Posin’ a Threat: Countering the Colonial Project from Jay-Z’s “Moonlight” to the US Senate

Abstract

This article explores how Jay-Z’s music video “Moonlight” riffs off the Academy Awards debacle surrounding the award-winning film Moonlight and, in doing so, critiques the ability for Black cultural production and art to thrive and prosper within parameters controlled and mediated by white gatekeepers. Adding another layer to this commentary, I also argue that “Moonlight” inadvertently reinforces the silencing of women of color by positioning them in the service of men. Strikingly, both the intended and unintended arguments in “Moonlight” are evidenced through the video’s parody of the popular NBC television sitcom Friends. By adopting Frantz Fanon’s framework of decolonization, this essay analyzes these multiple layers to demonstrate how performance has been a site for Black artists to reconfigure stereotypical images and champion embodied experiences of blackness as a way of knowing. Moreover, this article also interrogates both inter-and intraracial tensions by rigorously addressing the issue of gender. While I argue that the music video for “Moonlight” gifts audiences with a performance that interrogates, disrupts, and reconfigures oppressive racialized narratives, I also contend that it reveals the need to recognize and address the vital role that gender plays in the ability to activate—or evade—a holistic process of decolonization.