The Lemonade Reader

Beyoncé, Black Feminism and Spirituality

Kinitra D. Brooks, Kameelah L. Martin

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9780429945977
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Feminism & Feminist Theory
• Index: Social Sciences

The Lemonade Reader is an interdisciplinary collection that explores the nuances of Beyoncé's 2016 visual album, Lemonade. The essays and editorials present fresh, cutting-edge scholarship fueled by contemporary thoughts on film, material culture, religion, and black feminism.

Envisioned as an educational tool to support and guide discussions of the visual album at postgraduate and undergraduate levels, The Lemonade Reader critiques Lemonade 's multiple Afrodiasporic influences, visual aesthetics, narrative arc of grief and healing, and ethnomusicological reach. The essays, written by both scholars and popular bloggers, reflects a broad yet uniquely specific black feminist investigation into constructions of race, gender, spirituality, and southern identity.

The Lemonade Reader gathers a newer generation of black feminist scholars to engage in intellectual discourse and confront the emotional labor around the Lemonade phenomena. It is the premiere source for examining Lemonade, a text that will continue to have a lasting impact on black women's studies and popular culture.

PART I

Some shit is just for us

1

SOME SHIT IS JUST FOR US

Introduction

Cheryl Finley and Deborah Willis

Beyoncé’s 2017 Grammy Awards performance relied heavily on visual references to the Yoruba river/love goddess Oshún, who is associated with sweetness, acts of kindness and generosity, calmness, and bountiful love. Beyoncé is deeply committed to changing visual narratives about being black and female. She is dedicated to researching historical narratives from fashion, beauty, religion, and the everyday—from fifteenth-century art history paintings to the black power movement of the twentieth century to black lives matter protests of the twenty-first century. Her artistry explores unique and distinctive moments in history that focus on today while harkening aesthetics of the past. Beyoncé converges the politics of beauty to political moments that transform memory.

For example, she referenced Oshún, who is one of the seven major Yoruba (Nigerian ethnic group) gods or deities incorporated into Santería, a creolized religion combining elements of Catholicism, brought to the Americas through the transatlantic slave trade hundreds of years ago. Oshún bore twins to Shangó, the thunder deity, with whom she ruled from his expansive brass palace. Hence, the brassy/gold hue of Beyoncé’s elaborate crown and regal robe reference the wealth of brass objects—bracelets, fans, earrings, staffs, and swords—accumulated by Oshún as the mother of Yoruba twins. Known for her powerful maternal instinct, Oshún is a fierce, loving goddess who is charged with protecting not only her existing children, but also her unborn children and, by extension, future generations. We see this in Beyoncé’s performance with the participation of her own mother, Tina Knowles, and then her daughter, Blue Ivy. Of course, we are now aware that she birthed twins shortly after this performance. The contemporary relevance and power of this transgenerational visual/spiritual reference is one that, to our mind, also references the political necessity of conscious musicians and recording artists like Beyoncé, who have taken on the responsibility of motivating, empowering, and mobilizing African Americans through visual and aural reference to historical and contemporary shared experiences. This is especially evident in Lemonade—in its imagery and in the titles and lyrics of the songs—which seek to link African American history with the contemporary moment. At times, the chorus of women dancers referenced Oshún’s watery, river goddess origins, and sometimes reflected the other goddesses that made up the multifaceted uber-goddess enacted by Beyoncé, including the African river goddess Mami Wata and the multi-armed Hindu goddess Kali (when she’s wearing the beaded bikini and flowing drape) associated with love, death, and sexuality.

In addition to her association with maternity, power, and protection, Oshún’s connection to love and to the golden color of brass and its durable quality are also evident in Beyoncé’s performance—from the radiating, flowered crown to the reflective, brass/yellow/golden robe to the oversized throne, which in its tilting motion faces toward the sun, again projecting her connection to the heavens, as a powerful goddess. The flowers onstage and in her hair send a shout out to the Roman goddess Venus, the goddess of love, fertility, and beauty. Oshún is also associated with extreme beauty and that beauty—the beauty of black people, black women, girls, men, and boys—is a quality that Beyoncé not only exudes, but always has been keen on representing, projecting, and teaching to her own family and to her larger public family and fan base.

This first section, “Some Shit is Just for Us,” frames a black interior through the writings of Lindsey Stewart, Janell Hobson, LaKisha Simmons, and Alexis McGee. Stewart introduces Beyoncé as an interlocutor reimagining freedom, connecting the notion to love and agency in Lemonade. Hobson engages Beyoncé through feminist critique such as bell hooks on hypervisibility, beauty, and the politics of hair. Simmons locates stories of renewal in the work of Beyoncé by linking the historical with the present. It is a haunting reflection on loss and motherhood. McGee explores the impact of Beyoncé’s oeuvre through performance and narration. Hybridity is explored through identity, representation, and spectacle. This section explores the commonalities found in Beyoncé’s use of historical accounts in her reenactments with detailed content of the everyday of black womanhood which invites us to explore fantasy, hope, loss, and possibility.

2

SOMETHING AKIN TO FREEDOM

Sexual love, political agency, and Lemonade

Lindsey Stewart

There is “something akin to freedom,” Harriet Jacobs writes in Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, within voluntary sexual love under slavery (Jacobs 2001, 48). This insight, the kinship of sexual love and freedom, can be seen in many black cultural productions, from literature such as Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937 [2006]) to visual albums such as Beyoncé Knowles’s Lemonade (2016). In this essay, I develop the role of black spiritual traditions in the kinship formed between sexual love and freedom. I pair Their Eyes Were Watching God and Lemonade because the controversy they have sparked bear striking similarities that underscore how our conceptions of political agency still require improvement. That is, grasping the emancipatory effects of this kinship requires that we expand our notions of political agency beyond protest. For instance, Richard Wright thought Hurston’s emphasis on sexual love indicated that her novel was not “serious fiction” (Wright 1994, 25). Similarly, Lemonade’s emphasis on love (both self and familial) rings hollow to bell hooks without accompanying calls “for an end to patriarchal domination” (hooks 2016).

Indeed, upon reading hooks’s “Moving Beyond Pain,” a critique of Lemonade, I was struck by how much it resonates with Wright’s “Between Laughter and Tears,” a critique of Their Eyes Watching God. Both argue that the artists in question are not really producing art for black people’s benefits; rather, they are exploiting aspects of black culture for their own personal profit.¹ Both can appreciate various aesthetic aspects of the pieces reviewed, yet they conclude that these works of art are underdeveloped in their portraits of black life. For example, Wright claims that Hurston’s characters “swing like a pendulum eternally in that safe and narrow orbit in which America likes to see the Negro live: between laughter and tears” (Wright 1937, 25). Likewise, hook argues that Beyoncé’s album “stays within a conventional stereotypical framework, where the black woman is always a victim.”

Both then and now, these critiques may strike us as missing fundamental aspects of the pieces reviewed. Why, for instance, do they ultimately miss the themes of the pieces reviewed?² A significant clue is their lack of attention to the role of black spiritual traditions in their artistic appraisals, due to their narrow focus on protest. As Angela Davis argues in Blues Legacies and Black Feminism, “[t]he articulation of a specifically black aesthetic … cannot locate itself in the living tradition of African-American culture without taking seriously the practices variously called conjure, voodoo, and hoodoo” (Davis 1998, 159). In this essay, I argue that exploring sexual love within the context of black spiritual traditions offers a different conception of political agency that both Wright and hooks miss.

Hurston’s missing theme

One way to contextualize Wright’s critique of Hurston is to consider his “Blueprint for Negro Writing,” originally written in the same year as “Between Laughter and Tears.” In this essay, Wright specifies guidelines for black writers, notably their use of black folklore, as a way to develop their political responsibilities to black folk. While folklore is a term that has long fallen out of fashion, it can often serve as a divining rod of classed, gendered, and regional influences within black political thought. How a thinker delimits folklore, those traditions they emphasize as defining “the black experience,” can tell us a lot about their politics. And it can diagnose how class, gender, and regional identity inform a thinker’s definition of political agency.

Wright opens the essay with a critique of a current trend of black writing. He argues that black intellectuals were trying to “plead with white America for justice” (Wright 1994, 97–8)—which means they ceased to write works for black folk. Raising an implicit critique of the Harlem renaissance’s attraction to the class-based, racial-uplift program, Wright urges black writers to return to our folklore for source material. For folklore, on Wright’s account, is an element of black culture that is “addressed to him; a culture which has, for good or ill, helped to clarify his consciousness and create emotional attitudes which are conducive to action” (Wright 1937, 99). That is, folklore is the “most indigenous and complete expression” of black life, carrying “the collective sense of Negro life in America” (Wright 1994, 99). This is because folklore “rose out of a unified sense of common life and a common fate” (Wright 1994, 100). As a result, black folk traditions “embod[y] the memories and hopes of [our] struggle for freedom” (Wright 1994, 100)—which makes black folklore an important tool for liberation.

It is important to highlight Wright’s central example of black folklore. He writes:

Not yet caught in paint or stone, and as yet but feebly depicted in the poem and novel, the Negroes’ most powerful images of hope and despair still remains in the fluid state of daily speech. How many John Henrys have lived and died on the lips of these black people? (Wright 1994, 100)

Lawrence Levine argues that John Henry is the central black folklore figure. A “steel-driving-man,” John Henry worked to clear the way for the tracks of the Chesapeake and Ohio Railways. With his natural strength alone, he bore into mountain rock, beating pace of the steam-powered hammer of the white man. There are many endings to the story, including death from his heart giving out to third-day resurrections. His legend symbolizes not only the brutal work that many African American men faced, often involuntarily through chain gangs, but it also symbolizes the tension wrought by industrialization’s creep upon manual labor. And he is beloved because he beat the white man (industrialization) at his own game (Levine 1977, 420).

John Henry draws up a number of things about Wright’s politics. For instance, John Henry’s power (his hammer) is also sexualized.³ As a result, the stakes in this fight against the white man include the restoration of the black man’s sexuality—a theme that, Hurston claims, preoccupies Wright in Uncle Tom’s Children. ⁴ Folklore, for Wright, is formed in the “absences of fixed and nourishing forms of culture” (Wright 1994, 99). Through this figure, Wright emphasizes our being violently ripped from Africa, and he disavows any lingering cultural connections. It is also important to note that this includes black spiritual traditions, which Wright separates very early in “Blueprint” from black folk traditions (Wright 1994, 99).⁵ As a result, John Henry is alone: cut off from ancestors both physically (being ripped from Africa) and culturally (being stripped of their tradition). Finally, John Henry signifies open, direct, honest protest against whites. Levine writes, “[John Henry] defeat[s] rivals … directly and publicly,” being “contemptuous of guile and indirection” (Levine 1977, 426). By examining Wright’s pick of folk heroes, we find that the “collective sense” of black life in America is defined, for Wright, by tragic struggle, heroic strife, and direct confrontation with whites. As such, protest is the privileged mode of black political agency for Wright. Black life is consumed with our struggle against race and class oppression, as exemplified in the folk-hero “John Henry.”

As June Jordan’s insightful essay, “Notes Toward a Black Balancing of Love and Hatred,” demonstrates, privileging protest in our assessment of political agency can cause us to miss other modes of agency (such as “self-affirmation” or love).⁶ I argue that Wright’s preference for protest hinders him from seeing the politics at work in Their Eyes Were Watching God. His claim that Hurston had “no basic id...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• List of illustrations
• List of contributors
• Foreword by Candice Benbow
• Preface by T. Denean Sharpley-Whiting
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: Beyoncé’s Lemonade lexicon Black feminism and spirituality in theory and practice
• Interlude A: What do we want from Beyoncé?
• Interlude B: Bittersweet like me When the lemonade ain’t made for Black fat femmes and women
• PART I: Some shit is just for us
• PART II: Of her spiritual strivings
• PART III: The lady sings her legacy
• Afterword by Regina N. Bradley
• Index