If we are “the belly of the world,” as Saidiya Hartman, as Hortense Spillers, as
Gayl Jones, as Dame Toni Morrison, have repeatedly shown, if the brutal
history of Black women’s dispossession resulting from slavery—the “theft,
regulation and destruction of… sexual reproductive capacities…”—frames the
conditions of modern racial and gender inequality then what good is pop
spectacle? What difference does the sumptuousness of Beyonce Knowles
Carter’s luxurious and effulgent, two-decade iconicity steeped in late-capitalist
fetish and reified meme fodder mean in the perpetual struggle for fully-realized,
liberated Black life?
This multi-media, collaborative, audio-visual lecture makes a case for
considering the long arc and evolution of Beyonce’s elements of style—sartorial,
kinesthetic, and choreographic, vocal, auditory and otherwise—as the means
through which a Black feminist history of modernity is staged and relitigated
for popular consumption and rigorous reflection. It takes seriously Stuart
Hall’s influential claim that “style—which mainstream critics often believe to be
the mere husk, the wrapping, the sugar coating on the pill—has become itself
the subject of what is going on…. We have worked on ourselves,” Hall sagely
concludes, as the canvases of representation….” (emphasis Hall’s). Beyonce as
canvas acts as the portal through Black women’s historical imagination has
moved squarely to the center of the pop imaginary in the twenty-first century
with increasing stylistic depth and complexity and with a boldly curatorial
vision and strategy of execution over the past decade in particular. The result
is one of the most unprecedented, multi-faceted, complicated (and sometimes
contradictory) long-game arguments ever made in popular music culture about
Black women’s pursuit of their own material reclamation in the western world.
This lecture pursues a way in which to reckon with the scale of Beyonce’s epic
style-as history-style-as-Black-feminist historiography canon of werk. It aims
to do so through a mixing and melding of sounds from Beyonce’s archive and
that of her citational references across a multiplicity of recordings,
performances and concert sets.
So cue up the sound and vision—of 2002 Yonce’s Betty-meets-Angela-Davis
conjuring, the funk redux sexual rebellion coded in the soundtrack for a
humble leap into solo adventures; of 2006 Yonce turning Josephine’s banana
dance into “Déjà vu” head games, an expulsion of colonial wonder and empire
mounted in the belly of the Fashion Rocks beast; of Bday video packages staged
in the Louisiana swamplands as lush Trojan horse aesthetics that take you
first ludically, ironically to the site of America’s unsettled afterlives of racial
and gender subjugation; of fabulist Motown Dreamgirls glam as artful
meditation on the shibboleths of Black celebrity; of reimagined Fosse-Verdon
choreography as a theory of Black women’s virtuosity, as weaponry, as flight
and catharsis; of Lemonade plantation citationality as Daughters of the Dust
post-emancipation “Freedom” dreams; of Beychella Homecoming as long Civil
Rights struggle uplift pedagogy; as the Renaissance cinematic universe as
Marvel movie meets Afrofuturist formations; of a “II Most Wanted” on the run,
outlaw rodeo persona breaking the laws of Jim Crow recording culture and
riding us into the sunset.
Through collaborative co-sound curation, visual and sonic arrangement and
illustrative storytelling that yokes together the form and content of Beyonce’s
recording repertoire with her multi-dimensional performances, this lecture
aims to trace the story of Beyonce’s “born free” style and the way in which it
amounts to a “letting go” of the body that bears the traces of that history that
hurts. As our H-town queen begs us to do, we take seriously her call to “look at
that horse…” We’re on it with her. Riding with all this majesty, decked out in
Uncle Johnny’s finery, holding fast to that white Stetson, gathering up the
pieces of our wildly rich and rarely-regarded, prodigious lifeworlds in the
continual making, doing and undoing of something that Hall beautifully refers
to as “profoundly mythic…. a theater of popular desires, a theater of popular
fantasies. It is where we discover and play with the identifications of ourselves,
where we are imagined, where we are represented, not only to the audiences
out there who don’t get the message, but to ourselves for the very first time….”
Bibliography
Hall, Stuart, “What Is this ‘Black’ in Black Popular Culture,” Social Justice
(1993).
Hartman, Saidiya, “The Belly of the World: A Note on Black Women’s Labors,”
Souls (2016)
Jones, Gayl, Corregidora (1975)
Morrison, Toni, Beloved (1987)
Spillers, Hortense, “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe: An American Grammar
Book,” Diacritics (1987)
