Sonic Afrofuturism is a necessary component for challenging the terms of our futures scripted by Western science fiction AND producing material collectivity which is essential for ANY movement building to be successful.

The frst chapter in this book introduced Afrofuturism as a Black cultural form that counters sf’s colonial heritage. Where chronopolitics is a method that disrupts capitalism’s teleological organization of time and space as the necessary building blocks for expansive accumulation, sonic Afrofuturism disturbs the western hierarchies through which sf world-building is expected to follow the same measurable coordinates. In Bakhtinian terms, this makes her work centrifugal rather than centripetal (Hassler-Forest 2016, 189): where most forms of Eurofuturist sf replicate capitalism’s measurable approach to space-time, Monáe’s sonic Afrofuturism constructs speculative worlds without simultaneously seeking to measure, map, or control them (Prescod-Weinstein 2021, 257). Just as Eurofuturist sf has tended to reproduce the basic structural coordinates of industrial capitalism, Afrofuturism has thereby made capitalism’s racial organization more starkly visible. Cedric J. Robinson introduced and developed the term racial capitalism to emphasize how racism has been a primary rather than a secondary component of the capitalist system. His foundational work as a theorist and historian of the Black radical tradition1 has documented in exhaustive detail how slavery and antiBlackness were “historical and organic rather than adventitious or synthetic” in the development of global capitalism (2000, 4). Every failure to acknowledge race as a central component therefore implicitly perpetuates white advantage2—even among those who supposedly seek to criticize or demolish it. Robinson’s term therefore helps us see more clearly that “one cannot understand capitalism without understanding the stolen labor of enslaved Africans and their descendants as a fundamental organizing principle and building block” (Prescod-Weinstein 2021, 140). In his book Necropolitics, Achille Mbembe has identifed the three central drives that have structured racial capitalism from its inception: The frst is the constant manufacturing of races, or species (as it happens, Negroes); the second is the seeking to calculate and convert everything into exchangeable commodities (law of generalized exchange relations); and the third is the attempt to maintain a monopoly over the manufacture of the living as such. (2019, 177) The interlocking nature of these three drives clarifes the inextricably intertwined relationship between racism and capitalism. This has resulted in a set of social hierarchies that distinguish Black from white, subject from object, center from margin, human from inhuman (Zamalin 2019, 11). In the same way, it has depended upon narratives and mythologies that reproduce whiteness as an invisible and “neutral” default identity. Across its many depictions of speculative futures, the sf genre has historically privileged racial capitalism’s basic mechanism of primitive accumulation through imperialist expansion (Rieder 2008, 30). This has yielded a feld of cultural production in which whiteness has been deeply ingrained across the wide and diverse feld of mass-cultural sf (Rieder 2017, 140–141). Considering this seemingly endless variety of futures where Black people either don’t exist at all or exist only as barely present background fgures, one understands how Afrofuturist utopias have deviated from white utopian fction. Rather than expressing in narrative form the white modernist’s drive toward god-like mastery, Black utopias have constituted a mixture of “pragmatic experimentation and critical reexamination” that challenges liberal humanism’s master narrative of Eurocentric progress and colonialist expansion (Zamalin 2019, 14). By contrast, the Black utopian tradition is steeped in what Paul Gilroy has described as “both a hermeneutics of suspicion and a hermeneutics of memory” (1995, 71): a double movement that combines the critical deconstruction of white supremacy with refections on the legacy of African enslavement. This double movement facilitates a form of redemptive critique that opens up pathways toward a future of liberation. And because this redemptive critique emerges in response to the historical legacy of colonialist extraction and racist oppression, it is shaped by dreams of escape rather than by fantasies of expansion. This is, again, why the Afrofuturist imagination is so much more than the expression of Black centered speculative futures. If the overarching goal is not the expansion of power but the eradication of oppression, then we can see how Afrofuturism as an expression of Black radicalism is uniquely able to project a truly universal utopian horizon. And since Western fantastic fction has been dominated by its systematic demonization of Black people as an inherently threatening “Dark Other” (Thomas 2019, 9–10), it takes substantial effort to reverse this dynamic, decolonize our shared vocabulary, and “re-story” our narrative culture (159). This re-storying process has been central to Afrofuturism. It contributes to antiracist movements by foregrounding the signifcance of race in all speculation about the future. It bolsters the civic imagination by providing speculative alternatives to the grim reality of racial capitalism (Jenkins et  al. 2020, 5). And it provides frameworks for postcapitalist speculation that are drawn from histories of the oppressed, rather than those who continue to proft from racial capitalism. As Robinson once wrote: “What is required for the African Diaspora to assume its historical signifcance is a new and different philosophy and a new theory of history” (Robinson 2019, 22). Afrofuturism draws on sf to help us imagine such philosophies and theories of history, while showing us how they fnd expression in stories that invite us to look beyond racial capitalism’s hegemony. As a Black utopian project, Dirty Computer articulates a vision of futurity that “troubles normative, and normalizing, temporalities as it affrms a forward-leaning desire for life lived otherwise” (Brown 2021, 17). Monáe’s world-building vividly clarifes how Western defnitions of the human have always been grounded in processes of exclusion: her Metropolis Saga used the android fgure as a vessel for those who are denied their humanity, while Dirty Computer foregrounds queerness as a primary destabilizing force (Romano 2018). These movements place Janelle Monáe’s work within the larger framework of critical posthumanism as a necessary correction to liberal humanism (Roden 2015, 9). Unlike liberal humanism’s singular, stable, and unifed subject, posthuman subjectivity represents “an amalgam, a collection of heterogeneous components, a material-informational entity whose boundaries undergo continuous construction and reconstruction” (Hayles 1999, 3). More than anything else, this means coming to terms with an ethical philosophy that tears down humanism’s hierarchical structures and opens itself up to more radical understandings of social and political justice (Braidotti 2013, 46). As the previous chapters have illustrated, racial capitalism’s social organization is grounded in a matrix of intersecting oppressions. While this matrix includes race, gender, sexual identity, class, age, and ability among its primary axes, anti-Blackness has unifed and transcended them as the core exclusion against which “universal” humanity has been measured (Jackson 2020, 33). As Zakiyyah Iman Jackson phrases it in her essential book Becoming Human, “Blackness has been central to, rather than excluded from, liberal humanism: the black body is an essential index for the calculation of degree of humanity and the measure of human progress” (2020, 46). Racial capitalism has thrived on this systematic dehumanization of Black people, in which chattel slavery served as “a geologic axiom of the inhuman in which nonbeing was made, reproduced, and circulated as fesh” (Yusoff 2018, 5). Jackson’s key term for understanding racial capitalism’s irreducible anti-Blackness is “plasticity”—a term that indicates how Blackness is equated with an animalistic lack of humanity that defnes the essence of non-white bodies as “infnitely mutable” (Jackson 2020, 11). Therefore, since liberal humanism has been grounded in the exclusionary abjection of Blackness, its cultural traditions continue to cast Black people’s essence as fundamentally malleable and thereby “sub/super/human at once” (Jackson 2020, 3): simultaneously superhuman in their physical abilities as laborers, and mere subhuman fesh that can be molded by those whose whiteness automatically grants them fully human subjectivity (Weheliye 2014, 27). Black utopian speculation has countered this projection of Black plasticity with speculative narratives of freedom that are fundamental building blocks for our collective ability to imagine postcapitalist futures. For as we move through the latter-day stages of a capitalist system that has fallen into a chronic state of disrepair (Streeck 2016), we require utopian visions grounded in true solidarity and liberation from oppression more than ever (Miéville 2018, 6). And the utopias that derive from the Black radical tradition are more suitable to this context than any other: Our dystopian postdemocratic political moment requires imaginative thoughts. We need more rather than fewer utopian ideas about radical democracy and social freedom, more rather than fewer antiutopian critiques of American faith in free-market utopianism, religious fundamentalism, technological determinism, and racial progress. Black utopia can add to this chorus trying to generate them. (Zamalin 2019, 144) Once we recognize the profoundly racial organization of capitalism, we also understand why Black utopian sf is best equipped to illuminate our precarious postcapitalist horizon. Since race operates in the frst place as a mode of oppression, moving toward a future that will “expand the principles of fairness and opportunity to all members of society” is a process that should be driven and inspired by those voices with the most intimate knowledge of social inequality (Marable 2016, “Black Studies, Multiculturalism and the Future of American Education”). Janelle Monáe’s world-building has explored new theoretical approaches to Black futures that emerge from Afrofuturism’s chronopolitical approach to history. On Dirty Computer, this has yielded a ferce critique of racial capitalism grounded in the rich tradition of Black radicalism. But where the despairing non-futures that have come to typify Eurofuturist sf lack any true hope for a better future, Black anticapitalism continuously “advances as each generation assembles the data of its experience to an ideology of liberation” (Robinson 2000, 317). This ideology of liberation is what ultimately binds together all of Dirty Computer’s complexly networked components, which celebrate the queerness of postcapitalist futurity as much as they condemn the cruel and exploitative history of racial capitalism.