ABSTRACT
This essay reads Beyoncé’s 2016 visual album Lemonade as the dramatic performance of a modern Pan African-seeking ritual. Borrowing from Yoruba, BaKongo, and Mende cultures, the album presents a model for Black femme liberation via the telling and showing of Beyoncé’s own spiritual journey. While Lemonade is superficially a story about Beyoncé’s relationship with Jay-Z, taking the audience through the motions of her marriage to an unfaithful husband, the visual album roots itself deeply in the story of the Black woman’s spiritual relationship with self, as individual and collective. Lemonade shows a process of returning to old values of Black womanhood and agency buried by diaspora, respectability politics, and assimilation. This essay critically analyzes Beyoncé’s progression to enlightenment through the development of her self-as-character in her visual albums. The visual album chapters Denial, Apathy, Reformation, and Hope are highlighted in order to explicate non-linear navigations through Black diasporic religious allusions throughout the narrative.
