ABSTRACT
In this essay I offer ways of thinking about spiritual power as a performative aesthetic, first in the vocal intonation and visual archive of Aretha Franklin and then in Beyoncé’s visual album Lemonade. Using the phrase “natural women” I contemplate how Lemonade is itself an archive of sorts embedded with references to the work of influential natural women including black female artists like Nina Simone, Julie Dash, and poet Warsan Shire, whose poetic language provides the thematic and emotional anchor to the film. The film mobilizes the sensual and the sacred, the natural and the supernatural as seminal pillars of an “ecological spirituality” and self-making. Lemonade connects Beyoncé’s creative and spiritual growth to a network of spiritual “forces”—other collaborators, spiritual guides, ancestral and spectral presences, and to the afterlives of slavery, racial violence, and natural disaster. Drawing primarily from theories of black female performance and eco-criticism, I locate Lemonade as one in a series of visual culture texts in recent years that explore the intersections between the natural and supernatural and black artistry and southern life, including the work of artist Allison Janae Hamilton, Bree Newsome’s short film Wake, Dee Rees’s Mudbound, and OWN’s Queen Sugar.
