ABSTRACT
Invoking an undeniable black feminist language, Beyoncé’s most recent work delves into the machinations of existing at the crossroads of race and gender inciting controversial responses from some of the most prominent black feminist voices in the academy. For this chapter we present a close textual reading of Lemonade wherein we argue that the thematic and narrative structure of the film heavily relies upon African American archetypes and vernacular forms. Our scholarship, more specifically, articulates how and where Lemonade converges with blues ideologies and the conjure culture of the American south. We engage Angela Davis’ Blues Legacies and Black Feminism (1998) as the theoretical foundation for understanding how the blues function as a cultural mediator of gendered consciousness in post-emancipation life, and expand upon Yvonne Chireau’s assertion that there is a profound kinship between African-derived spirituality and blues music. Positioning blues as musical genre and social condition that works symbiotically with the conjuring tradition, we argue that Beyoncé’s Lemonade reflects what we term the “Occult of Black Womanhood”—a bluesy, spiritual matrix in which black women mediate the realities of their twenty-first century raced and gendered existence. Calling attention to the simultaneous deployment of the blues singer and the conjure woman in the personas of Lemonade, we contend that the narrative arc that moves from betrayal to catharsis relies upon these communal outcasts with proto-feminists leanings who also privilege communal healing. Reading Lemonade as a neo-blues narrative, we demonstrate how Beyoncé’s rendition disabuses itself from dichotomies of secular and sacred, generating a black feminist voodoo aesthetic that generates a space in which blues and spirituality merge.
