: In 2016, Melania Trump made  after many noticed eerie similarities between her speech and one given previously by former first lady Michelle Obama. Earlier this year, 60 Minutes ran a story about racial bias in facial recognition and  to include mentions of the three Black women, , , and , who spearheaded the most seminal research in the field. In July of 2021, the Confederate statue of Robert E. Lee was removed from Charlottesville, Virginia. 20-year-old student activist  started the petition that led to the  when she was just 15 years old. In an  written for Teen Vogue, Bryant shared, “I have read book after book and watched countless documentaries about the political implications of the fall of these monuments. Too many of them never mention the names of the Black women who were essential in making it all happen. It is morally bankrupt and intellectually dishonest to tell a story that leaves Black women like myself out of the narrative.” Bryant’s fears highlight a disturbing trend that has manifested in different ways. Social media is a newer arena where Black women are seeing their work and words appropriated. Critical race scholar Dr. Angel Jones recently  about this on her Instagram page. In an , Dr. Jones shared that an Instagram page had been reposting her work without properly crediting or tagging her as the source. Social media isn’t the only place where Black women are seeing  being passed off as someone else’s. In 2017, designers  and  accused Khloe Kardashian and Kylie Jenner of  designs from their fashion lines. Images from both designers revealed close similarities between their designs and the designs from Kardashian and Jenner’s lines.With the insurmountable evidence revealing how Black women throughout history to present day are not properly credited, cited or referenced for the movements, ideas, creativity that they’ve birthed, it’s imperative to call this behavior out whenever it occurs. Whether it’s on social media or in real life, the first step is repairing the harm. You can start by acknowledging what you’ve done, regardless of whether it was intentional or not. It’s important to remember this  from illustrator Danielle Coke who referenced white folks who were stealing justice-related artwork from people of color: “you are reinforcing the same system that we are trying to dismantle. You are not amplifying us, you are centering yourself.” Artist  provides an excellent lesson for how to properly credit creators you are reposting on Instagram in an Instagram story that is now highlighted on  under ‘crediting.’ Dandy wrote that “ignorance does not absolve you from consequences,” and she is absolutely right. Those concerned about safeguarding their intellectual property can look into getting their work copyrighted or trademarked. Contrary to popular belief, imitation is not flattery at all. Those who have engaged in misappropriation must ask themselves this: how does the Black woman I have stolen from want this harm to be repaired?

In December 2021 I wrote a think piece regarding  as it pertains to Black and Brown people. Never in my wildest dreams did I imagine the article would go viral, but less than a month after posting it over 30K people had visited my website and read it. When one has a “viral moment” we all believe their lives change for the better. Well, my life didn’t necessarily change, but the lives of others were significantly impacted from my viral moment. Since December, I’ve been invited to participate in one panel discussion where I was told five seconds before going live not to say anything negative about Brene Brown and I was barely allowed to speak. I realized the organizers had used my name and image to draw attendees to the virtual discussion and bring awareness to their work, which had absolutely nothing to do with me or my article. Next, I was invited to be a guest on two podcasts. One was a live audience and it was a great experience, but afterwards I found myself being served legal papers by my now former employer. The second podcast has yet to air. I also sold fifty copies offrom my website. That’s it.  So how did everyone else benefit? Well for starters, I learned from several individuals who shared my article with their audiences on social media that they were invited to be guests on several podcasts, offered paid speaking engagements and served on panel discussions. I found this interesting because these individuals were either Black men or white women who had NOTHING – not a damn thing to do with the article I wrote except sharing it on social media. Those who invited them to participate in these events had gone to MYwebsite to read My article, which clearly has a way to connect with Me for media appearances and speaking engagements. Interesting. I know, right? One individual redirected the organization requesting his presence back to me and they told him “No, we want you,” of which he declined because he wasn’t versed in the subject matter. Another individual used my article as the basis of a training program for mental health clinicians at a university, yet no one asked my permission or for my input. Instead, I was tagged on LinkedIn as they announced the program to the public. So all of these individuals gained significant exposure and some had monetary gains too, simply by sharing my article, tagging me in their social media posts and then crossing their fingers, hoping and praying I would engage, comment and like their sharing of my work. Yet I basically walked away with nothing compared to what they gained in return. I also began to realize that when I commented on the LinkedIn posts of Black men and White women they were going viral. The posts would have nothing to do with Brene Brown, but instead diverse topics that focused on sexism, ageism or discrimination in the workplace. One Black male saw how my presence on his post impacted his audience engagement on LinkedIn with over 20K views and over 5K people liking and commenting. He took it upon himself to reach out to me via DM and ask if I would use MY platform and have him as a guest on MY LinkedIn Live and how much of a great team WE would make. That’s when I had to pump the brakes; “hold the hell up!” Although I wrote this great think piece, no one really wanted to hear from a Black woman who actually has an opinion and (gasp) thinks. I realized that society is more comfortable having individuals who are not familiar with my work in the area of diversity, research, academics and mental health, and who also don’t look like me to speak for me, instead of allowing me to publicly speak for myself. And in the end, society has made a conscious decision to reward these individuals instead of me. Let’s keep it real, no one wants to hear how difficult it is for Black and Brown women to lean in and be vulnerable in the workforce when a white woman says all is well with the world when you know yourself (or whatever Brene Brown is telling people these days). Yes, it’s easier to get people who are uneducated on the topic of courage and vulnerability to speak up and serve as the ‘experts’ instead of the actual experts, because this misinformation and poor representation continues to feed into the  narrative Carter G. Woodson spoke about. No one wants to hear from someone who actually has the credentials and the experience to call out the discrepancies in Brown’s research in certain areas because that would mean engaging in behaviors that would actually help Black and Brown people. Now I said all of that to say this, I don’t hate Brene Brown nor do I dislike her as a professional, but this is the narrative many have tried to paint as they attempt to make me the problematic Black woman. I simply pointed out what I believe to be a flaw in her subject matter as it pertains to Black and Brown people, which it seems many agree with me because they are profiting from my critique. So how have I pivoted to help make this viral moment benefit me? I am in the process of having the Brene Brown article copyrighted by the Library of Congress. It’s my intellectual property and at the end of the day, I need to protect it by any means necessary, in addition to maintaining control of how it is used and where it is used as much as I possibly can. In closing, this viral moment has reminded me that people will read the work of a woman of color, talk about it and her behind closed doors, and then borrow it like a bowl of sugar with no intentions of giving her anything back in return. Like others who have gone before me, I’ve now been labeled a problematic Black woman, while white women use my work and are uplifted and glorified. And just like was passed over to shine the spotlight on someone like Brene Brown, the intellect of Black and Brown women will continue to be used by whites, while we as the experts are talked about negatively, downplayed and pushed aside. Black and Brown women will never receive the support we deserve nor reap significant monetary gains for our labor or intellectual property, because no matter how educated we are, how many books we’ve written or how well spoken we maybe, folks are still under the racists spell that white is right and if we have to hear from someone Black, my God- let it publicly be the voice of a Black man instead of that of an educated Black woman.