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INTRODUCTION
Self-identified Afrofuturist, R&B singer, and now actress Janelle Monáe has garnered both popular and academic attention for her musical creation of the alternate cityscape Metropolis via multiple studio-released recordings and videos. The futuristic city is the landscape for the tale of Cindi Mayweather, or Monáe's vision of the subversive "electric lady" calling on the cyborg trope that Monáe revisits in each trip to Metropolis and one that is frequently invoked by other Afrofuturists. A growing movement of black speculative art, Afrofuturism is an umbrella term that covers the literature, music, high art, and street art that examine both the metaphors of technology as imagined by blacks across the African diaspora and the uses of technology by the same. Working at the "intersection of imagination, technology, future, and liberation," Afrofuturist authors, musicians, and technicians rely on the resilience of black culture to imagine improbable and seemingly impossible futures, new technologies and new uses for old technologies, using the tropes of science fiction and fantasy to critique social inequality.1
Monáe's futuristic city, Metropolis, which features slavelike android laborers and a deeply technological capitalistic division of wealth, has been created over one EP, Metropolis: Suite I (The Chase) (2007), and two full-length albums, ArchAndroid (2010) and The Electric Lady (2013). The videos released for the albums likewise elaborate on the science fiction world of Metropolis. Monáe cites her inspiration as a collection of figures and texts including Fritz Lang's 1927 film Metropolis, Ridley Scott's Blade Runner (1982), and the literary science fiction of Octavia E. Butler and Isaac Asimov as well as her own escape from "a drug-addled family in Kansas City, Kansas"2 Each song and accompanying music video, such as "Many Moons" and its "official short film," can be read as akin to a novel in a series, each focusing on new themes or ex- panding on the universe of Metropolis. This essay takes as its focus the theme of digital revolution in multiple songs and videos in Monáe's oeuvre but centers largely on her song "Q.U.E.E.N." from the 2013 album Electric Lady, as Monáe tries simultaneously to free herself from the overlords of Metropolis and the larger listening audience from these same oppressive forces in a literal and figurative "Kansas City." Building on Lang's 1927...