In Sam Spratt’s cover art for the standard and deluxe editions of Janelle Monáe’s second studio album, The Electric Lady (2013), Monáe promotes the time-traveling power of Afrofuturism. Literally, she wears her ability to move among past, present, and future temporalities on her sleeve, or rather, her wrist, where she brandishes a barcode. According to the mythology associated with the album art, the “Digital Auction Code” displayed by Cindi Mayweather, Monáe’s alter-ego, “denotes that she is FREE and NOT FOR SALE. She has become a Q.U.E.E.N., an E1 Class android superstar, with full manumission papers” (“Concerning”).1 The barcode and the mythos surrounding it signal the convergence of multiple time periods. The code recalls the histories of African slaves who were branded by their American “owners” and sold at markets and auctions. Additionally, the code points toward present and future times, not only due to its similarity to the barcodes, matrix codes, and microchips we see and scan daily but also for the information it provides about Mayweather, a free android associated with the Droid Rebel Alliance that seeks to disrupt the futuristic human-android hierarchy that echoes contemporary race, gender, sexuality, and class conflicts.
With her aural and visual blurring of the boundaries between self and other; human and android; and past, present, and future, Monáe joins musicians Sun Ra, George Clinton, and Erykah Badu and authors Samuel Delany and Octavia Butler as a member of the Afrofuturist elite. Afrofuturism, the cultural aesthetic of a specifically black posthumanism, contends that boundary crossings enable black subjects to connect to black history in the present and also find authority in the potentiality of the future. With this blurring of subjective and temporal boundaries, Afrofuturism endorses posthuman theory’s embrace of liminality, a threshold state or experience of occupying two positions simultaneously. In songs like Monáe’s “Q.U.E.E.N.” (2013)—where mentions of Nefertiti, Harriet Tubman, and Marvin Gaye appear alongside references to “electric ladies” and “electric sheep” (a nod to Philip K. Dick’s 1968 android-abundant novel)—and Erykah Badu’s “Window Seat” (2010)—which brings together a blues guitarist and a character from Star Trek with the lyrics, “On this porch I’m rockin’ / Back and forth like Lightnin’ Hopkins / If anybody speak to Scotty / Tell him, ‘Beam me up’”—Afrofuturists reveal black identities and cultures as temporally flexible, grounded in the potential of the future as well as the power of the past.
Discussion of Afrofuturist liminality in songs by Monáe and Badu extends to works of historical fiction, such as Gayl Jones’s blues-infused neo–slave narrative, Corregidora (1975). Monáe and Badu offer new spaces and places for fuller black expression by putting forward in their music, videos, and album art imagined black futures as well as alternative black histories. Jones similarly uses music in her novel to endorse an Afrofuturist or black posthumanist temporal liminality: her protagonist hears stories of and sings songs about the days of slavery in order to communicate that moving beyond the pain of the past requires an engagement with both black histories and futures. Although set in the past, contemporary neo–slave narratives such as Jones’s Corregidora feature characters with a forward-looking perspective that allows them to conceive of their present and past circumstances as continually developing. These works of historical fiction, like Afrofuturist music and stories, participate in the black posthumanist project of finding personal and communal authority in the future as well as the past and present.
Afrofuturist musicians, writers, filmmakers, and artists primarily concern themselves with creating black worlds. These worlds might contain recovered or alternative histories. They might function as politically charged commentaries on the present. They might set the stage for imagined futures. No matter the specific purpose, the worlds created by Afrofuturists tell the varied and variable stories of black people and cultures as they exist throughout—or between—time. Mark Dery, who coined the term Afrofuturism in the early 1990s, states that the black musicians, artists, and writers of the movement have “other stories to tell about culture, technology, and things to come” (182). Dery’s reference to “other stories” acknowledges the existence of a history of stories, but his mention of “things to come” draws attention to the future. More than twenty years later, Afrofuturists continue to shed light on the relationship of black pasts, presents, and futures. Theorist and music journalist Kodwo Eshun ties the temporal connectivity or liminality of Afrofuturism to Paul Gilroy’s spatial and subjective understanding of the Black Atlantic as a “rhizomorphic, fractal structure” (Gilroy, Black 4). Eshun links the scientific and technological rhetoric of Gilroy’s definition to the “webbed networks” of communication that exist within the “digital diaspora” (More 00[–006]).2 His assessment of Gilroy’s language specifically joins the past (i.e., the root-like structure of the rhizome) to the present and future (i.e., digital webs of communication). The very language of Afrofuturist theorizing indicates that no understanding of black space, time, or identity—from Gilroy’s Black Atlantic to Monáe’s “black and white”—can be complete without an acknowledgment of liminality.
The Afrofuturist commitment to liminality presents itself most clearly in music. According to Ytasha L. Womack, a need to blur boundaries, a desire to “shif[t] the edge,” defines the genre (56). “There are no barriers in Afrofuturist music,” she states, “no entity that can’t emit a rhythmic sound, no arrangements to adhere to, no locked-in structures about chorus and verse” (57). As this focus on freedom suggests, Afrofuturism remains suspicious of authentic histories and identities and favors, instead, the interstitial spaces between powers, cultures, subjectivities, and temporalities. While this interest in liminality distinguishes Afrofuturist music from other genres—Eshun initially asserts that Afrofuturist music does not emerge from a musical history but rather “arrives from the future” (More 00[–003], 00[–005])—embracing liminality means that Afrofuturist music must look forward and, as Eshun acknowledges in a later publication, backward as well (“Further” 289). Afrofuturist music thus develops out of that which comes after it and that which comes before, including the “unruly,” “fluid,” and “subversive” genres of blues and jazz (Grandt, Kinds xiv).
Considering Afrofuturist music alongside the jazz forebear specifically reveals how Afrofuturism’s embrace of temporal liminality pervades even its ties to musical and other histories: both Afrofuturism and jazz demonstrate a commitment to creativity that can be linked to the future as well as the past. Jazz scholar Jürgen E. Grandt states that “jazz can be loosely defined as an art form pioneered and developed by African Americans that seeks to integrate freedom with structure, spontaneity with forethought, individual expression with collective interplay, West African musical residuals with certain European concepts and instruments” (Kinds xiii). For Grandt, jazz music’s engagement with seemingly disparate elements such as freedom and structure extends to a larger “jazz aesthetic” that highlights the “hybridity” of black culture throughout time: “the ‘blackness’ of black culture, of both the music and the literature, in fact thrives on hybridity, harnessing the energies inherent in the tension-filled process of cultural product as well as simultaneously affirming the African American (literary) tradition” (Kinds xviii). Grandt points to the temporal interplay present in jazz music, the jazz aesthetic, and black culture as a whole when he makes note of the present- and future-located processes of production and the past-situated affirmation of tradition. However, he laments that not all critics acknowledge these boundary crossings:
Literary criticism has tended to ignore or distort jazz’s inherent hybridity in order to posit a program of authentic blackness—or, indeed, in order to eschew probing the relationship of whiteness to blackness. Jazz suggests that any notion about and expression of “authentic” blackness is a process, a process that, like jazz improvisation, occurs in time and therefore asks to be continuously negotiated anew. And precisely because an authentic blackness embedded in time must necessarily also react to impulses from “outside” the African American tradition, the resulting hybridity does not dilute authenticity, but it is that authenticity: the jazz aesthetic in fact encourages the usage of extraneous material, as long as that material is brought into some sort of negotiation with the tradition’s historical conscience[…] . (Kinds 110)
According to Grandt, the achievement of black authenticity must be understood as a process that not only allows for difference but also incorporates difference into tradition, thereby altering the authentic black subject, the black tradition in which the subject belongs, and elements of difference the subject encounters. In this way, jazz hybridity and Afrofuturist liminality overlap: just as the future exists in a state of flux for each aesthetic, so do the past and present, as well as every entity that resides within these temporalities.
While both musical traditions recognize the mutability and interconnectivity of past, present, and future, the process of authentication prevalent in jazz music associates the genre with black humanism, a theory of identity and community that developed in response to a history of black oppression and the denial of black humanity. Theorists intertwine traditional notions of the human with the liberal humanist subject, a being characterized by self-control and self-determination (Macpherson 3). Despite the irrelevance of these qualities of humanity to women, people of color, the poor, and other groups denied independent personhood, many authors and critics of black music, art, film, and literature engage in what Eshun calls “a perpetual fight for human status, a yearning for human rights, a struggle for inclusion within the human species” (More 00[–006]). Theorists Alexander G. Weheliye and Marlo David likewise argue that black thought “has not evinced the same sort of distrust and/or outright rejection of ‘man’ in its universalist, post-Enlightenment guise as Western antihumanist or posthumanist philosophies” (Weheliye, “‘Feenin’” 26). Because the humanity of the black subject has been denied during slavery and other times of oppression, many black authors work to create what Sylvia Wynter identifies as “different modalities of ‘human being’” (“On Disenchanting” 243). Weheliye argues that these modes “incorporate the colonial and racialist histories of the ‘human’” into black humanist notions of identity, which emphasize “the historicity and mutability of the ‘human’ itself, gesturing toward different, catachrestic, conceptualizations of this category” (“‘Feenin’” 27, 26). Although critic Richard Iton questions the ability of certain words and concepts to become dissociated from embedded contexts and “hierarchical designs” (14), Weheliye asserts that, in the case of the human, revision occurs: if historically situated and made multiple, particular black “performances of the human” become disentangled from the white, liberal humanist tradition (“‘Feenin’” 30). Accordingly, Weheliye finds that black humanists’ contextualized, non-hegemonic understandings of humanity make the human a category worthy of ongoing consideration, one that he asks posthuman theorists to consider alongside their own readings of the black subject (“‘Feenin’” 40).
The project of black humanism, which acknowledges both the hybridity (or “mutability,” to quote Weheliye) and historicity of humanity in an effort to achieve an understanding of the black human subject, corresponds with the project that Grandt envisions those who embrace his jazz aesthetic will take up: the bringing together of the new and the old in order to determine a historically authentic—though always shifting—blackness. During their engagement with multiple, networked temporalities and identities—hallmarks of a posthumanist ontology—Afrofuturists draw on humanist projects by acknowledging the importance of black history without positing a single historical origin for authentic black identities. Eshun asserts that Afrofuturism “is concerned with the possibility for intervention within the dimension of the predictive, the projected, the proleptic, the envisioned, the virtual, the anticipatory and the future conditional” (“Further” 293). Eshun’s comments, though centered on the movement’s relationship to the future, signal the existence of liminal temporalities, since the future can “intervene” on the present and past. Afrofuturism’s predictive, proleptic nature promotes not only liminal conceptions of time but also identity: as past, present, and future moments overlap, so do past, present, and future visions of blackness.
Acknowledging blackness as an identity in process requires that multiple temporalities be explored together. In his examination of “black authenticity,” E. Patrick Johnson asserts that “the concept of blackness has no essence” but is, instead, “contingent on the historical, social, and political in terms of its production” (3). Manifold forces have shaped ideas of blackness throughout time; accordingly, even within Afrofuturist and posthumanist theorizing, which reject the privileging of history over other temporalities, using history as one of many reference points through which to understand the present allows for contextualized readings of black identity and community. Evaluating history in the search for black authenticity inspires critical engagement with constructions of blackness privileged in the present or anticipated for the future, since these constructions, like their antecedents, risk participating in exclusionary practices. Black narratives, such as those shared by Badu, Monáe, and Jones, function as “formerly unarticulated histories” (Rody 5) that work in the tradition of ethnic and postcolonial literatures and poststructuralist and postmodernist theories to destroy master narratives—such as that of the liberal humanist subject—and tell previously unheard or ignored tales. Acknowledging the “arbitrariness of authenticity” in these narratives prevents them from perpetuating the exclusionary practices of the master narratives they supplant (Johnson 3).
Similarly, considering posthumanist texts and the Afrofuturist aesthetic in the context of humanist (and other) histories works to ensure that posthuman theory does not adopt the exclusivity of certain humanisms. While posthumanist theorists Judith Halberstam and Ira Livingston determine history to be “inefficient as a method of processing information”—they argue that “[a]s history slows down relative to events in the realm of information and meaning, the future remains on hold” (3)—Carol Mason asserts that posthumanists should consider the past in their explorations of the future in order to understand the political implications of the very act of theorizing. She states, “I fear that without saying ‘where we’ve been’ and without defining specific political goals, even the best intentions [in theorizing the posthuman subject] can obscure the historical and discursive production of subjectivities, and consequently hide some of the political opportunities and pitfalls available in understanding such productions” (Mason 236). As Eshun, Weheliye, and Kalí Tal point out, this historical contextualization becomes especially important when considering theories concerned with identity, since ignoring the multiplicity of history can lead to privileging particular portions—or peoples—of the past.
The multiplicity of history as well as the relationship between historicity and futurity present themselves clearly in Afrofuturist music, including in songs and videos by Erykah Badu and Monáe. Each artist holds an important place in the Afrofuturist movement: Badu “emerged during Afrofuturism’s formation and frequently drops imagery and references to quantum physics, motherships, and the revolution in her music and videos” (Womack 146), while Monáe has been dubbed Afrofuturism’s “new pioneer,” “new avatar,” and “poster girl” (Calveri; Anders; Gonzales). Songs and videos from both women exemplify the time-traveling power of Afrofuturism, yet critics adopt a history-focused stance in regard to Badu, arguing that she connects her audience to an authentic past, and a future-focused position when considering Monáe, asserting that she brings her followers into a new tomorrow. However, considering the artists alongside one another confirms their shared commitment to temporal liminality.
Badu—who, as David notes, proclaims herself an “analog girl in a digital world” in her song “On & On” (David 697)—appears to be a singer and performer devoted to history, yet she embraces temporal liminality in her songs, album artwork, and personal style. Additionally, in her music videos she traverses different continents and time periods in order to transport black histories and futures into the present for the viewer. In the video for “Next Lifetime,” a song from her 1997 album, Baduizm, Badu travels through Africa and North American during several lifetimes. In the 2011 video for “Gone Baby, Don’t Be Long,” featured on New Amerykah Part Two (Return of the Ankh), released in 2010, Badu moves via conveyor belt through an animated world that references ancient Egyptian civilizations, the American Industrial Revolution, and technologically advanced futures. While these videos depict the continuity of past, present, and future, Badu rejects a singular, stagnant black history or identity by intertwining historically situated ideas of blackness with projections of black futures.
As Afrofuturist or black posthumanist pieces, Badu’s songs and videos signal that our present ideas about black identity and even black history develop from visions of the future as well as knowledge of the past. However, Badu demonstrates humanist leanings as well, given her assertion of an authentic blackness. David argues that Badu’s constantly shifting appearance “enforces a complex signification on concretized notions of embodied blackness through a series of reversals and ruptures while she simultaneously invokes a natural, authentic, essential black humanity that resonates within spaces of neo-soul identity” (698, 702). Badu’s seemingly paradoxical rejection of “concretized notions of embodied blackness” and embrace of “a natural, authentic, essential black humanity” links her Afrofuturist music to jazz, which similarly presents the “expression of ‘authentic’ blackness” as “a process that […] occurs in time and therefore asks to be continuously negotiated anew” (Grandt, Kinds 110). By directing her “gaze forward into the posthuman/post-black future and back into the black humanist past simultaneously” (David 698), Badu refuses to determine a single historical origin point for authentic black identities, situating them as in-process instead.
The video for “Next Lifetime” relies on temporal liminality to emphasize the continuous negotiations involved in determining authentic blackness. While “Next Lifetime” closes in the year 3037, the cast of characters returns to the “Motherland” setting of the video’s 1637 opening. Moreover, the costuming featured in the 3037 segment signals the continuation or return of history: the metallic face paint donned by the black men and women represents a futuristic aesthetic, but the 3037 robes and headdresses echo the clothing styles of the 1637 opening and the 1968 middle section. Badu further connects futurity and history through the cultural practices depicted in the video. Text overlay labels the event depicted in the 3037 piece an “ancient choosing ceremony,” which not only acknowledges the significance of history—the “ancient” quality of the ceremony gives it weight in the 3037 present—but also the function of the future. Changes in costume color, for example, show that the movement of time has altered the ceremony, yet the participants fold these modifications into the ceremony without comment. The present and future, then, become part of “ancient” history.
In the Afrofuturist videos “Gone Baby, Don’t Be Long” and “Next Lifetime,” among others, Badu exists as a liminal figure—an artist who, according to David, “performs in the breaks, in the gaps between essentialized blackness and post-soul possibility to project forward into future blackness” (705). Similarly, Monáe must be recognized for her liminality. Like Badu, Monáe uses her music, videos, and personal style to exhibit the relevance of black futures to current and past conceptions of blackness. Moreover, both artists draw upon multiple black histories in their work, connecting the black humanist search for authenticity and the black posthumanist embrace of fluidity.
Monáe’s “Q.U.E.E.N.” video takes place within a liminal setting, one simultaneously historical, contemporary, and futuristic. As the opening credits roll, a voiceover begins, announcing the existence of the “Time Council,” a future-located organization devoted to “stop[ping] rebels that time travel” (Monáe). The voice becomes digitally embodied: a monitor displays the speaking subject as a light-skinned, racially ambiguous woman who greets the two young, black women who enter the “PROJECT Q.U.E.E.N.” exhibit at the Time Council’s “Living Museum” (Monáe). The women—and more so the video’s viewers—find themselves ensconced in multiple time periods. The women visit in the present a museum that showcases “legendary rebels,” including two loincloth-wearing men and “Badoula Oblongata” (a pseudonym or persona adopted by Badu), as well as Monáe and several besuited members of her Wondaland Records roster, “frozen in suspended animation” (Monáe). Viewers experience even greater temporal liminality by observing a futuristic museum that displays as historical artifacts individuals who might not yet exist in our present (for example, Badoula Oblongata can be considered a fantastical, futuristic version of Badu).
While multiple temporalities intertwine in the video, ideas about the future shape the historical and contemporary significance of the legendary rebels, including their promotion of black identities. Throughout the video for “Q.U.E.E.N.,” understandings of the past and present intersect with expectations of what the future will bring, prompting viewers to call into question the received histories of black identity. When the two museum visitors play Monáe’s record and thus reanimate those exhibited, viewers witness the frozen rebels’ movement in seemingly anachronistic situations. First, the black men in loincloths play an electric guitar and drum set. While the musicians’ costuming and white body paint indicate their membership in an indigenous tribe, the men, who demonstrate their facility with contemporary and, at least in the case of the guitar, Western instruments, refuse to be located in a specific place or time. As opposed to the indigenous subjects of Jimmy Nelson’s photography book Before They Pass Away, who, Elissa Washuta argues, stand as symbols of a static historical blackness, the tribesmen of “Q.U.E.E.N.” mock viewers who might see them as purely historical or on the verge of extinction. The men, located in futuristic museum, embody posthuman liminality, offering the possibility that past and present understandings of indigenous identities may be derived from the future.
The video’s promotion of temporal liminality continues with its depictions of Wondaland Records’ artists. Monáe launched Wondaland Records in 2015—two years after the “Q.U.E.E.N.” video premiered—signing many members of her former Atlanta-based artist collective, the Wondaland Arts Society. While watching the video, viewers may recognize Monáe, Jidenna, and other Wondaland artists as existing in the present, but the personas portrayed in “Q.U.E.E.N.” visit from the past and the future. The voiceover at the beginning of the video announces that investigators “are still deciphering the nature of” Wondaland’s weapons initiative program and “hunting the various freedom movements that Wondaland disguised as songs, emotion pictures, and works of art” (Monáe). The very mention of “Wondaland” in the voiceover conveys temporal liminality: today, “Wondaland” evokes Wondaland Records, but when the video came out in 2013, “Wondaland” likely referred to the Wondaland Arts Society (though other possibilities remain available, since the video features people with the ability to time travel). Although the Wondaland Arts Society no longer exists, its members’ music, videos, and artwork can be found in the present; moreover, archives of the society’s web page feature proclamations of temporal flexibility, with Wondaland music deemed “the weapon of the future” (Wondaland). Additionally, Monáe—the singer, genomic “mother” of the android Cindi Mayweather, and “notorious leader” of Wondaland—presents herself as a musical weapon from the future: the liner notes to her 2010 album The ArchAndroid proclaim that she time travels from the year 2719 (English and Kim 219).
In the “Q.U.E.E.N.” video, Monáe’s Wondaland artists promote the power of posthumanism not only through their presence but also, paradoxically, by interacting with objects from the past. When the museum’s visitors play Monáe’s record, two reanimated Wondaland men—Chuck Lightning and Nate Wonder, who make up the duo Deep Cotton—transport themselves from a glass display case by clapping their hands. Once free from the case, Lightning sits at a typewriter, repeatedly keying, “We will create and destroy ten art movements in ten years,” while Wonder appears standing with a glowing incandescent light bulb in his hand (Monáe). At the typewriter, Lightning draws upon the viewer’s expectations that the future will disrupt present and past ideas about history and identity. Lightning seems old fashioned when considered in the context of writers who utilize laptops and tablets. However, the message keyed—“We will create and destroy ten art movements in ten years”—resists historicization: Lightning presents the creation of history, the art movements referenced in the typing, in future tense (“We will create and destroy ten art movements in ten years” [emphasis mine]). The typing, and the video as a whole, support Eshun’s claim that Afrofuturist history “arrives from the future” (More 00[–005]). Viewers can only imagine what the future will bring, what the art movements will look like, and why the Wondaland collective would want to destroy them.
The powers of the Wondaland members featured in the “Q.U.E.E.N.” video appear future based, since the members possess knowledge denied to the viewer. The now-archived Wondaland Arts Society website states that its members enjoy the “new and ancient” force called “WISM,” which brings together “Love. Sex. Wisdom. Magic and Wonder” (Wondaland). Additionally, the society proclaims a belief in Moore’s Law, the conjecture that approximately every two years the processing capabilities of computers double (Wondaland). Together, these concepts show that Wondaland members develop their abilities and philosophies not only from the recognition of history (the “ancient” aspect of WISM and the repeating, historical pattern of Moore’s law) but also their projections of the future (the “new” component of WISM and the predicted doubling of processing speeds).
Monáe’s video depicts these liminal understandings of black identity and power during the scenes featuring Deep Cotton’s Wonder holding the light bulb. The incandescent bulb looks archaic when compared to compact florescent or LED lights, and the use of past technologies is made stranger when the viewer remembers that Wonder visits from the future: certainly he enjoys more advanced technologies, yet he engages with equipment out-dated in our present. However, the absence of a power source that would explain the bulb’s glow indicates that Wonder accesses or produces an energy source not yet understood by the viewer, a source originating in the future. This future-based power transforms Wonder from passive museum object to active time-traveling subject. If the viewer must imagine the future as a site of power for Wonder, then his identity, including his racial identity, might be understood to develop from the future as well.
With history removed as the ruling factor in determining blackness, the future becomes available as a site for the development of black power and identity. While music theorists and science fiction scholars have undertaken posthumanist and Afrofuturist readings for more than a decade, these theories have relevance for works in other genres, including those genres that seem resistant to futurist projections. Like Afrofuturist music and stories, works of contemporary historical fiction, including the neo–slave narrative Corregidora, participate in the posthumanist project of locating black power in the future as well as the present and past. In Corregidora, Jones’s protagonist uses the liminality made possible by music first to reposition herself and her family in relation to their traumatic history and second to create a future for herself by becoming a different type of mother: the creator of a community.
In her 1975 novel, Corregidora, a text that spans from the late 1940s to the late 1960s but is peppered with stark descriptions of the physical, emotional, and sexual abuse a family of women suffered during slavery, Jones presents music as a tool through which her protagonist, Ursa Corregidora, initially reproduces but eventually alters her family’s moribund history. Ursa sings the blues, a genre that, like Afrofuturist and jazz music, engages simultaneously with historical and futurist tropes. The blues allows Ursa to bring the histories of her enslaved ancestors into being through song and also create a new vision for the future that shapes her understanding of her past and present experiences. This two-part project results in inconclusive readings about Ursa’s power at the conclusion of the novel: we do not know if Ursa repeats the past and reunites with her abusive ex-husband, though we are made aware that she refuses to reproduce one history and become, like her great-grandmother before her, a perpetrator of violence against the man who wronged her. However, the place of possibility in which Jones leaves her characters and readers emphasizes the power that can be drawn—potentially, at least—from a liminal subjectivity. Recognizing Ursa’s subjectivity as oriented toward the past, present, and future means that we cannot situate her—or her foremothers in the novel or black women and men from other works of historical fiction—as a fixture in or bearer of an unchanging history. Instead, we must acknowledge that posthuman liminality offers a constantly renewing source of agency for Ursa, her family, and her community.
Liminality becomes important early in the novel Corregidora. Ursa finds herself both estranged from and consumed by her family history in the present. While her mother, grandmother, and great-grandmother occupy her thoughts, Ursa struggles with her lack of a physical (specifically, uterine) connection to the women in her family. Following a domestic dispute with her first husband, Mutt, Ursa suffers a miscarriage and undergoes an emergency hysterectomy (Corregidora 15). Because of her inability to biologically continue her family line following the procedure, Ursa feels alienated from her foremothers, who stress the importance of keeping their history alive by producing children who will carry the stories of their ancestors’ suffering into the future.
While Ursa possesses a liminal subjectivity, given her position both inside and outside the family line, her foremothers’ narrative, passed on through the maternal body, reflects an engagement with a single, static history. Specifically, the family narrative relies on history to authenticate those experiences that have received no legal and insufficient cultural validation. Since the age of five, Ursa has heard stories from her foremothers about the necessity of communicating through the female body the horrors endured at the hands of the “Portuguese slave breeder and whoremonger” Simon Corregidora (Corregidora 8–9). Corregidora raped and impregnated Ursa’s great-grandmother and grandmother (his own child), whom he owned as slaves. Because no written evidence of this abuse exists, Ursa’s fore-mothers ask each female member of the family to contribute evidence by “making generations” (producing children) who will carry the stories of Corregidora’s past offenses into the future (Corregidora 22). Ursa states: “My great-grandmama told my grandmama the part she lived through that my grandmama didn’t live through and my grandmama told my mama what they both lived through and my mama told me what they all lived through and we were suppose to pass it down like that from generation to generation so we’d never forget” (Corregidora 9). Ursa’s foremothers rely on a family-based oral tradition to validate their historical experiences. Their stories carry the past into the present and future as they give ongoing life to Corregidora and his crimes.
In addition to propagating the family narrative rhetorically, female children stand as biological artifacts of Corregidora’s sexual abuses. “I’m leaving evidence,” her great-grandmother says, speaking of the stories she has told and the family she has produced. “And you got to leave evidence too. And your children got to leave evidence. And when it come time to hold up the evidence, we got to have evidence to hold up” (Corregidora 14). Ursa’s great-grandmother, grandmother, and mother offer their bodies and the bodies of their children as confirmation of Corregidora’s past crimes. These women expect that Ursa will likewise perpetuate the family line and transform her body and the bodies of her offspring into the body of history or body of evidence to be presented against Corregidora on Judgment Day (Corregidora 41).
Through their procreative project, Ursa’s foremothers participate in the obstruction of black subjectivity: they historicize the women of the family as well as the future of the family line. Certainly, the women of Jones’s novel work to bring the past into the present and future. Making generations necessarily implies some type of forward movement. However, rather than attempting to rewrite or respond to history, as seen in other black humanistic efforts, the women of Corregidora carry forward a fixed history. Moreover, the women authenticate their present and future experiences by linking them to particular past events. Ursa’s great-grandmother admits that the past continues to shape the women in their family, marking them as messengers of a history written by their oppressors: “They burned all the documents, Ursa, but they didn’t burn what they put in their minds. We got to burn out what they put in our minds, like you burn out a wound. Except we got to keep what we need to bear witness. That scar that’s left to bear witness. We got to keep it as visible as our blood” (Corregidora 72). Like the mark of race that, according to Hortense J. Spillers, historicizes the contemporary black subject, the scar that bears witness to Corregidora’s crimes hinders Ursa as she works to develop a future distinct from her family history.3
The family’s focus on an unchanging version of history represents a perversion of the black humanist agenda. While practitioners of black humanism may honor a debt to history that black posthumanist theorists avoid, the history embraced by black humanists must be understood as flexible and mutable. The focus on a fixed history in Corregidora situates Ursa’s foremothers as devoted to a destructive form of humanism that limits the development and even the existence of the individual in the present and future. Ursa learns that in order to give her life and the lives of her foremothers purpose, she must exist as an historical object—a physical record of Corregidora’s crimes—rather than as a present- or future-oriented subject. Like Corregidora himself, the women of Ursa’s family objectify the female body, perpetuating its use in what Camille Passalacqua calls “a paradigm of production and power” (150). The expectation that Ursa will use her body to preserve and sustain history traps her in “a cycle of trauma”: rather than freeing her family from the horrors of their history, the imperative that she tell their story through her body—her babies—makes her enslaved to the past (Passalacqua 146). Ursa’s second husband, Tadpole, notes that the focus on “making generations” shared by the women of Ursa’s family mirrors Corregidora’s objectives: “Procreation. That could also be a slave-breeder’s way of thinking” (Corregidora 22). Tadpole’s comment points to the oppressive nature of the strategies for empowerment employed by Ursa’s family. Situating the body as a repository for historical trauma means that the individual cannot escape this suffering.
Although Ursa cannot carry a child following her hysterectomy, the destiny assigned by her foremothers continues to control her. Reflecting on her music, Ursa realizes that she has been using her singing and songwriting abilities to give birth to the stories of Corregidora that her foremothers impregnated her with, which brings her family history into the present. Ursa states, “They [her foremothers] squeezed Corregidora into me, and I sung back in return. I would have rather sung her memory [stories of her mother’s life unrelated to tales of Corregidora] if I’d had to sing any. What about my own?” (Corregidora 103). Ursa understands that her perception of herself has been stifled by what Sirène Harb calls “stagnant versions of history and identity” (118). As she comes to realize that her much-discussed family history threatens to consume her, Ursa repudiates her ancestors’ strategies for fighting oppression and commits to changing her blues.
The liminality of blues music allows Ursa to alter her family history and personal identity. Blues music draws from historical forms (such as call-and-response form) but allows for the expression of individuality through the future-focused action of improvisation. Houston A. Baker notes that the “instrumental rhythms” of the blues “suggest change, movement, action, continuance, unlimited and unending possibility” (8). While Baker’s emphasis on change and continuance reveals that the blues relies on the past as a reference point, the terms also indicate the instability of history, since the futurist elements of the blues keep its historical components in a state of flux. In its creation of the new and “rememory” of the bygone and extant (Morrison, Beloved 36), the blues engages with early iterations of Iton’s “black fantastic,” the “notions of being that are inevitably aligned with, in conversation with, against, and articulated beyond the boundaries of the modern” (16). By exceeding the modern—which marks the black subject as less-than-human—and entering the fantastic, the blues anticipates Afrofuturism’s embrace of ideological, temporal, and subjective boundary crossings.
We can see the fluidity of boundaries in one of the hallmarks of the blues form, the “blue note.” The blue note is “a musical note expressed with a slight deviation”—specifically, a drop in pitch—“from its standard temperament” (P. Jones 166). Grandt situates the blue note as existing in a “crossroads,” a place “neither here nor there, defying the fixity of space and text, and yet a vital aspect of the story being told” (Shaping 80). In terms of temporality, the blue note brings together the past (the standard temperament, the security of what has come before) and the future (the slight derivation from the historical precedent, the excitement of what is new).
Carlyle Van Thompson argues that the blue note and other elements of the blues form appear in Jones’s text via Ursa’s repeating but varied statements about each of her foremothers sharing “the part [of family’s abuse] she lived through” (Thompson 75–76; Corregidora 9). Moreover, the blue note’s liminality ties to Ursa’s motivation for making music. Her blues reflects her dedication both to continuing her foremothers’ historical project (her acknowledgment of the “standard temperament”) and to modifying the method through which she brings their past into the present and future (her “slight deviation” from the established pattern).
Jones further draws upon the blues tradition’s liminality with her use of the break, a space of transition from one moment to the next. Albert Murray writes that the blues break is “a very special kind of ad-lib bridge passage or cadenzalike interlude between two musical phrases that are separated by an interruption or interval in the established cadence” (99). Murray compares the function of the break passage in blues with the function of a colon in a sentence: the break, like a colon, signals a pause in the “established flow of the rhythm and the melody” but not a full stop (99). During the break, a musician improvises, playing about four bars solo, before the ensemble falls back in and the rhythm and melody are restored (Murray 99). When considered in terms of temporality, the break can be understood to join the music of the past and the music of the future, given that the solo played during the break disrupts yet also dissolves into the established musical form.
Blues breaks appear throughout Corregidora, often signaled by Jones’s use of broken prose passages and italicized text. Donia Elizabeth Allen asserts that the breaks draw attention to places in the novel where “boundaries are confused” and “characters are unable to distinguish where they end and the memories and stories their ancestors passed on to them begin” (266). While, as Allen illustrates, break passages in the novel indicate moments of internal or external chaos, the breaks also function as spaces in which Ursa moves among temporalities and, significantly, engages with the future.
During one such break, an imagined narration tracing her development from child to adult, Ursa asserts, “I am Ursa Corregidora. I have tears for eyes. I was made to touch my past at an early age. I found it on my mother’s tiddies. In her milk. Let no one pollute my music. I will dig out their temples. I will pluck out their eyes” (Corregidora 77). Ursa’s proclamation of her identity during the break begins with her return to the position of a child, the time when she was first confronted with stories of Corregidora, but moves into a future time when she will fight those who would attempt to pollute her music, when she will resist her foremothers’ demand that she bear and birth only the stories of their past pains. Ursa’s turn toward the future gains additional significance when considering the context in which the break passage occurs: she makes her statement of identity during a dream in which she talks to Corregidora and her great grandmother, two figures from the past who infringe upon her present and future. Thus, while the break denotes, according to Allen, the difficulty Ursa faces in “setting boundaries of all kinds, physical, emotional, between past and present,” the break also marks a moment where she recognizes “the importance of coming to voice, of being able to distinguish the voices of one’s ancestors and one’s own” (272). As such, the break functions as a liminal space where past, present, and future temporalities and self and other identities overlap and intersect. In this liminal space, Ursa acknowledges the power of history—for example, her pronouncement that she has “tears for eyes” indicates that her foremothers’ past continues to shape her present existence—but she also shows that the history of the Corregidora women has changed by asserting her independence from her foremothers’ predictions for the future.
The presence of the liminal blues form in Corregidora necessitates an exploration of the novel’s multiple temporalities. As Madhu Dubey argues, the plot of Jones’s novel “raises the possibility that an uncritical preoccupation with the mother’s past might obstruct rather than assist the development of the daughter’s story” (253). In addition to recognizing the fixation on the past within the novel, we must resist “an uncritical preoccupation” with history in our readings of the text. Scholars such as Missy Dehn Kubitschek and Ashraf H. A. Rushdy offer productive humanist readings of Jones’s novel, asserting that Ursa’s subjectivity develops from her ability to rewrite the past (Kubitschek 147; Rushdy, Remembering 55). Jones likewise suggests the applicability of historical, humanist interpretations of texts. She asserts, “To liberate their voices from the often tyrannic frame of another’s outlook, many world literatures continue to look to their own folklores and oral modes for forms, themes, tastes, conceptions of symmetry, time, space, detail, and human values” (Liberating 192). Jones’s assessment of tradition-focused strategies for communicating applies to Corregidora, since her protagonist seeks to liberate her voice through the African American genre of the blues.
Discovering an empowered black identity through a link to history is not problematic; however, finding that empowerment must be derived solely from a tie to history minimizes the potential of present and future conceptions of blackness, as Jones’s characters demonstrate. Accordingly, in Corregidora, Ursa’s blues conveys the role the present and future play in shaping subjectivity and history. In an interview with Michael S. Harper about her use of the blues in her fiction, Jones suggests that the blues has power because of its ability to bring several emotions together. She asserts, “Blues talks about the simultaneity of good and bad, as feeling, as something felt. […] Blues acknowledges all different kinds of feelings at once” (Jones and Harper 700). Later, in Liberating Voices, her analysis of the oral tradition in black literature, Jones brings the concept of time into her assessment of the genre’s take on emotion, noting, “Blues pulls together and asserts identity (self and other) through clarification and playing back of experiences and meanings” (93). Jones’s statements about the blues convey that time periods intertwine and overlap within the genre: futures exist in the present, as do pasts. Accordingly, a critical examination of the blues—like a critical examination of black humanism and black posthumanism—requires an engagement with multiple, complex pasts, presents, and futures.
In Corregidora, reading for temporal liminality highlights moments when Ursa draws power not only from the past but also from the future. For instance, Ursa states that when writing her music, she strives to compose a song that brings the future and past together: “I wanted a song that would touch me, touch my life and theirs. A Portuguese song, but not a Portuguese song. A new world song. A song branded in the new world” (Corregidora 59). Ursa’s differentiation between “my life and theirs” and a “Portuguese song” and “not a Portuguese song” signals that she separates herself from the oppressive history of her family. While she desires to join her foremothers’ stories with her own, she views her music as a tool she can use to build and protect a future distinct from her family’s past. Moreover, the novel reveals that Ursa’s future vision for her music influences her understanding of the family’s narrative: the future she imagines can “touch” or shape her fore-mothers’ history. Rushdy joins Keith Byerman in arguing that Ursa’s singing of the blues signals that Jones’s character has “found a way to translate into a cultural artifact the oppressive history of the Corregidora women” (Rushdy, Remembering 42; Byerman, “Fingering” 178), a type of creation that changes her relationship with her family’s history and also changes the history itself. Unlike her great-grandmother, grandmother, and mother, who seek to bring their fixed history into the present and future, Ursa uses her vision for the future to revise the family legacy.
Ursa draws a distinction between interconnected temporalities, which she allows, and determinant histories, which she rejects. As such, Ursa’s blues reflects the power of posthuman liminality. Indeed, Eshun insists that Afrofuturist music “is all in the breaks,” the gaps between listening to specific artists and tracks and reevaluating “what you took to be the limits of Black Music” and “what you took Black Music to be” (More 00[–002]). While he does not mention the blues specifically, Eshun’s focus on the break suggests that the blues break can function as a liminal space. Through her blues, Ursa harnesses the power of liminality, rewriting the story of her family’s historical suffering and extending their family line in new ways. She rejects her foremothers’ command to give birth to generations in order to perpetuate an unchanged history, yet her songs create a community. Her friends and co-workers note that after her hysterectomy, Ursa’s voice develops a tone or quality that draws the listener in: “You got a hard kind of voice,” her boss Max states. “You know, like callused hands. Strong and hard but gentle underneath. Strong but gentle too. The kind of voice that can hurt you. I can’t explain it. Hurt you and make you still want to listen” (Corregidora 96). Both Tadpole and Ursa’s friend Cat explain that the audience is attracted to Ursa’s ability to communicate her suffering, which indicates that Ursa does accomplish her foremothers’ goal of bringing an historical pain into the present. Tad tells Ursa that when she was singing, her voice “sounded like it had sweat in it. Like you were pulling everything out of yourself. You were beautiful, sweet” (Corregidora 54). Cat similarly states, “Your voice sounds a little strained, that’s all. But if I hadn’t heard you before, I wouldn’t notice anything. I’d still be moved. Maybe even moved more, because it sounds like you been through something. Before it was beautiful too, but you sound like you been through more now” (Corregidora 44).
As her listeners’ words intimate, Ursa brings the trauma of the past—her foremothers’ and her own—together with her hope for the future. While she resists her foremothers’ singular focus on history, she does not ignore history itself—since she’s embraced a liminal identity, she could not even if she wanted to. However, the end of Jones’s novel signals that Ursa has begun to see her story as fluid, as beholden to the future as much as the past. “I have to make my own kind of life,” Ursa tells her mother. “I have to make some kind of life for myself” (Corregidora 111). When her mother asks, “Corregidora’s never been enough for you, has it?”, she, like Jones’s reader, already knows that Ursa’s answer will be no (Corregidora 111). In addition to directly rejecting her foremothers’ value system, Ursa’s statement about building a future—her assertion that she has “to make some kind of life” for herself—contrasts with her mother’s rhetorical link between her daughter’s past and present. When Ursa’s mother states, “Corregidora’s never been enough for you,” she uses the contracted phrase “has never been” to join Ursa’s childhood feelings and current outlook on the Corregidora family legacy. The distinction between Ursa’s present- and future-focused comments and her mother’s past- and present-concerned question marks Ursa’s break from her foremothers’ humanist project.
By using her blues to construct an alternative history and future, Ursa becomes a new type of mother: the creator and nurturer of a community. Ursa does not simply change the manner through which she completes the tasks set out for her by her foremothers; instead, she uses her music to separate herself from their ongoing and unchanging past. Rather than allowing her body to be sacrificed as the bodies of her foremothers were, Ursa uses her voice to free them and herself from the oppression Corregidora initiated and the women in her family perpetuated. Like the singing women at the conclusion of Toni Morrison’s Beloved whose wordless songs pour from their bodies and communicate a suffering larger than them, Ursa shares her story and the stories of her ancestors through her music. Her singing of the blues draws the community into the family’s tale, making not one person—a child—responsible for their history but asking for all of the community to participate in the creation of counternarratives. In widening and broadening her family line through the blues, Ursa allows others to bear the burden of keeping her family history alive, which gives her room to create a future for herself and to revise the legacy of the Corregidora women. This revision of her family legacy—the move to use her musical vision for the future to transform her understanding of the past—positions Ursa’s blues as a liminal genre.
In bringing together multiple temporalities and privileging the potential of the future, Jones’s novel demonstrates the power of posthumanism. Significantly, Corregidora features an open, ambiguous ending: readers are unsure of how Ursa’s relationship with her ex-husband, Mutt, will develop. While Ursa considers reliving with Mutt the violent assault she has been told her great-grandmother enacted against Corregidora before escaping his enslavement, she decides not to recreate this past (Rushdy, Remembering 48, 53–54). Instead, she enters an unknown future. The place of possibility in which Jones leaves her characters and readers emphasizes the power that can be drawn from a future-focused subjectivity. As Eshun states, “The future is a much better guide to the present than the past” (More 00[–001]). Accordingly, readers should not assume that Ursa’s life will be a repetition of her foremothers’ history: we do not know what will happen. Forging links across time, space, and personhood propels the black subject into a visionary position where all acts, including those that may seem preordained, can be altered. By creating new spaces and places for fuller black expression, Jones, like Badu and Monáe, promotes both alternative black histories and potential black futures. The relationship between liminal temporalities and subjectivities reveals itself in Afrofuturist music and historical fiction as well as other genres, including visual art, speculative fiction, and film.