A Battle or a Conversation: Imagining Africa and Its Diaspora in Beyoncé’s "Black Is King" and "Lemonade"

Abstract

In her visual albums "Black Is King" (2020) and "Lemonade" (2016), pop artist Beyoncé engages with audiovisual representation as a way of "rewriting" existing narratives of Blackness and re-presenting the African diaspora and the African continent. The albums navigate a contentious space in which feminist empowerment mingles with sexual objectification and conservative gender roles, oppression is countered by hyper-capitalist consumption, African and Afrodiasporic cultures are mobilized or appropriated, and powerful counter-narratives are made in ways that can seem like hegemony reproduced. In this paper, I argue that a determinant factor of the ability to navigate those complexities is the notion of "community": its representation, its scope, and its tensions. Both formally and in content, Beyoncé and her co-creators’ audiovisual narratives stimulate a reflection on how to make the individual collective, the personal political, and how to unite disparity into “the Black diaspora” as a community and an addressee. Beyoncé’s Afrodiasporic projection requires strong authorship and the creation of a unifying myth. The ensuing narrative and profitability imperatives provoke the question whether Beyoncé’s visual albums can truly be sites for the envisioning of the African diaspora as a community marked by diversity, tension, and negotiation.