can you please write a blog essay about niki minaj’s grammy outfit + the problematic and challenging terms of “post-afro-futurism”/afro-avant-garde/afro-kitsch (whether or not these terms are valid or inherently racist)?
when you’re not doing, like, other stuff, i mean. and so i can cite it in my (probable) thesis.
…
thnx in advance,
- beth
***
There is a certain danger in discussing topics like Afro-Futurism or a sort of Afro-Avant-Garde: Coming from the privileged white perspective, any statement could be charged with unintentional racism. But more than that, the term itself seems to suggest that Africans or African Americans (Blacks) are not included in the Avant-Garde project by virtue of the project itself. As if Africans are too different from whites to cohere with the typical avant-garde project. Afro-Futurism itself might be a misnomer: futurism was a celebration of the aesthetics of speed and war; Afro-Futurism is the re-imagining of science fiction with afro-centric themes. There is also a danger in engaging in this sort of investigation because I was never taught about Afro-Futurism, white culture does not (maybe can not) teach Afro-futurism, I almost necessarily don’t have access to it. I only can cite very limited examples of artists who could count as Afro-Futurist. My interpretations of the genre always feel a bit racist: I do, factually, come from the position of a privileged white person and any attempt to understand a black semiotics will be tainted with misunderstanding and threatened by accusations of a (possibly unintentional) racially motivated superiority complex.
And yet: by definition Africans are not really included in (at least) the Futurist project. Marinetti, in the writing of the futurist manifesto, makes it specifically clear that he does not want any minorities or subalterns in the movement: gays, women, the elderly, and (if not directly then by implication) blacks. To say that the term Afro-Futurism is racist denies the fact that artists like Janelle Monae or Kanye West have a distinctly different vision of the future than William Gibson or Phillip K. Dick. Perhaps we need movements like the Afro-Futurist movement to remind us of the obtrusively hegemonic presentation of science fiction and futurist art: cyberpunk art and literature is particularly guilty for featuring fetishized versions of women, blacks, and asians and coming from a sometimes exaggerated place of hyper-masculinity or even misogyny. One only needs to look at Neuromancer to see comically stereotypical depictions of space Rastafarians. The main female character of the book created a trope of the razorgirl: a (white) emotionless female warrior always clad in skin tight leather. By the end of the book though, the razorgirl is always charmed by the charismatic bad boy hacker protagonist and usually succumbs to his sexual advances. Science Fiction, like Noir, is usually presented from the point of view of the able bodied heterosexual white male.
As much as there is a need for Afro-Futurism, there is a need for art forms that depict the future from the eyes of various marginalized culture: feminist science fiction like Tank Girl and the Alien Franchise (with Ellen Ripley as the amazingly wise and strong female lead; the fear of the xenomorphs is a sort of abject fear of pregnancy or female power: the aliens reside inside the belly of their victims until bursting out, the xenomorph hierarchy is matriarchal, even the technological imagery of the films are bodily and cavernous like the drawings of Giger’s women), queer science fiction like the world presented by Lady Gaga or Fischerspooner (in which a quest for fashion, fame, and pleasure are presented as the downfall of society: more pleasure principle than will to power), and the Latin Cyberpunk works of Guillermo Gomez Pena.
Interestingly enough, the contemporary artists who most prominently and popularly display an Afro-futurist aesthetic do so by borrowing heavily from other cultures: Kanye West regularly appropriates science fiction images from anime like Akira and the colorful art of Takashi Murakami. Nicki Minaj calls her style “Black Harajuku”: a re-interpretation of Japanese street culture. It seems strange that these artists need to borrow from asian culture when Science Fiction already makes itself, in its very structuration, suitable to appropriation for marginalized cultures. The robot, as a literary device, can be used to represent any “othered” people: queers, blacks, whatever; as something slightly less than human who are often oppressed by human hegemonic authorities. The metaphor of the robot could easily be retrofitted to talk about slavery. Comics like X-men use mutants to represent any number of marginalized figures: expelled from regular society and viewed as a threat, the mutants must now cope with how to deal with the privileged human class. Janelle Monae uses the cyborg and the android (in her character Cindy Mayweather) as metaphors for the alienation felt by blacks in a white society. Janelle Monae’s afro-futurism is particularly interesting because it uses vintage and retro fashions to re-interpret the future, but avoids classification as retro-future because of its more predominantly racially charged themes. Grace Jones’ visual aesthetic deals with post-modernity and sexuality by appropriating the themes of white writers and artists like Andy Warhol, The Normal, and J.G. Ballard (example: her cover of Warm Leatherette, a proto-techno song about car crashes re-done as a funk song).
Perhaps analyzing one particular Afro-Futurist look might be worthwhile. Let us take (because this was the original request and because it is interesting) Nicki Minaj’s 2010 Grammy look. Obviously a take on the Bride of Frankenstein outfit, complete with coiffed hair with a lightning streak, this look cleverly inverts and deconstructs the Caucasian / male science fictional narrative inscribed within science fiction. Bride of Frankenstein, an iconic science fiction text, has been largely deconstructed by queer critics because of it’s queer villain, queer director, themes of gender equality and gender performativity, and campy mise-en-scene (see: Gods and Monsters). But, even before (or maybe next to) the queer interpretation, can we see the machinations of white privilege expressing itself? Nicki Minaj (or her stylist, or her creative team, or Givenchy who designed the look, or whoever) takes the depiction of the bizarrely erotic corpse-bride and literally inverts the tropes: the black hair with white lightning streak is now a white vertical afro with a black streak. The play on white and black is a sort of visual pun: while we can’t expect this mild stylistic gesture to bring to mind thousands of years of a struggle for power, the quirky inversion of the white/black binary certainly shouldn’t be overlooked. The replacement of the Bride’s white gossamer gown with leopard print could be seen (this might be a stretch) as a play on various class/race based status symbols: the white, elegant, classy and expensive silk of the Bride is replaced by gaudy, trashy, and tacky (“black”) leopard print. I do not mean to say that leopard print is “tacky” or “black” (or that black things are tacky, or any combination of those things) but that it is perceived as such by an imagined white audience. The silhouette of the dress takes an avant-garde McQueen inspired bubble skirt design, re-appropriates this white avant-garde, and sort of un-classes it by way of the gaudiness of the pattern. Minaj’s comment to interviewers coheres to a science fictional narrative in which fashion and glamor are more important than eternal life, companionship, or power: “This is all my hair […] At night, if I press a certain button, my hair grows up. I press another button, it activates the color in it.” By playing with notions of high class and low class, Minaj is criticizing these structures within and inscribed by white culture. By appropriating science fictional themes, Minaj points out the inherent white narrative and aesthetic within science fiction, and the ways in which power, class, and taste are played out in the genre. Is this interpretation racist? Might I be overlaying white semiotic systems as normative structures that Minaj is violating? This is very possible, and this objection threatens my analysis.
I feel uncomfortable classifying this look as afro-kitsch, if only because kitsch is such a problematic word. One man’s kitsch is another man’s camp: would afro-kitsch be things that blacks find kitschy or is it afro-kitsch because white people find it kitschy? Does the classification of black anything as kitsch by a white viewer have, within it, a certain racism? I think so, at least a little bit. Because kitsch implies a lack of a cultural sensibility or a lack of a certain amount of cultural capital, the description of another race’s set of semiotics as kitsch seems to be putting that race back into a subaltern position: we do not want to allow their semiotics to speak.
I don’t feel like writing a concluding paragraph. So: the end!
-eric
[interested in hearing more on this subject? Got any other topics you want over analyzed? Submit topics, commissions, suggestions, whatever by ask box or email!]
