A Closer Look At Jane 57821
In The Afro-Surreal Manifesto, D. Scot Miller declares that “Afro-Surrealism is about the present,” insisting that the unreal, the uncanny, and the absurd are not speculative or deferred—they are the lived reality of Black people now. Afro-Surrealism is not an escape from reality but a confrontation with its layered textures: the bizarre, the disjointed, etc. What appears fantastical to the dominant gaze is often, for Black communities, the ordinary experience of navigating a world shaped by historical violence, systemic oppression, and cultural erasure.
The Afro-Surrealist seeks “to uncover the unconscious in the now,” illuminating how trauma, joy, resistance, and magic coexist in the everyday. This practice reclaims the strange not as deviation but as a necessary expressive language for lives too often misrepresented or rendered invisible by dominant narratives. Afro-Surrealism bends time, warps realism, and recovers histories not through linear causality, but through emotion, haunting, and rupture.
This sensibility finds a powerful echo in the concept of the avatar as theorized by hooks and McMillan. hooks often writes about how Black bodies—especially Black women’s—have been hyper-visible, surveilled, and stereotyped in ways that flatten their complexity and humanity. For hooks, reclaiming representation is a form of resistance: the creation of self-defined images and narratives becomes a project of liberation. She calls for a visual politics that rejects imposed avatars—those externally constructed and often dehumanizing representations—and instead insists on avatars that are generated from within: avatars of self-determination.
McMillan extends this line of thought by reconceptualizing the avatar not merely as a tool of representation but as a tactic of performance, exploring how Black women artists strategically inhabit “simulated” roles—digital, artificial, exaggerated, objectified—in order to expose and subvert the historical framing of Black bodies as ornamental, non-human, or consumable. These avatars do not seek to humanize in conventional terms; rather, they disorient and destabilize the viewer. The performance of objecthood becomes a paradoxical assertion of agency.
These two frameworks—Afro-Surrealism and avatarhood—intersect in Janelle Monáe’s Dirty Computer: An Emotion Picture (2018), a visual album that stages the story of Jane 57821, a queer Black android whose memories and desires are being forcibly deleted by a sterile, authoritarian regime. In this dystopian yet familiar world, Jane is an avatar in every sense: a digital projection, a performative persona, a vessel of marginalized embodiment. Her Blackness, queerness, and erotic imagination are reclassified as “dirty data”—dangerous, deviant, deletable. But these very attributes become sources of resistance.
In line with Miller’s manifesto, Monáe makes use of rococo aesthetics (Tenet #5): her vision is lush, hyper-stylized, and emotionally potent. As Jane undergoes state-mandated cleansing, her inner life resists obliteration. Her suppressed memories erupt in a series of kaleidoscopic musical sequences—nonlinear, sensuous, saturated with color and desire. These interludes operate as ruptures in the visual narrative, rejecting chronology and coherence. The music videos double as flashbacks, fantasies, counter-histories—each one refusing the logic of erasure. Here, Monáe deploys Afro-Surrealism to literalize what it means to survive as data, body, and memory in a world that seeks to overwrite you.
Jane does not remain a fixed subject. She disperses herself across screens, voices, roles, and genders. She multiplies, glitches, refuses stability. Her shifting identities reflect not incoherence, but an intentional refusal of the regime’s rigid taxonomies. These moments of surplus disrupt the regime’s narrative control and embody Miller’s claim that “excess is the only legitimate means of subversion” (Tenet #6). In doing so, Dirty Computer becomes more than a speculative dystopia—it becomes an Afro-Surrealist project that foregrounds nonlinear time, affective truth, and the magic within oppressed realities.
Jane herself exemplifies Afro-Surreal fluidity. Her identity cannot be reduced to a single name, body, or desire. She moves through roles, screen personas, and affective registers. She is simultaneously lover, fugitive, prophet, and glitch. In this way, she inhabits what Miller calls “the Afro-Surrealist life”—a life of aliases, defiant in its refusal to conform to census or state (Tenet #4). She performs multiplicity not as fragmentation but as power.
Crucially, the Afro-Surrealist elements of Dirty Computer cannot be separated from its avatar logic. Jane’s memories are not simply plot devices—they are insurgent archives. Even when her body is confined in the cleansing facility, her mind overflows with vivid fragments of connection, intimacy, and defiance. These scenes constitute Afro-Surrealist ruptures in the systemic grid: moments when community and pleasure cut through surveillance and control.
Ultimately, Dirty Computer exemplifies the convergence of Afro-Surrealism and avatarhood in a shared politics of refusal, multiplicity, and speculative presence. Monáe offers a vision in which the strange is not escapist, but emancipatory. Through Jane, her glitching, shifting avatar, she shows how performance, memory, and desire can short-circuit regimes of domination—and how the Afro-Surreal can make visible the truths buried beneath imposed realities.
D. Scot Miller’s Manifesto: https://www.foundsf.org/Afrosurreal_Manifesto