AN ABSTRACT OF THE THESIS OF CALEB MCKINLEY-PORTEE for the MASTER OF ARTS degree in COMMUNICATION STUDIES, presented on JULY 5TH, 2017 at Southern Illinois University Carbondale. TITLE: QUEERING THE FUTURE: EXAMINING QUEER IDENTITY IN AFROFUTURISM. MAJOR PROFESSOR: Dr. Craig Gingrich-Philbrook This thesis examines the art aesthetic known as Afrofuturism. The research provided examines Afrofuturism in music, art, and literature. This thesis provides an example of applying Afrofuturism to performance studies within Communication Studies. This thesis contains the script to a solo performance art piece which attempts to build a bridge between performance studies and Afrofuturism, while also examining Black, Queer identity.

In this thesis paper, I will document and analyze the process of making my graduate thesis film, Vela & Niyah. I will start by stating my overall goal of the film, then move into each specific area of the filmmaking process and what was done to accomplish this goal. I will detail my successes and struggles throughout the process. I will analyze my own work, and reflect on the important lessons learned while making my thesis film. In the end, I will determine if my thesis proves true, and if I was successful in the individual aspects of filmmaking, as well as the thesis film as a whole.

Janelle Monáe’s multi-part, multi-media work Metropolis can be read as a speculative fiction text. In my work, I examine the ways in which Monáe uses the structure of her second album The ArchAndroid and the music, lyrics, and dance of her video "Tightrope" to contribute to her underlying narrative. The ArchAndroid creates an auditory experience of time travel by varying the beat and musical style and through the use of specific production techniques. The accompanying video "Tightrope" delineates its titular metaphor through its music, dance, and visuals. These elements, as part of the central narrative of Cindi and Janelle, demonstrate the ways in which Monáe plays with the concept of selfhood by continually recontextualizing identity in time and space. / Master of Arts

Janelle Monáe is a pop superstar whose Afrofuturist art is paving the way for a new revolution of popular music. An investigation into her oeuvre reveals an artform that ­relies on technological aesthetics and science-fiction narratives as a critical lens through which capitalism and its racist, sexist, homophobic, and hegemonic tendencies are clearly revealed. Monáe displays a masterful understanding of social hierarchy and power imbalances, and uses her music as a form of resistance to those heterosexist, white-supremacist institutions that attempt to reduce Monáe to the profitability of her body and culture. Situating herself as a visible and celebrated queer black musician and activist, Monáe uses her voice to provide political commentary on present-day America, through imagined future dystopias. Her seamless synthesis of black music genres and aesthetics allows for a unified musical project that is accessible, socially informed, powerful, and impactful.

Magister Artium - MA / This thesis is an exploration and analysis of the ways in which we might use varying forms of Black thought, theory, and art to think Blackness anew. For this purpose I work with electronic music from Nigeria and Detroit between 1976 and 1993, as well as with works of science fiction by W.E.B. Du Bois, Samuel Delany, Ralph Ellison, and Octavia Butler. Through a conceptual framework provided by theorists such as Fred Moten and Kodwo Eshun and the philosophical work of Afrofuturists like Delany, Ellison, Butler, and Du Bois, I explore the outer limits of what is possible when doing away with a canon of philosophy that predetermines our thinking of Blackness. This exploration also takes me to the possible depths of what this disavowal of a canon might mean and how we work with sound, the aural, and the sonic in rethinking the figuring of Blackness. This thesis is also be woven together by the theory of the Black Radical Tradition – following Cedric Robinson and Fred Moten specifically. At the centre of this thesis, and radiating outwards, is the assertion that a set of texts developed for a University of the West – Occidental philosophy as I refer to it in the thesis – is wholly insufficient in attempting to become attuned to the possibilities of Blackness. The thesis, finally, is a critique of ethnomusicology and its necessity for a native object, as well as sound studies, which fails to conceptualise any semblance of Black noise.

In the wake of a disturbing decades-long trend in both print and visual media—the appropriation of Black history and culture—another trend is observed in works of African American fiction: the reclamation of the appropriated imagery, in both neo-slave narratives and works of Afrofuturism. The image focused on specifically in this paper is that of the ship, which I argue serves at least two identifiable functions in Black fiction: first, to address the historical treatment of Africans and their American descendants, and secondly, to demonstrate Black progress and potential. Through an exploration of three works of African American fiction, works that take their Black protagonists beyond the ship's dreadful hold, the reader can see the important themes being channeled: Charles Johnson's Middle Passage sets a course on how to arrive at true freedom, enacting a process of Black liberation that begins with learning how to survive "in the wake," a concept derived Christina Sharpe's work In the Wake: On Blackness and Being. Rivers Solomon's An Unkindness of Ghosts demonstrates not only the effects of "the hold," but how the hold itself has evolved from its origins on the slave ship; as new holds are constructed and demanded by society, rebellion is often necessary to dismantle them. Lastly, Octavia Butler's Dawn exposes the threat of neocolonialism, as well as the methodology under which subjection and enslavement is often justified. In each text, the protagonists exercise their empowerment to demonstrate that Black individuals possess the ability to change not only our nation, not only our world, but our entire universe. By tracking the evolution of ship in African American literature, a transformation is witnessed as the ship shifts from being an image of despair to an image of progress.

abstract: Modern and contemporary African American writers employ science fiction in order to recast ideas on past, present, and future black culture. This dissertation examines Afrofuturism’s cultural aesthetics, which appropriate devices from science fiction and fantasy in order to revise, interrogate, and re-examine historical events insufficiently treated by literary realism. The dissertation includes treatments of George Schuyler, Ishmael Reed, Octavia Butler, Colson Whitehead, Nalo Hopkinson, and Chicana/ofuturism. The original contribution of this research is to highlight how imagination of a posthuman world has made it possible for African American writers to envision how racial power can be re-configured and re-negotiated. Focusing on shifting racial dynamics caught up in the swirl of technological changes, this research illuminates a complex process of literary production in which black culture and identity have been continuously re-interpreted. In the post-war and post-Civil Rights Movement eras African American writers began reflecting on shifting racial dynamics in light of technological changes. This shift in which black experience became mechanized and digitized explains how technology became a source of new African American fiction. The relationships between humans and their external conditions appear in such futuristic themes as trans-human anamorphosis, cyberspace, and digital souls. These thematic devices, which explore humanity outside its phenotypic boundaries, provide African American writers with tools to demystify deterministic views of race. Afrofuturism has responded to the conceptual transformation of humanity with a race-specific scope, locating the presence of black culture in a high-tech world. Techno-scientific progress has provided important resources in contemporary theory, yet these theoretical foci too seldom have been drawn into critical race discourses. This discrepancy is due to techno-scientific progress having served as a tool for the legitimation of scientific racism under global capitalism for centuries. Responding to this critical lacuna, the dissertation highlights an under-explored field in which African American literature responds to techno-culture’s involvement in contemporary discussions of race. Rather than repeat nominal assumptions of Eurocentric modernity and its racist hegemony, this dissertation theorizes how modern techno-culture’s outcomes—such as information science, genetic engineering, and computer science—shape minority lives, and how minority groups appropriate these outcomes to enact their own liberation. / Dissertation/Thesis / Doctoral Dissertation English 2017

Cette thèse est une monographie de l'œuvre romanesque de Colson Whitehead (1969– ) replacée dans la perspective de la tradition littéraire noire américaine. Elle pose une question d'ordre esthétique et politique : Whitehead est-il un écrivain postracial ? Dans The Intuitionist (1999), la rivalité entre les personnages noirs et le jeu de masques mettent à mal une politique identitaire qui repose sur la race. La déconstruction du discours mythique qui célèbre le sacrifice d'un travailleur acharné désacralise le héros noir de John Henry Days (2001). Apex Hides the Hurt (2006) offre une réflexion sur le langage, son rapport au pouvoir et à l'appartenance raciale. La deuxième partie explore le paradoxe de l'identité « postblack » face aux stéréotypes raciaux dans Sag Harbor (2009). Enfin, la dernière partie signale un effort de redéfinition de l'humain dans Zone One (2011) où l'invasion des zombies permet de transcender la construction binaire Noir/Blanc dans un monde post-apocalyptique. L'analyse s'appuie sur la critique postmoderne car la notion de « race » et le racisme y sont abordés à travers l'ironie d'un texte qui met en scène et joue avec l'idée d'une société américaine postraciale. / This dissertation is a monograph on Colson Whitehead's fiction and nonfiction from the perspective African American literary tradition. It raises an aesthetic and political question: is Whitehead a postracial writer? In The Intuitionist (1999), the rivalry between black characters and the game of camouflage undermine racial identity politics. The deconstruction of the myth celebrating the sacrifice of a relentless worker desacralizes the black hero of John Henry Days (2001). Apex Hides the Hurt (2006) offers a reflection on language, its relationship to power and racial belonging. The second part explores the paradox of a “postblack” identity with regards to racial stereotypes in Sag Harbor (2009). Finally, the last part signals an effort to redefine the human in Zone One (2011) where an invasion of zombies enables the transcendence of the Black/White binary construct in a post-apocalyptic world. The analysis relies on postmodern criticism since the notion of “race” and racism are addressed through the irony of a text that dramatizes and plays with the idea of a postracial American society.

N. K. Jemisin‘s Broken Earth Trilogy explores the methods and effects of systemic oppression. Orogenes are historically oppressed and dehumanised by the wider society of The Stillness. In this thesis, I will be exploring the ways in which trauma experienced by orogenes is repeated through generations, as presented through Essun‘s varied and complex relationships with her children, and with the Fulcrum Guardian Schaffa. The collective trauma of orogenes is perpetuated through different direct and indirect actions in a repetitive cycle, on societal, interpersonal and familial levels. My reading will be in conversation with theories of trauma literature and cultural trauma, and will be informed by Afrofuturist cultural theory.  Although science fiction and fantasy encourage the imagination, worldbuilding is inherently influenced by lived experiences. It could thus be stated that the trauma experienced by orogenes is informed by the collective trauma of African-Americans, as experienced by N. K. Jemisin. Afrofuturism is an aesthetic mode and critical lens which prioritises the imagining of a liberated future. Writing science fiction and fantasy through an Afrofuturist aesthetic mode encourages authors to explore forms of collective trauma as well as methods of healing. Jemisin creates an explicit parallel between the traumatic African-American experience and that of orogenes. Afrofuturist art disrupts linear time and addresses past and present trauma through the imagining of the future. The Broken Earth Trilogy provides a blueprint for the imagined liberation of oppressed groups. Using Afrofuturist tropes such as technology, the ―Black Genius‖ figure and alienation, Jemisin demonstrates the power of reclamation and the possibility of a self-created future for oppressed groups.

abstract: The world of speculative fiction infuses the soul with the hope of the imaginary. My dissertation examines Afrofuturistic liminal imaginary space and the ways it is experienced as life-giving spaces. The imaginary and the aesthetics it births are formularies for art forms that speak to the hope of a transformed future. Speculative fiction, although in the realm of the imaginary, is an enlivened approach to express in the present collective possibilities and hopes of the people within those very imagined futures. During the past three decades, particularly, Black speculative fiction has been increasingly at the core of the new cultural productions of literature, film, horror, comics, fantasy, and music which tell the story of African descendant people. Afrofuturism is an analytic for exploration of the liberative revisioning of Black humanity in the face of persistent practices of structural injustice. My project presents the phenomenological exploration of Black Speculative Thought (ST) as it comes alive through artistic liminal spaces of Afrofuturist comic and science fiction conventions. I argue that Black imaginary liminal spaces such as Comicon Culture offer respite, renewal, and locales for creative resistance to thwart persistent alienation and nihilism of Black humanity. Furthermore, it is within these spaces where intersubjective agency can be taken up as a countermeasure to the existential realities and dominant hegemonic existences of everyday life. I examine the process, events, and experience of Black imaginary as it comes alive as potentiated hope for alternative futures. My intention is to marshal the theoretical specters of Critical Afrofuturism, Africana Philosophy, and Womanist Thought in this task. / Dissertation/Thesis / Doctoral Dissertation Women and Gender Studies 2019