Janelle Monáe’s Afrofuturist imagination is a funky revolution---her intense intersectional critique destroys humanist logics---Q.U.E.E.N. proves.

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.