Abstract

This essay approaches world building from a political point of view, arguing that the way in which imaginary and immersive transmedia storyworlds are constructed in fantastic genres reflects a fundamentally political position. In the context of 1970s countercultures and emerging identity politics, the cultural movement of Afrofuturism provided black artists with a way of reversing the racist bias so prevalent in science-fiction and fantasy narratives. In the 21st century, Janelle Monae is an artist who has reinvigorated this movement with a series of albums, music videos, and stage performances that adopt the cultural logic of transmedia world building, but do so in a way that challenges the traditional ontological structure of such secondary worlds. By combining Bakhtin's concept of heteroglossia with Hardt and Negri's concept of the multitude, this essay argues that Monae's work represents an important challenge to the white-centric traditions of world building, even if her success simultaneously must rely in part on the cultural logic of neoliberalism.

Keywords: science fiction, world building, Afrofuturism, transmedia, Janelle Monae, Mikhail Bakhtin