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The history of the production of cultural property in the United States follows the same pattern as the history of the racial divide that inaugurated the founding of the Republic. The original U.S. Constitution excluded both black women and men from the blessings of liberty. Meanwhile, that same Constitution granted rights to authors and inventors in what is known as the Patent/Copyright Clause of Article I, Section 8.1 This clause laid the foundation for intellectual property (“IP”) rights that have become an economic juggernaut not only in the United States, but globally.2 IP rights are inextricably tied to cultural and scientific production, which influences all aspects of society. Thus, before the passage of the major civil rights amendments and acts, the provisions of Article I, Section 8 were unavailable to protect the cultural rights of early black Americans. Congress enacted laws mandating racial equality and effectively protecting the intellectual property rights of blacks in the arts and sciences only within the past few decades.3 This Article briefly explores how women artists, particularly black women, have been impacted by the IP system, and compares how both blacks and women have a shared commonality of treatment with indigenous peoples and their creative works. The treatment of blacks, women, and indigenous peoples in the IP system reflects the unfortunate narrative of exploitation, devaluation, and promotion of derogatory stereotypes that helped fuel oppression in the United States, and in the case of indigenous peoples, both here and abroad. The treatment of women blues artists in the IP system illustrates the racial and gendered nature of IP rights, and that IP has been central to racial subordination from both an economic and cultural standpoint. However, examining inequality in the IP context is not merely a backwards-looking narrative. Racial and gender dynamics offer unique insights that can guide reforms to the IP system with a view toward benefiting, in Derrick Bell’s words, the least-advantaged “faces at the bottom” of our society.4 Traditionally, IP scholarship and jurisprudence has not focused on race and gender inequality. However, these issues are receiving renewed attention in feminist scholarship and in critiques of existing power structures by those concerned with the treatment of people of color, women, and indigenous peoples in the international arena. Analytical inquiries that explore the rights of minorities, women, and indigenous peoples enhance the debate about IP reforms. Further, a focus on the least advantaged segments of society, such as blues women, shifts the debate to focus on the empowerment of artists who create, and not on empowerment of large conglomerates that control IP in the United States and abroad. Part I of this Article, briefly discusses the tenets of critical race theory to show that it can be useful in explaining how IP law has disadvantaged African-American artists and fostered their subordination. Part II explores how feminist critiques of IP benefit from examining the treatment of black women, using blues women of the 1920s as a focal point. Part III examines how the treatment of indigenous peoples parallels IP deprivations of blacks and women.

Leftist notions of reform, progress, tolerance, and social justice always come up against the harsh reality that any progressive development can only mean a more sophisticated system of misery and exploitation; that tolerance means nothing; that justice is an impossibility. Activists, progressive and revolutionary alike, will always respond to our critique of the social order with a demand that we articulate some sort of alternative. Let us say once and for all that we have none to offer. Faced with the system’s seamless integration of all positive projects into itself, we can’t afford to affirm or posit any more alternatives for it to consume. Rather we must realize that our task is infinite, not because we have so much to build but because we have an entire world to destroy. Our daily life is so saturated and structured by capital that it is impossible to imagine a life worth living, except one of revolt. We understand destruction to be necessary, and we desire it in abundance. We have nothing to gain through shame or lack of confidence in these desires. There cannot be freedom in the shadow of prisons, there cannot be human community in the context of commodities, there cannot be self-determination under the reign of a state. This world—the police and armies that defend it, the institutions that constitute it, the architecture that gives it shape, the subjectivities that populate it, the apparatuses that administer its function, the schools that inscribe its ideology, the activism that franticly responds to its crises, the arteries of its circulation and flows, the commodities that define life within it, the communication networks that proliferate it, the information technology that surveils and records it—must be annihilated in every instance, all at once. To shy away from this task, to assure our enemies of our good intentions, is the most crass dishonesty. Anarchy, as with queerness, is most powerful in its negative form. Positive conceptions of these, when they are not simply a quiet acquiescence in the face of a sophisticated and evolving totality of domination, are hopelessly trapped in combat with the details of this totality on its own terms. In No Future, Edelman appropriates and privileges a particular psychoanalytic concept: the death drive. In elaborating the relationship of “queer theory and the death drive” (the subtitle of No Future), he deploys the concept in order to name a force that isn’t specifically tied to queer identity. He argues that the death drive is a constant eruption of disorder from within the symbolic order itself. It is an unnameable and inarticulable tendency for any society to produce the contradictions and forces which can tear that society apart. To avoid getting trapped in Lacanian ideology, we should quickly depart from a purely psychoanalytic framework for understanding this drive. Marxism, to imagine it another way, assures us that a fundamental crisis within the capitalist mode of production guarantees that it will produce its own negation from within itself. Messianic traditions, likewise, hold fast to a faith that the messiah must emerge in the course of daily life to overthrow the horror of history. The most romantic elaborations of anarchism describe the inevitability that individuals will revolt against the banality and alienation of modern life. Cybernetic government operates on the understanding that the illusions of social peace contain a complex and unpredictable series of risks, catastrophes, contagions, events and upheavals to be managed. Each of these contains a kernel of truth, if perhaps in spite of their ideologies. The death drive names that permanent and irreducible element which has and will always produce revolt. Species being, queerness, chaos, willful revolt, the commune, rupture, the Idea, the wild, oppositional defiance disorder—we can give innumerable names to what escapes our ability to describe it. Each of these attempts to term the erratic negation intrinsic to society. Each comes close to theorizing the universal tendency that any civilization will produce its own undoing. Explosions of urban rioting, the prevalence of methods of piracy and expropriation, the hatred of work, gender dysphoria, the inexplicable rise in violent attacks against police officers, self-immolation, non-reproductive sexual practices, irrational sabotage, nihilistic hacker culture, lawless encampments which exist simply for themselves—the death drive is evidenced in each moment that exceeds the social order and begins to rip at its fabric. The symbolic deployment of queerness by the social order is always an attempt to identify the negativity of the death drive, to lock this chaotic potential up in the confines of this or that subjectivity. Foucault’s work is foundational to queer theory in part because of his argument that power must create and then classify antagonistic subjectivities so as to then annihilate any subversive potential within a social body. Homosexuals, gangsters, criminals, immigrants, welfare mothers, transsexuals, women, youth, terrorists, the black bloc, communists, extremists: power is always constructing and defining these antagonistic subjects which must be managed. When the smoke clears after a riot, the state and media apparatuses universally begin to locate such events within the logic of identity, freezing the fluidity of revolt into a handful of subject positions to be imprisoned, or, more sinisterly, organized. Progressivism, with its drive toward inclusion and assimilation, stakes its hope on the social viability of these subjects, on their ability to participate in the daily reproduction of society. In doing so, the ideology of progress functions to trap subversive potential within a particular subject, and then to solicit that subject’s self-repudiation of the danger which they’ve been constructed to represent. This move for social peace fails to eliminate the drive, because despite a whole range of determinisms, there is no subject which can solely and perfectly contain the potential for revolt. The simultaneous attempt at justice must also fail, because the integration of each successive subject position into normative relations necessitates the construction of the next Other to be disciplined or destroyed.

Property is generally understood as a “self-evident category” (Blomley, 2004: 2)—intuitively speaking, property is that which belongs to someone or something. Conjured though legal and extralegal enactments, property is deeply embedded in social and cultural life and is taken for granted in liberal modes of thinking. It operates as an unquestioned universality. Indicating the right to own something, and the right to enjoy that thing, legally recognized forms of property include real and tangible property, such as privately and publicly owned land, as well as intellectual property. Yet this commonsense notion of property as a “thing” obscures the web of social and power relations that must be performed to produce property as legitimate. Modern property, then, is not only an essential component of capitalist political economy but is also a shifting social formation animated by contextual assemblages of race, class, ethnicity, gender, and citizenship. Theorized this way, property is far from fixed, but rather is an unfolding and continuously enacted set of relations that necessitates and in turn shapes the hierarchical valuation of bodies and places.

It should be stressed, as Marxists have long done, that property, as an exchange commodity, is secured not simply through state, market, and so-called legal interventions—the price, the title, the deed, the survey, the land registry, the police, and so on—but also informal, unwritten, and coercive forces of looting and fraud (Luxemburg, 1968). Property comes into this world “dripping from head to foot, from every pore, with blood and dirt” (Marx, 2010 [1887]). As is well documented, property’s material and symbolic significance is rooted in the ostensible shift from feudal to capitalist relations, even though feudalism etched by race, religion, and caste, for example, continues to prevail and structure capitalism (Robinson, 2000). Our focus on racial regimes of property draws from key scholarship theorizing property in its multiple meanings as both “an object and a relation” (Correia, 2013: 7), including the written and unwritten terms, contracts, and logics underpinning ownership (Bhandar, 2014, 2018; Blomley, 2001, 2003, 2004, 2016; Moreton-Roberts, 2015; Roy, 2003, 2017).

As a global youth movement, rap music is a powerful tool for social/political engagement. Since its emergence, rap and its discourses (counter-hegemonic or otherwise) reference a panoply of identity politics: race, gender, sexuality, class, religion, etc. Inevitably, the dissemination of rap music as a commodity necessitates that artists negotiate the ideological hegemony of the marketplace: neoliberal capitalism. Hip hop artists who create subversive art must negotiate between two extremities of inaudibility: either de-radicalize in order to successfully circulate within the markets (dialogue is silenced within the commodity), or radicalize and forgo market exposure (dialogue is silenced within the markets). In this way, the marketplace resists radical change. In order to assess the activist potential of rap, one of the strongest forms of musical protest, it is necessary to confront the sanitizing effects of capitalist ideologies on rap and its potential as musical protest.

In this paper, I will explore how hip hop artists negotiate their selves (bodies, identities) within the regime of values of neoliberal capitalism (Appadurai 1988). I take a specific counter-movement within a globalized, translocal hip hop movement, focusing on the queer rap activist community of South Africa and its relationship to American rap activism. South Africa is one of a few African nations which features both the protection and strong social acceptance of queer citizens (Pichon 2019), fostering a strong queer rap community. Queer hip hop, both in the USA and South Africa, reveals how issues of race, gender, sexuality, and class are concurrent and mutually interdependent. Through a consideration of queer rappers in South Africa, I consider how emotions and meanings elicited within specific rap performances negotiate both the ideological hegemonies of neoliberal capitalism and the revolutionary goals of the queer community. My goal is to understand how South African rap activists repurpose a globalized, capitalist hip hop movement to promote local dialogue. “One common theme throughout Africa has been the question of how to adapt hip-hop so that it represents local and national issues without incurring violence.“ (Morgan & Bennett 2011, 189) South African (queer) hip hop intersects heavily with American (queer) rap. For this reason, I begin by summarizing the historical contexts of both nations. I describe a brief history queer hip hop in the United States, and its relationship to globalized gangsta rap. Next, I trace the same history within South Africa, its relationship to the United States, and the recent wave of queer rap activism in South Africa. Through a musical case-study, I consider three songs from the South African rapper, Dope Saint Jude, and the relationship between activist rhetoric and commercial success. Finally, I reflect on strategies for artist activism at large.

To clear some muddied waters, let me begin by asking, What does language do that bodies don't? At the most basic level, there is a fundamental difference between a body moving to music and that of bodies en masse fighting for political reform. The former is a reflex that can be crafted and recrafted to perform within different sonically sculptured scenes; the latter functions as a phatic, bodily extension to emphasize political demands for radical reform. To put it simply, a body's kinesthetic response to music that can be shaped into dance is not equivalent to language (sign and phatic gesture) that is necessary not just for the survival of the human race, but for the communication needed to build solidarity between proletariat groups worldwide for revolution to take place. So while the impulse might be to read dancing bodies as counterhegemonic rhythmic cartographies that resist dominant paradigms and articulate a subaltern history, culture, and consciousness, music and/or the body's movement in response to music quite simply does not have the same ontological equivalence as language. This is not to say that a rhythmic cartography such as Nortec does not cross borders. As the brief discussion of techno above points out, Nortec participates in a rich history of techno's diasporic movements and hybridizing of musical genres. However, this connection to hybridizing at the level of music culture and genre is not to be confused with acts of linguistic communication-whether counterhegemonic or not. Musical rhythms and body movements might jell together and form communities, such as Latinos with salsa or meringue, Tijuanenses and Nortec, thrash metal and white suburban male teenagers, or ska and British underclassers. However, such dance/music cartographies are not text-acts equivalent to the linguistic structures that inform language. They could [END PAGE 153] never be, then, considered the same as the language required for communication in order to build coalition and incite revolution. Nortec, or any dance/music rhythmic cartography, cannot do what is required of hundreds of thousands of people gathered together on the streets to overturn the formation of nation-states by bourgeois elites with its drawing of boundaries, establishment of institutions, and laws (judicial and legislative branches) and government (executive branch) to enforce the material reality of the existence of these borders that delimit the territory within which the ruling class can rule. So what are we to make of scholars who conflate language and dance/ music compositions?8 What are we to make of the formulation of music/ dance as a counterhegemonic discourse where power is no longer locatable in bourgeois institutional centers used to command, to dominate, to oppress and to exploit in the hands of one social class and its institutions (the State)? Where the text is the world and therefore dance/music is a text invested with the weight of the power that exists in the real of reality. The tendency of such scholars is to posit these musicscapes as referential, and therefore as potential sites of ontological transformation. Such scholars can theorize music as having a magical power to reterritorialize the restrictive capitalist nation-state because they identify it as a discursively referential construct. However, if the nation-state is neither a textual construct nor an imagined community, but rather the very real drawing up of boundaries, establishment of institutions and laws by a bourgeoisie to enforce the very real and violent oppression of the working class, then we must reassess such declarations. We must reassess the reading given subaltern-identified "rhythmic cartography" or "audiotopia" as referential acts equivalent to speech-acts or text-acts invested with the equivalent power to destabilize a real global capitalism.9 This confusion of a cultural form with ontological fact embraces the type of relativism and constructivism that I stand against at the very outset of this book. Such criticism muddles musical aesthetics and dance compositions with ontological fact that does little to build an understanding of music and its function. As Keith Negus aptly reminds, "Music cannot simply reflect an individual's personality or life, a nation, a city or 'the age we live in'. That word, reflection, is one that slips very easily into both academic discourse and everyday conversations about popular music. But no music can be a mirror and capture events or activities in its melodies, rhythms and voices. The world, a society, an individual life, or even a particular incident, is far too complex for any cultural product [END PAGE 154] (book, film, or song) to be able to capture and spontaneously 'reflect'" (Popular Music in Theory 4).

Unfair compensation and sampling In 1979, Eddie Johns, then 28 years old, released an album, More Spell on You, with a punchy disco title track produced and recorded in Paris. Daft Punk will go on to sample it 30 years later. The duo chopped the track’s horn sections into short samples and rearranged those snippets into a new hook for the track One More Time. That song became Daft Punk’s biggest hit to date and its first million-selling single.[7] The song helped the duo transition from its status as a respected club music act into one of the most popular electronic groups in the world. Pitchfork called One More Time the fifth-best song of the 2000s,[8] and Rolling Stone called Discovery one of the 500 best albums of all time, in any genre.[9] Eddie Johns told his side of the story in a 2021 interview with the LA times. Johns was neither compensated for his work, nor listed as a songwriter in the credits of One More Time. A stroke left him unable to work, forcing him into homelessness for more than a decade. The article further states that: “The rights to More Spell on You — first released in France on the label Président — were acquired by a French label and publishing company, GM Musipro, that reissues vintage French rock and pop. It’s where Daft Punk pays its royalties for permission to sample More Spell on You. The firm’s founder, Georges Mary, confirmed via phone and email that his company does receive those payments from Daft Punk but did not specify an amount.”[10] This exemplifies how the music industry operates: two French white men fail to credit a Black singer who is heavily sampled on their hit track, and pay royalties to the French label which owns the rights of the record, most likely thanks to a predatory contract signed by Johns. This story echoes the experience of many Black artists which did not receive their dues, often under the excuse that reaching out to the songwriters was difficult or impossible. Consider for instance U.K artist A Guy Called Gerald's legal battle with Rham Records: he had to launch a crowdfunding campaign to help finance a legal fight over unpaid royalties, Gerald was never paid royalties for his 1988 hit single Voodoo Ray or his 1989 album Hot Lemonade by the label.[11] Rham Record went as far as stating that they have repeatedly attempted to contact Gerald and his team to pay the royalties and neither him or his team answered them. In reality, the label was repeatedly told to stop exploiting the song. In the spring of 1993, at the age of 57, Sam Moore (of soul and R&B duo Sam & Dave) wrote to his union’s health and retirement plan to inquire about the status of his pension account. Moore learned he was entitled to a single payment of US$2,285, and a monthly payment of US$67, for up to five years. These figures, the H&R Funds told Moore, were based on his earnings since the early 1960s: around US$66,000. With the help of a pension expert, Moore and his wife (who was also his manager) estimated these decades of earnings added up to more like US$3 million. They believed his pension should have been around US$9,000 per month.[12] Unfair compensation: “it’s not a bug, it’s a feature!” Earlier, we discussed how Eddie Johns had to struggle with homelessness while his Daft Punk-sampled song was a million dollar hit, with royalties paid to a French production company instead of him, using the excuse that they were not able to get a hold of him. Excuses that we saw were also used for British musician A Guy Called Gerald. The use of the same excuse in those two very different contexts regarding black artists highlights the systemic nature of black dispossession in dance music. In the case of Sam Moore, it was about wrong estimates for his pension funds. Music scholars have noted that Black artists, as a class of performers, routinely found their works appropriated and exploited by publishers and managers. What if Eddie Johns was in an author’s right organization? Such organizations (for Johns, France’s SACEM)[13] task themselves with ensuring fair compensation in exchange for a yearly paid membership fee. Had Johns joined SACEM, he might have received payments and this is where the issue lies. Entertainment lawyer Kevin J. Greene states in Thieves in the Temple: “Because the creators of these works were legally unsophisticated and often illiterate, copyright formalities such as registration put them at a severe disadvantage. Grafted onto the legal requirements of copyright law were predatory music industry practices that required sharing of copyright ownership and credit.” Credit : By Staselnik - Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0[14] However, this point of view does not account for the recording industry’s racial capitalism. The cultural landscape and music seem to reflect the dynamic of dispossession that black people and other minoritized people encounter in society. There is a long history of whitewashing and dispossession of black and queer music - at the intersection of both dynamics sit world famous artists, from Elvis with blues/rock'n'roll to Madonna with Vogue. The music industry is an American invention, created on the back of the US' Black population. With a system resembling the process of extractivism, natural resources are being replaced by the labor of Black musicians. Exploitation of Black artists is a deliberate product of an industry shaped almost entirely by white people. In this context, it is likely that an organization such as SACEM would have still failed Eddie Johns. In other words, unfair compensation is not a bug, it’s a feature.

In his recent sweeping and skillful Toni Morrison lectures, "Mike Brown’s Body: Meditations on War, Race and Democracy," Robin Kelley (2015) draws an extraordinary conclusion. Kelley asserts that Michael Brown should be understood as “collateral damage in a perpetual war whose colonial roots are still alive.” He situates the police murder of the eighteen year old Black man in the suburban municipality of Ferguson in a much larger and longer history of imperial violence. In contrast to claims emerging out of security studies that locate unending warfare in the period post-2001, Kelley (2015) argues that the entire history of American racial oppression is a story of perpetual war. Kelley explicitly asserts that “coloniality and capitalism are inseparable,” and that the U.S. racial state must be understood historically and geographically as transnational imperial violence, simultaneously reliant on indigenous dispossession and enslaved labor. His approach to the problem of anti-black violence in America locates it firmly within settler colonialism, both mirroring and amplifying the exciting engagements underway between critical race theory and indigenous studies, feminist and queer theory (Jackson, 2014; King, 2014; Lawrence and Dua, 2005; Morgensen, 2012; Snelgrove et al, 2014; Tuck et al, 2014). “War,” he argues, “begins at the point of settlement with the shipment of kidnapped Africans across the Atlantic, the enslavement of indigenous people, with rape and pillage, forced removals, not to mention religious conversion and compulsory assimilation.” Kelley’s arguments question the distinction between "internal" and "external" organized violence, and so too the supposedly foundational separation underpinning the modern state system between police and military force. In its place, Kelley offers a profoundly important rethinking of space. The "domestic situation" becomes one site in a wider cartography of imperial violence that transformed, rather than expired with, emancipation.

Summer 2018 was the summer of Janelle Monae—her sultry, funky “Make Me Feel” filtered out of car windows and pumped through grocery store aisles, and fans seemed ready to embrace her as a symbol of liberated Black queerness. On the heels of the film Black Panther (2018), Monae’s 2018 music film Dirty Computer, with its futuristic exploration of Blackness, capitalism, and technicity, was particularly legible to an American public newly introduced to the concept of Afrofuturism. Although her widespread fame is relatively recent, she has been a major talent in the Atlanta and Kansas City Black music scenes and a much theorized practitioner of Afrofuturist philosophies for the past fifteen years. Monae’s Afrofuturism has generally been attributed to her use of an android alter ego, a character named Cindi Mayweather, who is the heroine of her first three loosely narrative albums. Blurring the lines between her android identity and her construction of self, Monae only performed in tuxedos for the first ten years of her career, a uniform that emphasized androgyny and suggested she was replicable, interchangeable. Dirty Computer is the first of her albums, and thus music films, not to use Mayweather as a protagonist, and many critics and fans saw her break from the android and the tuxedo costume as a liberation, using the rhetoric of authenticity so often associated with coming out to praise her indisputably queer subject matter (as in her song “Pynk,” her 2018 paean to female genitalia). However, this equation between authenticity and Monae’s more legibly racialized, gendered embodiment elides the complexity of her long-standing engagement with the tensions between the technic and the material encoded in the Black female body. In fact, the phrase “dirty computer” is not a departure from Monae’s cyborg vision but an elegant encapsulation of her theory of embodiment. Monae employs the cyborg as a tool for reclaiming visceral, material knowledge, paradoxically using the machinic in service of expanding the definition of the human in an acknowledgment of our somatechnic entanglements.1 Her “dirty computer” describes a virtualized, technic self that nonetheless is characterized by mess, dirt, and inevitable obsolescence, incorporating anachronisms and refusing linear temporality. In conjunction with her repeated insistence on the realization of ...................................................................................................... MELUS: The Society for the Study of the Multi-Ethnic Literature of the United States 2022. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of The Society for the Study of the Multi-Ethnic Literature of the United States. All rights reserved. For permissions, please e-mail: journals.permissions@oup.com. https://doi.org/10.1093/melus/mlac018 154 MELUS Volume 47 Number 1 (Spring 2022) [129.237.90.151] Project MUSE (2024-07-07 22:27 GMT) University of Kansas Libraries selfhood through a fleshy body materialized through movement as a source of testimony, Monae’s version of Afrofuturist posthumanism celebrates Black female embodiment even as it upends gender and pushes past the limits of the human. I begin by tracing Monae’s engagement with cyborg theory, describing her earlier albums’ explicit and strategic deployment of machinic bodies and establishing her commitment to both materially present embodiment and temporal fugitivity. I discuss how Monae experiments with virtualization as a tool for evading capture by hegemonic regimes of the human, revealing the permeable boundaries between the digital and the material, the object and the subject in her lyrics and her music videos. I conclude with an analysis of the music film Dirty Computer, reading her most recent formulation for the body as a confirmation of the simultaneously enfleshed and technic embodiment Monae has been articulating throughout her career. My curiosity about Monae’s figuration of embodiment was initially piqued through the distinctly modernist, retro-futuristic aesthetics of her early albums and music videos. Her head and shoulders dominate the cover of her first album The ArchAndroid (2010), resplendent with a gold collar, earrings, and headdress that replicates the skyline of an art deco city; she looks like a 1920s vision of a futuristic Nefertiti. The visual language of her music videos echo silent film, framing her wide-eyed face in tight close ups. She makes her engagement with Fritz Lang’s Metropolis (1927), a modernist masterpiece of film, clear in her homage to his aesthetics and thematics: her alter ego, Cindi Mayweather, looks just like the female android in Lang’s film, and her 2008 music video Many Moons begins with a supertitle announcing the Annual Android Auction in Metropolis, an overt reference to Lang and his robotically doubled female lead. Separated by eighty years and created by radically different artists, these two projects center the same questions about what it means to be a body, the possibilities and terrors of the melding of human body and machine, and even share an aesthetic sensibility. What is efficacious for Monae about the cyborg, or about connecting modernist and Afrofuturist articulations of the body beyond the human? Why tie a vision of the future to the concerns of the past? Modernist fascination with the cyborg and the robot is not particularly mysterious; they are images of mechanized life that manifested modern anxieties about the increasingly apparent melding of human with machine. The term robot first appeared in print in the work of Czech playwright Karel Capek, who adapted the word from the Czech robota, meaning forced labor, to describe the automatons in his 1920 play R.U.R. Robots are rooted in concern about the further alienation of humans from their labor and the potential for systems of slavery or serfdom to return through the use of artificial intelligence in what was supposed to be a brave new century where indentured servitude (at least of white people) was a thing of the past. Cyborgs are closely related to robots and androids, but the cyborg relies on feedback—it is cybernetic, a machine that incorporates information and suggests enmeshment with and enhancement of a system understood as human (unlike a robot, which is clearly machine, a cyborg usually has skin or a skin-like covering obscuring its gears, or otherwise incorporates organic or biomechatronic parts). This passing for human or more-than-human quality of the cyborg combines powerfully with anxieties about gender and gendered performance; the female cyborg becomes distinctly horrific because of its pleasingly human aesthetic and sexual characteristics in contrast with its unfeelingness or lack of emotion. The modernist cyborg encapsulates anxiety about women’s increasing participation in the workforce, externalizing fears about the New Woman and her efficiency and financial independence coupled with her desirability and sexual promiscuousness. Trilby’s susceptibility to hypnosis and her robotic obedience to the mystical Svengali in George du Maurier’s wildly popular serialized novel Trilby(1895) comes to mind as an example of a proto-cyborgian character of the New Woman era, as does Mina Harker, the young heroine of Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897); however, her narrative is redeemed as she marries Jonathan Murray, exits the trance that renders her body cold and her mind open to penetration, and returns to appropriately feminine feeling. That Monae adopts a cyborg persona is perhaps equally appropriate given this history: as a Black woman in music, an industry that relies on Black labor and innovation and fashions Black femininity into a saleable product while continuing to marginalize female artists of color, the cyborg is an apt comparison.

According to Durkheim, it is crucial for the individual to understand the society they are a part of to understand themselves. He argues that humanity itself is linked to this feeling of belonging to a larger society, and thus the personal in entrenched in this large assemblage of societal influences acting upon the individual. In an individualistic capitalist society where there are fewer and fewer means of participating in the collective, coupled with the increased privatization of the individual, these feelings have fewer outlets. In the modern United States, I argue that in the present historical moment one of the primary forms that these feelings find their outlet is through the consumption of popular music. In order to study this theorization of the social structures that have developed as a result of capitalism and the impacts they have on the individual and society as a whole, I will turn to the rising popularity and commercialization of Black expression in contemporary popular music as a case study in collective effervescence. I believe that we can take the frameworks provided by social theorists who focus on post-colonial racial theories to further delve into the political mechanisms at place in rap music in the age of Black Lives Matter and identify its larger social implications and impacts. I have chosen to focus on popular music because pop culture can serve as an indication of where a society is, what it values, and what it aspires to. The other significant aspect of pop culture is that it is a site that invites the involvement of all people, from a wide array of classes, genders identities, and races, meaning that it is widely accessible. It serves as an equalizer, especially now in an age where information is spread and consumed at unprecedented speeds and connects individuals in ways that have never before been possible. The way pop culture is dissected and discussed is increasingly online on social media platforms where all a user needs is an Internet connection to participate in this new, digital public sphere. In modern America, it is through this technologically mediated collective experience that people engage with popular culture. In this study, I argue that in lieu of concrete social structures to provide the means for a populace to experience collective effervescence, popular music has become the primary vehicle through which societal issues are collectively felt and dealt with. Popular music in America has functioned as a primarily communal cultural form that brings people together and plays a crucial role in community building and ultimately how we make sense of the world around us. 9 It has the capacity for consciousness building, for boosting empathy and understanding, and, as is becoming clear as a result of a wave of politically active artists, for encouraging political action and civic engagement. Although there is a long lineage of activism on the part of the Black community in American popular music, I believe that there are several key factors that have led to the increasing politicization of celebrities within the last decade, specifically the rise of digitally mediated public spaces and the rise of the Black Lives Matter movement online. My thesis will consist of examining the music and impacts of three key contemporary popular artists and the ways in which they make sense of the political and historical movement starting in 2014 and continuing to the present, and the ways in which this has sparked wider discourse in the public sphere. I will be turning to the careers of Beyoncé Knowles, Kendrick Lamar, and Janelle Monáe, focusing in on their becoming more vocal on electoral politics and the social issues confronting America today. In addition to specific albums, I will examine key music videos, live performances, as well as their broader public presence and cultural impact. These case studies will be situated within their respective musical lineages and the time period and context in which they were made, performed, and consumed. In examining the political nature of these contemporary Afrocentric musical events and albums, I hope to get into a deeper analysis and understanding of the ways in which we conceive of equality, activism, anomie, the role of the state, and post-industrial age democracy in contemporary America, and how this dialectic process has evolved.

Black women are disproportionately at risk for domestic violence, sexual abuse, and death at the hands of family members, partners, and people they know. A 2014 Time magazine article revealed that they are almost three times more likely to experience death as a result of domestic violence than are white women. While they comprise only 7 percent of the population, Black women make up 22 percent of domestic violence homicides.61 In fact, a leading cause of death of African American women ages 15-34 is homicide at the hands of a current or former intimate partner.62 Even when Black women do turn to the police for support, they often fail to secure safety from their abusive partners. More disturbingly, an alarming number of police killings of Black women take place in the context of police responses to domestic violence situations.63 Similarly, Black women’s experiences of sexual or homophobic and transphobic violence—leading to the deaths of at least 10 transgender women nationally in the first few months of 2015 alone and a total of at least 12 deaths in 2014 – have failed to result in protection or prevention.64 The reflexive criminalization of Black women seems at times to heighten the perception that they are threatening, foreclosing the possibility in police officers’ minds that they are simply survivors of violence. Black women survivors of violence—and particularly poor, lesbian, gender-nonconforming, and transgender Black women—find that police responses to violence all too often result in further, and sometimes deadly, violence against them. Meagan Hockaday March 28, 2015 / Oxnard, California A police officer fatally shot 26-year-old mother Meagan Hockaday when responding to a domestic dispute. Within 20 seconds of entering her home, the officer fatally shot Hockaday, who he claimed was advancing toward him with a knife drawn. Hockaday had three young children who were all in the house when the incident occurred. The official investigation into this case is ongoing.65 Janisha Fonville February 18, 2015 / Charlotte, North Carolina Janisha Fonville was shot to death by a Charlotte police officer who was responding to a domestic violence complaint involving Fonville and her girlfriend. The officer, who had previously been involved in questionable shootings, claimed that Fonville lunged at him with a knife.66 Her girlfriend, the only other person on the scene, maintains that Fonville was over six feet away from officers, and stood a mere five feet tall, posing no direct threat to the 22 23 officer who shot her. Neighbors questioned why officers could not have used nonlethal force to subdue her.67 Aura Rosser November 9, 2014 / Ann Arbor, Michigan When Aura Rosser’s boyfriend called the police to his apartment over a domestic dispute, Rosser was fatally shot upon their arrival. Police later claimed she had attacked them with a knife, compelling them to use deadly force. Her boyfriend contradicted them, telling reporters, “It doesn’t make any sense … me and her, we had an argument. Glass was being broke, so I called the police to escort her out … the police said ‘police,’ so I stopped. She walked towards them. They said ‘freeze’ and the next thing I know I heard [gunshots].” One officer shot Rosser while the other attempted to use a Taser to subdue her. Rosser suffered from addiction and mental health issues, but her sister disputes that she was a threat to the police. “She would have fainted at the sight of the gun being drawn on her. She would have been extremely docile, no aggression whatsoever towards police.” The officer who shot Rosser was not charged with her death, but her family is moving forward with a civil suit.68 Yvette Smith February 16, 2014 / Bastrop County, Texas Police officers arrived at 47-year-old Yvette Smith’s home in response to a domestic disturbance complaint between two men in the household. Smith, a single mother of two, opened the door for the officers and was shot almost immediately in the head and the stomach. The officers first alleged that Smith had a gun, but that claim was retracted the next day. Deputy Daniel Willis, who fatally shot Smith, has been indicted for murder.69 Along with cisgender and heterosexual Black women, lesbian, bisexual, transgender, and gender-nonconforming Black women have been largely absent from the discourse around racist state violence. The overlap of sexism, racism, homophobia, and transphobia place Black LGBTQ and gender-nonconforming people in a precarious position at the intersection of constructs around gender, race, and sexuality, fueling police violence against them.70 For instance, police often punish actual or perceived sexual or gender nonconformity with physical and sexual violence. These acts are sometimes accompanied by homophobic, transphobic, and/or misogynist slurs like “dyke ass bitch,” or assertions that if they want to “act like a man” they will be “treated like a man,” or threats to “rape them straight.”71 In one particularly egregious case, a Black lesbian in Atlanta reported being raped by a police officer who told her that the world needed “one less dyke.”72 Profiling of Black transgender women, along with Black non-transgender women for prostitution-related offenses is rampant, sometimes based on the mere presence or possession of a condom.73 Black transgender women and gender-nonconforming women are also routinely subjected to transphobic verbal harassment and abuse, unlawful and degrading searches to assign gender based on anatomical features, and dangerous placement in police custody. According to the National Transgender Discrimination Survey, 38 percent of Black transgender people who had interactions with police reported harassment, 14 percent reported physical assault, and 6 percent reported sexual assault.74

As our country mourns with Asian and Pacific Islander American communities across the country, as we grieve with the families of slain Black and brown children, women, and men, and as we attempt to enact policies that attack the racism underlying this violence, we must also take time to define what a different society could look like for those most affected by this brutality. At the center of this work is an urgent need to reimagine the concepts of integration and coalition building. There is a brokenness pervading the very structure of American culture — a brokenness rooted in the divisive core of white supremacy and racism. In order for racism and white supremacy to perpetuate themselves, whiteness must be a distinct racial category, one implicitly understood as superior and sacrosanct — because if being white were indistinguishable from being Black or Korean or Filipino, our society could not reasonably justify the injustices our society perpetuates on the basis of race alone. How could we explain the repeated and extrajudicial killing of people doing nothing, but going about their daily lives, if we did not understand them as both Black and Dangerous? How would we place the brutal beating and killing of the elderly and vulnerable if we did not situate them as both Asian and Foreign? White supremacy must necessarily break the body of humanity and personhood in order to facilitate harm and, ultimately, augment its own power. And while the justification for this racial stratification was always artificial, its legacy is real and its wounds are deep. It stands to reason, then, that the thoughtful mending of those fissures is the only societal antidote to this ongoing systemic harm. Intentional, accountable community building is the bone-deep remedy and coalitions are the sutures that help us mend from the searing lacerations caused by centuries of orchestrated racism. While the myriad cultures, languages, and people who comprise the Asian and Pacific Islander American community are not new to white supremacy’s sorrow, the rise in violence over the last year has made that sorrow even more acute. In the past year, Asian American communities have watched in horror as their elders were harassed and brutalized, and the most vulnerable murdered. Anti-Asian violence comes from the very same source as the anti-Blackness that drives the hundreds of deaths of Black people each year at the hands of vigilantes and police alike. The xenophobia that facilitates the imprisonment of migrant children in cages at the border, even as a pandemic ravages our country, is rooted in the same pernicious force that drives anti-Asian violence. The erasure, invisibility, and exoticism that many Asian and Pacific Islander American activists and scholars have articulated throughout history, but most recently in the wake of the Atlanta shootings of six Asian women and the Indianapolis murders of four Sikh FedEx workers, is a function of a system devised to divide and conquer. This system is committed to entrenching power, humanity, and agency in one singular identity: whiteness. The work of dismantling and rebuilding a society without white supremacy at its center is the defining work of our generation and every generation to come. During the Civil Rights Movement, desegregation was the overwhelming focus of organization and mobilization. In the decades following, as desegregation gutted the resources within Black communities, and integration was touted as the primary means to eradicate racial harm. However, integration has historically been a deeply fraught concept. For many, integration symbolizes the apex of racial healing, for others, it indicates assimilation and erasure. If many mainstream readings of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.’s words and career are to be believed, integration was his primary objective, not the dismantling of a racist, classist society. Our vision of integration in this country is often attached to his most famous speech; the term conjures images of classrooms where the Black and white children sit next to each other, judged not by their skin, but the content of their character. However, this view of integration — filtered through the lens of whiteness — has proven limited in its effectiveness over the many decades Americans have sought to see it realized. It is time we reexamine and redefine what integration could truly mean. While this glittering imagining of integration may be captivating, coalition-building and liberation — not integration — were the central thrust of Dr. King’s work, along with the many activists and organizers who led the 1960s Movement of Civil Rights. If we — those in our country most concerned with dismantling systems of power — were more practiced, more thoughtful and intentional about that coalition building, it would mean that we would have responses when anti-anyone violence rears its head. Because while in this moment it is important to stop anti-Asian violence or to end the state-sanctioned violence that steals the lives of Black people, it is equally important to to name and thwart the systemic racism that undergirds these evils. Successful multi-racial coalition building — and thus a more expansive definition of integration — hinges on the solidarity around anti-anyone violence, anti-anyone oppression. Racism is the driving force that allows a Minnesota police force — in the midst of a trial for the police officer who murdered George Floyd — to kill yet another Black man in the streets and then impose a curfew on the citizens and community members protesting state-sanctioned violence. Racism is the same underwriter of a police-driven narrative that says the murder of eight people in Atlanta was just an average white man having a bad day. Integration has historically been concerned with teaching white people how to live with people of color or has been preoccupied with exposing children of color to dominant white culture in order to improve their lives. This is not integration, it is forced assimilation. Thus, it is inherently flawed as an idea. By contrast, coalition building, such as the rainbow coalition assembled by Fred Hampton and the Black Panthers, is about honoring each other's humanity and differences in service of a collective good. Coalitions like the Highlander Center and the Fair Food Program are not just about unity in the face of common enemies, but about liberation rooted in shared humanity. We have examples of how to do this throughout history, but the efforts made by governments or other vested interests to dismantle them have led us to erroneously believe that coalitions are situational at worst and ephemeral at best. But such coalitions allow us to access the truth that white supremacy and racism have stripped away: that we are all deserving of dignity, freedom, and the ability to thrive. In such coalitions, we do not ask anyone to subvert their identity, tradition, or language, but to honor how those unique aspects of being intersect. In successful coalitions, we recognize how systems that demand we prioritize arbitrary divisions or ask us to see differences as adversarial are in service of whiteness and destruction, not care and abundance. Coalition building is solidarity work. It requires radical imagination to both reimagine community and integration, but this moment requires it of us.

Note from Anna Fosberg: As America as a whole confronts what systematic racism is and how to stop it, many white Americans are working to understand what it means to be an effective ally to the Black community. For many, race in America is still a sensitive and taboo issue and, as such, many white allies are left wondering how we can truly be allies to a community that is not our own, and to ensure our support goes beyond impotent performative allyship. The goals of this project are to have a conversation, to allow people to share their personal perspectives, and to guide other allies in the engagement of genuine actions towards social change. In addition to exploring how to be an ally to the Black community, my coauthors and I broadened the scope of our inquiry to ask how allyship pertains to different marginalized groups. Specifically, we spoke with colleagues from Black, Latinx, immigrant, and LGBTQ+ communities in order to gain a fuller perspective on meaningful allyship. Although there is no single “right” way to become an ally, my coauthors and I believe that the interviewees’ responses offer guidance for those looking to better understand and provide meaningful, not performative, allyship. I was inspired to write these articles, in part, by my conversations about race relations and current events with Judge Zuberi Williams of the Maryland District Court. Judge Williams encouraged me to think more critically about the world around me. I hope this article will inspire others to reflect inward about how they can serve as effective allies. Part One: How do you distinguish effective allyship from performative allyship?

Real allyship requires you to understand how to support a marginalized community. To be blunt, real allyship requires you to actually do something. Of course, this can result in different levels of action; not everybody has to protest or post on social media. But even less noticeable actions require you to do something because, at its core, allyship demands you to challenge yourself. To get uncomfortable. True allyship requires follow-through. Posting on social media is great insofar as it can help raise awareness to real issues plaguing communities that are not our own and provide perspective to members of our social network that might not otherwise be educated on certain issues. However, posting on social media is not enough. There needs to be a follow-up action. Did you donate to bail relief fund groups? Did you go to a protest? Did you have a tough conversation with a family member? Did you read a book about anti-racist behavior? These actions, whether offline or online, reflect a motivation other than feeling good about yourself or contributing to a trend. We should be taking responsibility for our actions as individuals and, subsequently, giving something up. Your actions should benefit someone other than yourself. Real allyship occurs after it is no longer popular or trending to speak up; it is standing up for things knowing that the result will not benefit you. Performative allyship is based on the idea of self-gratification and does not look at your responsibility within a community; it is disingenuous. For example, merely posting a black square on Instagram is not being an effective ally. You are merely performing with personal gratification in the center of your action. If that’s the case, then you are not actively living as an anti-racist. Performative allyship is done to make yourself feel better, to “prove” you are not a racist, to create a perception of yourself for others, to be trendy. The consistency of people’s actions speak louder than words. In an age where our lives are projected online, social media is forcing people to become more publicly accountable than ever before. Many people who had never denounced injustice, made donations, or done any tangible work towards social change posted a black square in the name of Black injustice, but many of these same people often failed to demonstrate any follow-up actions. Real allies do more than post a black square; real allies go to protests, or read, or have uncomfortable conversations about race. They demonstrate patterns of actively working towards social change. Their actions are motivated by uplifting someone else, rather than seeking to be seen as part of a movement. This article is based on interviews with Penn State Law Class of 2019 graduate Melissa Blanco; Class of 2020 graduates Yanna Banks, Kathryn Dutton, Christina Gottfried, Alice Gyamfi, Marcus Hobson, Ava Ibanez, Shamsiddin “Pop” Little, and Vanessa Miller; and 2021 juris doctor candidates Graham Ball, Kaitlin Briggs, Bianca Gutierrez, Rebecca Heisner, Ryan Morrison, Emory Robertson, Kelsi Robinson, Tyla Swinton, and Alexis Thackurdin.

To all non-Black people of color — it’s time we speak up against the anti-Blackness in our communities. This guide is written to serve as a starting point for how non-Black people of color can engage in conversation regarding the anti-Blackness within our respective communities. A disclaimer: the term “people of color” (POC) encompasses people of diverse ethnic and cultural backgrounds. We acknowledge and think actively about how each of these individual communities distinctly experience racism: Asian, Black, Hispanic/Latinx, Indigenous, Middle Eastern, Pacific Islander, and multiracial. I identify as Asian and have consulted the other folks in DoSomething’s POCI affinity group, which is comprised mostly of people who identify as Asian and Latinx. This is a guide for non-Black POC to stand in one form of solidarity with our Black community by tackling our anti-Blackness — but a one-size-fits-all approach does not work and we don’t presume to speak for all Asian people, all Latinx people, or all non-Black people of color. We also acknowledge that anti-racist conversations do not center Black people, and real action is needed to uplift the Black community. As advocates for racial justice and as imperfect allies, we’re sharing this guide in the hopes that it helps some of you broach needed conversations with your loved ones. [table of contents] Learn More Living as non-white people in America, we are faced with varying instances of discrimination across our different identities every day. There is a thread of shared experiences of oppression which runs through all people of color. But as non-Black people of color, it's vital to recognize that being Black in America is not the same as being any other race in America. The internalized racism and anti-Blackness within each of our individual communities have long perpetuated white supremacy and the continued violence against the Black community. As non-Black people of color we when it comes to Black lives. To stand in solidarity with our Black community means we must be — to stop brushing aside the anti-Blackness many of us have learned and been complicit to within our respective communities. We've heard and excused it too often in our circles, with our friends & family: it's just how they are, they're old anyway, they're just joking, they had this one experience, they didn't mean it like that, they don't know better, it's not worth it. We need to do better and having direct and honest conversation is a start Prepare for the Conversation 1) Educate yourself. Learn about the systemic racism and oppression against Black people that have afforded you the comforts you have, even as a person of color. Learn about the history of your race in America and how the movements that have led to the privileges you have would not exist without the Black community. (Non-Black Latinx Resources on Anti-Blackness, South Asians and Black Lives, Addressing Anti-blackness Within the Vietnamese & Asian Community) 2) Recognize your anti-Blackness and consider where it stems from. One place to start is with an implicit bias test. Reflect on the anti-Blackness perpetuated in your home, amongst family members, in your friend group. Examine the colorism, the color hierarchy of complexions with fairer skin as “better than’ and darker skin as “less than,” in your community. Think about how you might be appropriating Black culture. Ask yourself of the ways in which you've been conditioned to believe in the superiority of whiteness, to “other” and place harmful stereotypes on Black people. To read: “30+ Ways Asians Perpetuate Anti-Black Racism Everyday” 3) Choose who you want to talk to & how. Start with someone who you know well and trust. You’ll feel better equipped to engage in more conversations as you have them and continue to educate yourself, you don’t need to address your entire family at once. Considering how to have these conversations is also important. As opposed to engaging in potentially unproductive dialogue on social media, try engaging in one-on-one or small group conversation in-person or via video chat. 4) Establish goals for the conversation. Think about what you want to leave the conversation with. It’s worth having a clear understanding of what specific points you’d like to convey. Remember, one conversation won’t resolve the decades of unaddressed anti-Blackness. You might have a tangible goal, like asking your conversation partner to make a donation, call elected officials, attend a protest, or sign a petition. Another goal could be getting a better understanding of how your conversation partner is responding to this moment and what they’re feeling. Either way, it’s helpful to know what you want to achieve from the conversation. 5) Set expectations for yourself and your conversation partner. Talking about racism isn’t easy but it’s necessary. The first time you try it will likely be bumpy, but starting the conversation to dismantle anti-Blackness is more important than staying comfortable in silence. Expect discomfort and explore why. Set the expectation that this is a first conversation, and that you will try again if it doesn’t go the way you’ve planned. Be gentle with yourself. Remember: the path to addressing anti-Blackness is learning, unlearning, and relearning. It is not the role of your Black friends to offer themselves up to grant you the unsettling of your discomfort. Do not burden them in this way. Have the Conversation DO... Be specific and get personal. With whomever you’ve chosen to talk to, make sure you tailor the conversation to them. Know the experiences of the people you’re talking to and bring in what you know they’ll understand to connect with dismantling their anti-Blackness DO... Focus on the Black experience. Don’t let the conversation drift to your own valid experience of oppression, but rather stay focused on how Black people experience oppression and how we contribute to that. DO... Ask open ended questions. Try something like “How have you been feeling about what is going on in the news right now?” or “What are some reactions you’ve had to the protests happening across the country?” or “How is the current news cycle making you think differently about your identity?” DO… Recognize your limitations. Whether it's a language barrier or a conversation escalating towards harm, understand that it’s okay to try another tactic at another time, or press pause altogether. DON’T… End the conversation at the first sign of discomfort. Expect for the conversation to be uncomfortable, and prepare for disagreement. Think about the difference between going outside of your comfort zone to the point where it is towards learning and growth and going into a place of fear where you are no longer growing. DON’T… Think you have to do this alone. Here are some ways to correct problematic language. Bring resources & research, and feel free to start by reading an article together or watching a video to reflect on. And remember — be patient, with yourself and with your community. Being an imperfect ally means we maintain a mindset of constantly learning and giving ourselves, and our loved ones, the opportunity to grow. Stay persistent.

Foucault's notion of a heterotopia satisfies the following key principles (1) a constant across human groups and cultures (2) transformative by each generation each society and adaptable to history (3) capable of holding within a singular space, multiple places and spaces, (4) responsive to changes and breaks in time functions, (5) holding points of entry and departure" that both isolates them and makes them penetrable,” and (6) You're treating additional spaces, either illusory or Utopian in nature.(Footnote 4) If we consider maroon societies as more than the ideologies they produced, if we accept that they occupy both physical and intellectual space in the Caribbean history and lived experience, then we can perceive how they meet in these key principles and how they constitute the “heterotopia car excellence” As Foucault, imagine it imagines the ship: “a floating piece of space, A place without a place, that exists by itself, that is closed in on itself and at the same time given over into the Infinity of the sea” (footnote 5) As the ship gives into the sea, maroonage extends into the land, no matter how that space is settled by the colonizer or how much colonial forces deny the maroons’ Right into the ground on which they stand. And this defiance, maroon societies' identities position themselves as heterotopias of resistance, rejecting the denial of civility and sovereignty to Africans in the new world. Before and since the maroons, black people in the Atlantic have inland New world. Before and since the maroons, Black people in the Atlantic have negotiated their ability to carve out livable spaces, always in resistance or counterpoint to oppressive forces that deny them humanity, let alone their own space.

The protagonists of the video are literally and figuratively frozen in time in the beginning. They are in stasis like the exhibits of a Natural History Museum suggesting an intertextual reference to Coco Fusco and Guillermo Gómez-Peña in their performance “The Couple in the Cage” (1992-3). Wonder and Lightning’s bodies initially covered in sacred white chalk, in particular, refer to anthropological discourses of the discovery of supposedly premodern, undiscovered, and ahistorical peoples intended to legitimise Western conquests and settler colonialism while at the same time retracing the historical ancestry of the African Diaspora. Eventually, when the singers and musicians start to move and perform the song, they disrupt the space of the museum and break out of the discursive mould in which there were supposed to be cast forever as past relics. They reconquer previously conquered spaces of subjection and create a futuristic overlay of personalities who have exclusive knowledge about the future and its inventions, as Lillvis has convincingly demonstrated in her monograph (c.f. 67-9). Along the lines of Caroline Rody on African American and Caribbean women’s historical fiction, Lillvis proposes that “[b]lack narratives, such as those shared by Badu, Monáe, and Jones, function as ‘formerly unarticulated histories’ that work in the tradition of ethnic and postcolonial literatures and poststructuralist and postmodernist theories to destroy master narratives—such as that of the liberal humanist subject—and tell previously unheard or ignored tales” (Lillvis 63). I would add, that they also project future possible worlds onto the now by showcasing the radical interconnections between creation, destruction, and regeneration further expanded in the video when one of the Wondaland members types on a typewriter that they “will create and destroy ten art movements in ten years” and thus showcase the fertilizing properties of Afrofuturist practices Moreover, the singing performances are also explicitly gendered. Badu’s alter-ego Badoula Oblongata (the last name being an allusion to the spinal cord2) and Monáe in her trademark tuxedo confidently move on displaying multiple ways of being in the world through their singing that references traditions and contemporary forms of African American music. In keeping with the energetic Funk bass line, their voices shift from Monáe’s funk to soul and jazz in Badu’s intermezzo where she declares “here comes the freedom song” back to Monáe’s rap performance in the final stages of the song that aligns with the marching and protest that she calls for in the lyrics: March to the streets cause I’m willing and I’m able Categorize me, I defy every label And while you’re selling dope, we’re gonna keep selling hope We rising up now, you gotta deal you gotta cope Will you be electric sheep? Electric ladies, will you sleep? Or will you preach.

​​One of the sociocultural functions of speculative fiction in popular culture is to reflect on actual intersubjective dynamics through the relocation of world/subject constellations onto remote spaciotemporal planes. Particularly when the fictional worlding of alternate possible worlds combines the free play of speculation with references to or analogies for past and present human conditions, it fosters the expression of cultural critique and the promotion of social change. Afrofuturism, in particular, reinscribes lived experiences of othering and exclusion by associating these with science fiction tropes of extraterrestrial, alien lives. As the Afrofuturist cultural theorist, Kodwo Eshun, writes, “Afrodiasporic subjects live the estrangement that science-fiction writers envision. Black existence and science fiction are one and the same” (289). Black diasporic experience resonates with outer space imaginaries because these display similar imbalances in power relations along disenfranchising dichotomies of racialization, gender, and class while telling stories about the crossing of thresholds, the exploration of new frontiers, or the multifarious assemblages1 of hybrid and liminal identities. Science fiction situates itself at the interstices of the social and thrives on the challenges and opportunities inherent to an in-between that bears a striking resemblance with the spaciotemporal networks of the black diaspora. The imaginary intermediate formations of science fiction in Afrofuturism recuperate the prerogative of interpretation and, therewith, the agency over black diasporic pasts, presents, and futures. Eshun describes the Afrofuturist political agenda “as a program for recovering the histories of counter-futures created in a century hostile to Afrodiasporic projection and as a space within which the critical work of manufacturing tools capable of intervention within the current political dispensation may be undertaken” (301). The critical and aspirational interventions of Afrofuturism target the here and now of contemporary social formations and, therefore, ultimately seek to make sense of diasporic human experiences on earth in their excursions into digital, virtual realms as well as in their accounts of space and time travel. Womack also understands Afrofuturism as “an intersection of imagination, technology, the future, and liberation” (9). According to her, the constitutive elements of this “artistic aesthetic and . . . framework for critical theory . . . [are] science fiction, historical fiction, speculative fiction, fantasy, Afrocentricity, and magic realism with non-Western beliefs. In some cases, it’s a total reenvisioning of the past and speculation about the future rife with cultural critiques” (9). In this artistic and cultural nexus, the liberation of hegemonic constraints is achieved through the transversal shift to utopian ideals and projections because the resulting what-if scenarios facilitate the recovery of the power of the subject in light of oppressive pasts of colonisation and slavery.

Mya Hall was a Black transgender woman killed by National Security Agency (NSA) police just weeks before Freddie Gray’s case garnered national headlines. Alleged to be driving a stolen car, she took a wrong turn onto NSA property and was shot to death by officers after the car crashed into the security gate and a police cruiser. No effort to use nonlethal force was made even though there was no threat to the facility, and no one in the vehicle was armed. Friends remembered Hall as a kind and caring woman struggling to make ends meet in the face of entrenched structural discrimination against Black transgender women.14

The resurgent racial justice movement in the United States has developed a clear frame to understand the police killings of Black men and boys, theorizing the ways in which they are systematically criminalized and feared across disparate class backgrounds and irrespective of circumstance. Yet Black women who are profiled, beaten, sexually assaulted, and killed by law enforcement officials are conspicuously absent from this frame even when their experiences are identical. When their experiences with police violence are distinct—uniquely informed by race, gender, gender identity, and sexual orientation—Black women remain invisible.Despite their marginalization in contemporary efforts to challenge anti-Black racism and police brutality, Black women and girls continue to lose their lives to racially motivated violence. The nation has been left reeling in the wake of the June 17th shooting in which a white gunman murdered nine Black parishioners at a historically Black church in Charleston in an explicit act of racial terror. Six of the nine people killed were women—the oldest, Susie Jackson, was an 87-year-old grandmother—demonstrating clearly that Black women also face the lethal risk of white supremacist violence.

Our failure to rally around Black women’s stories represents a broader failure to demand accountability for all Black lives targeted by the state. Families who lose Black women to police violence are not regularly invited to speak at rallies and do not receive the same level of community support or media and political attention as families who lose Black men. This leaves the families of Black women killed by the police not only to suffer the loss of their loved ones but also to confront the fact that no one seems to care. Yet the killings of Black women and girls are no less troubling than the killings of their male counterparts. Their families mourn no less for their lost loved ones, and they should not be left to suffer in solitude and silence. Black women have consistently played a leadership role in struggles against state violence—from the Underground Railroad to the anti-lynching movement to the Civil Rights and Black Power movements to the current Black Lives Matter movement—yet the forms of victimization they face at the hands of police are consistently left out of social movement demands. Black women leaders are often asked to speak only about their fears of losing their sons, brothers, partners, and comrades. Yet as the tragedies that have befallen many Black women who have died at the hands of the police reveal, Black women and girls also face real risks of lethal police violence, which must be contested along with those facing Black men and boys.

1.2. Improvement should not be viewed solely in terms of therapeutic properties Some of the critics of follow-on patents suggest that inventions that do not directly improve the therapeutic properties of a chemical compound are unworthy of patent protection. But to the contrary, improvements that do not directly improve therapeutic effect can nonetheless provide substantial benefits to patients. For example, with respect to patents on new salt forms of a chemical compound, the Guidelines paper itself acknowledges ‘‘[t]he choice of a salt for a particular drug is important in obtaining certain desirable characteristics related to stability, bioavailability, manufacturability and route of administration to the patient.’’37 Inexplicably, however, the Guidelines recommend against the patentability of a new salt form in spite of these advantages.38 It would be a mistake to disregard these nontherapeutic values in an assessment of obviousness or utility. As noted by the Federal Circuit’s Judge Lourie, it would not be sound policy to require an improvement in therapeutic properties over the prior art as a requirement of patentability, and to negate the importance of other physical properties of a claimed compound or salt.39 Oftentimes, the benefits of a particular salt form reside not in therapeutic effect but in other properties that nonetheless contribute substantial value to the product and, ultimately, patients.40