ABSTRACT
Studying two reviews of Lemonade by white men music critics, this piece argues that their attempts to identify “the music itself” as separate from the album’s black feminist politics constitutes a type of epistemic violence with respect to the album, its creators, and its audiences. It is epistemic violence because it discounts the implicit knowledges music communicates in its aesthetics as knowledge. Reading black feminist aesthetics and criticism of Lemonade by black feminist writers, I show how attention to the album’s music offers an opportunity to dig into the implicit knowledges (e.g., about black women’s strategies for surviving and thriving amid patriarchal racial capitalism) it conveys.
