ABSTRACT
Beyoncé’s latest visual album, Lemonade (2016), created considerable controversy and debate given its main theme, the singer’s husband’s cheating and her unique celebration of her heritage as a Southern Creole woman. The video includes multiple references to African American history and to the current Black Lives Matter movement in which the singer participates. Interrogating the main settings of this album, particularly those of post-Katrina New Orleans, plantations and slave cabins, this chapter proposes that through Lemonade’s scenery and time narrative Beyoncé subverts Western notions of historical space and time as she simultaneously celebrates black diaspora identity. Within the elements of the individual that are central to the work, duplicity plays an essential role, as shown in the juxtaposition of images from a present-day New Orleans with those from an antebellum past where Beyoncé appears as the mistress of an all-black plantation household, providing, in such a way, a historically unlikely image. Similarly, the video juxtaposes images of Beyoncé’s private life, her ancestry and family, and of her public life, where multiple notable African American figures make a cameo. These two parts of the singer’s life signal not only W.E.B. Du Bois’s concept of double consciousness, but also point to Toni Morrison’s description about how their integration generates a conflict for any artist in the diaspora. With this diverse array of imagery, Lemonade extends its range of narrative, time, and place and establishes a debate about how hybrid identities subvert traditional paradigms to include a black Atlantic reality and discourse.
