The already porous boundary between Monáe and Cindi Mayweather is further muddled when she explains to interviewers that, “I only date androids.” 3
#Alter ego band montreal android#
It has historically been difficult to separate the android alter ego from Janelle Monáe the person. I am half human, part droid.” 2 This performative tactic in interviews is characteristic of Janelle Monáe’s public self-presentation across a career that spans almost two decades. 1 Monáe takes a dramatic pause, slowly turns to face the camera, as though attached to a dolly, mechanically pivoting towards the audience, and she says in monotone, “Hello, I am Janelle Monáe.” Her face softens, her natural timbre returns, “and also Cindi Mayweather. “Who is Cindi Mayweather?” the CNET interviewer asks Janelle Monáe. In analyzing the shift in affect from her first alter ego to her most recent, I detect in Monáe's alter egoing a critical optimism, a disidentifying strategy that begins to take shape in Dirty Computer. In identifying Monáe's troubled relationship with notions of normative identity through her first alter ego, I evaluate the relevance of posthumanism and Afrofuturism, which scholars have used to critique American notions of race, gender, and sexuality. Former President Donald Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign also utilized an affective political strategy, as he rallied his supporters around culturally white (male) nostalgia with the cry, “Make America Great Again.” I track the affective evolution of Monáe’s alter egoing from pessimism to optimism in the context of the anti-Black populisms of the post-Obama era (2016–), culminating in a close reading of her 2018 album, Dirty Computer. He developed his signature optimistic politics while he was a senator and he continued to promote his “audacious hopefulness” into his 2008 presidential campaign. Former President Barack Obama developed an affective strategy based on his personal brand of optimism, first presented in his book The Audacity of Hope (2006).
I understand Monáe’s alter egoing as a reaction to the affective political strategies mobilized in US electoral politics. The intellectual labor that Janelle Monáe primarily provides are critiques of notions of womanhood and Blackness in the United States. When alter egos are analyzed through this lens, the refashioning of artistic imaginaries become legible as intellectual labor. ABSTRACT In this article, I use alter egoing as a heuristic, a method for solving the problem of the evolving alter egos of Black women in popular music.
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