New Formation: Janelle Monáe’s Radical Emotion Pictures
"Dirty Computer" finds Monáe not only inserting herself into traditions that can’t fully contain her but resculpting them in her likeness.
Adrienne Brown is an associate professor of English at the University of Chicago. She is the author of Race and Real Estate (co-edited with Valerie Smith, Oxford University Press, 2015), The Black Skyscraper: Modern Architecture and the Shape of Race and Writing (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2017) and a forthcoming edited collection of W. E. B. Du Bois’s speculative short fiction with Britt Rusert. She also writes about sound, performance, and pop music.
"Dirty Computer" finds Monáe not only inserting herself into traditions that can’t fully contain her but resculpting them in her likeness.