Dirty Computers versus the New Jim Code: Janelle Monáe’s Datafied Performance

Abstract

While digital data networks provide new opportunities for anti-racist creative production and activism, they also constitute a powerful surveillance network that reproduces and even exacerbates racist social structures. This article focuses on the creative work of musician, performing artist, and activist Janelle Monáe, whose creative work across digital media platforms has developed Afrofuturist storyworlds that reflect this dialectic. By using androids and “dirty computers” as signifiers for processes of racialized, gendered, and sexual exclusion throughout her musical career, her work brings into sharper focus how digital data networks constitute what Ruha Benjamin has described as the “New Jim Code.” At the same time, her fully datafied performance in VR space as a transmedial extension of the television series Lovecraft Country shows how these same data systems can be used to creatively resist and potentially transform our understanding of these ubiquitous networks.