“Cold War” is not insular, but a larger project sustained by Black Women that yields the potential of a multiplicity of resistive futurities…bye, bye, bye, bye.

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.