Agentic AI and hybrid musical identity performance: an affective-ANT-Afrofuturist analysis of Xania Monet ’s post-digital storytelling

This paper examines the emergence of agentic AI in post-digital musical storytelling through a case study of Xania Monet , an AI-generated R&B persona whose sustained narrative coherence and affective specificity circulate across platformed digital environments. Building on algorithmic ventriloquism and phonographic theatricality , the study conceptualizes Monet as a techno-vocal human–machine compound, a relational assemblage in which human lyricism, generative architectures, training data, and platform infrastructures co-produce a culturally legible musical identity. Theoretically, the paper mobilizes an integrated Affective Actor–Network Theory framework in dialogue with Afrofuturism. Within this dual lens, AI is treated as an actant embedded in heterogeneous creative networks, while Monet ’s artistry is interpreted as a speculative intervention into Black futurity that reanimates diasporic musical epistemologies through computational voice synthesis. Rather than reproducing a disembodied simulation, her post-digital storytelling enacts a form of synthetic affective sincerity structured around resilience, spiritual endurance, relational rupture, boundary-setting, and reflexive engagement with post-digital culture.