Souls intact: The soul performances of Audre Lorde, Aretha Franklin, and Nina Simone

Abstract

This article redefines and regenders the meaning of soul in black expressive culture. The author argues that by the late 1960s the term encodes a narrative whereby racialized struggle yields a culturally superior style, and it shows how black women artists use literary and musical techniques to perform this recuperative alchemy. Reading Audre Lorde’s 1982 biomythography Zami as a paradigmatic soul text, the author contends that this text invites us to deprioritize concerns about the commodification of soul and to show instead how precisely black women artists such as Lorde, Nina Simone, and Aretha Franklin draw energy from the movement of the spiritual into the secular to create virtuosic, inclusive, and transformative forms of survivorship; the article suggests that they do so by weaving many genres together to create a home out of no home in the body, on the page, and on the stage. This analysis challenges interpretations of soul that privilege its marketization and appropriation and that reproduce a masculinist, heteronormative account, either as “fact,” in histories of popular music, or as the grounds for critique, in recent scholarship on “post-soul aesthetics.”