This article explores the ways in which Janelle Monáe’s audiovisual performances leverage black female flesh to trouble historically constituted imaginings of ‘the human’. Tracking Monáe’s audiovisual aesthetics across ‘Many moons’ and Dirty Computer, I interrogate acoustic and imagistic resonances that recall the repeating horrors of bondage, and which also constitute performative ‘fabulations’ whereby freedoms that are engendered specifically by and within black female flesh might be imagined. Monáe ‘enfleshes’ the cyborg to critique cyberfeminist and posthumanist theories that advocate for material dissolution as a framework for liberation, as well as to trouble black women’s historical relationships to the category ‘human’. Rather than understand Dirty Computer as a (re)turn to the human Monáe, I contend that the project extends the artist’s longstanding critical engagement with the black female cyborg and black sonic cyberfeminist liberatory potentialities.
Building on black women's critical negotiations of black nationalist discourse, this essay names the matrix of black maternal sounds, songs, and approximated womb-spaces as the site of production for black nationalist ideologies and black male identity. Listening to audible traces of black maternity in Frederick Douglass's 1845 Narrative, Frances E. W. Harper's Iola Leroy (1892), Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man (1952), and Toni Morrison's Song of Solomon (1977), the essay unearths the sonic frameworks through which black male subjectivity and ideologies of black nationalism are formulated. Masculinist black nationalist texts use black women's sounds to enact the subjective rebirths of men, who then abandon black women, thereby erasing their labors in the constitution of black nationalist ideology. However, embedded within these texts are the resonant echoes of black women's pain, which both haunt and structure their respective nationalist discourses. The article reveals the extended history of maternal disavowal in black male-authored nationalistic texts, and counterpoises black women authors' critical responses to these texts in order to reveal that maternal sacrifice proves endemic to masculinist forms of black nationalism. Keywords slavery, song, sound, freedom, maternity, black masculinity Every time I embrace a black woman, I'm embracing slavery.-Eldridge Cleaver, Soul on Ice (1968) But now the music became a distinct wail of female pain.-Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man (1952) Wi thout the scream of a maternal figure, it seems, the male black nationalist subject remains uninitiated into selfknowledge and full awareness of his oppressed social status. Black women's pain serves as the matrix of his becoming. Related through
This introduction provides an overview of the special issue that focuses on the interconnections of Black women’s literary studies with the crises of COVID-19 and ongoing anti-Black violence. More specifically, it considers how the work of three renowned writers, Paule Marshall, Ntozake Shange, and Toni Morrison—which collectively spans over fifty years—offers models for how to reimagine our current circumstances and create more just futures in our national and global communities. The essay identifies and expounds on the overarching question of the special issue: how does the work of Marshall, Shange, and Morrison speak to contemporary affairs and concerns? By engaging this question, this collection of essays offers new insights about these women’s writing in particular and expands the corpus of scholarship on Black women’s writing in general. In the aftermath of the passing of these writers, a collective reappraisal of their oeuvres is a timely and fitting tribute, as each of their bodies of work reveals that they long have engaged concerns about Black people’s encounters with systemic barriers that have laid the foundation for the current twinned crises of anti-Black violence and the disproportionate impact of COVID-19.
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