Freakifying history: remixing royalty

Abstract

Afrocentric revisions of world history have given way to Afrofuturist imaginings of the future. In the 2013 video for the song ‘Q.U.E.E.N.’, black American artists Janelle Monae and Erykah Badu offer an Afrofuturist redefinition of queenliness. While visually and lyrically presenting themselves as queens, they repeatedly ask ‘am I a freak for getting down?’ The idea of being a ‘freak’ and its associations with sexuality, abnormality, and deviance has a long history within the African diaspora that centers on the intersection of different forms of spectacle and performances of (un)respectability. By situating the video within the context of Monae's Electric Lady album and a larger lineage of musical and visual performance, this article explores the relationship between remixes of royalty, respectability, and spectacle in black artists’ use of African diasporic and Afrofuturistic imaginaries, while arguing for the sociopolitical power of the conscious performance as a ‘freak’.

Keywords:

• Afrofuturism
• freak
• spectacle
• queen
• black feminism
• respectability

Acknowledgements

I thank Leigh Raiford, Jasmine Johnson, Tiffany King, Jason Hendrickson and the special issue reviewers for their comments, feedback, and support in writing this article. Permissions to use the lyrics to "Q.U.E.E.N." were granted by the copyright holders Nathaniel Irvin III, Roman Irvin, Charles Joseph, Kellis Parker, and Janelle Robinson.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. For example, the music of Fela Kuti. See Veal (2000).

2. They did perform in one modern art museum, the Whitney, in New York City.

3. This is reminiscent of what Richard Iton calls the ‘duppy state’. For an extended conversation on the potential political and creative power of marginalized peoples, see Iton (2008).

4. Their vow was not to use any European languages and only speak in nonsensical grunts.

5. Ebony Patterson has done similar work in terms of reframing devalued persons.

6. ‘Club women’ refers to those nineteenth-century social activists and social clubs run by middle-class women in the USA.

7. Other examples of attempts to find a voice for those silenced in archives include Elizabeth Alexander's (2004) The Venus Hottentot and Fatimah Tobing Rony's (1992) ‘Those Who Squat and Those Who Sit’.