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We are presently in an era when celebrities have more access to social media outlets than ever before, which gives them an instantaneous voice through which to mold their identities and politics beyond the iconic or the symbolic. Sometimes, as our public surrogates, they express our feminist sentiments in the ways we approve of; at other times they do so in ways that we don’t. However, Beyoncé summarizes the issue as follows: “I don’t want calling myself a feminist to make it feel like that’s my one priority over racism or sexism or anything else. I’m just exhausted by labels and tired of being boxed in. If you believe in equal rights, the same way society allows a man to express his darkness, to express his pain, to express his sexuality, to express his opinion—I feel that women have the same rights.” As she reminds us, celebrity feminism does not have to be confined to an identity or a way of life. It is itself a political process, participating in an array of feminist movements.

Dance theorists and legal scholars argue that choreography is by nature ill-suited to the conceptual framework provided by copyright, even as there is widespread agreement that works of dance deserve the legal protection and cultural endorsement that its inclusion represents. I reexamine the factors that are often cited as barriers to choreography's suitability for copyright. I argue that choreography is better suited to the copyright regime than it appears, so long as we recognize that the artistic standard for substantial similarity should be different from the legal standard.

Using the figure of the anamorphosis, this essay explores the critical labor of the music video for The Carters' \"Apeshit\" (Ricky Saiz, 2018, United States). By playing off the canonical artefacts of the Louvre collection, \"Apeshit\" stages a stunning array of lessons in contrast, thinking through blackness in relation to ontology, capitalism, and aesthetics. With \"Apeshit,\" The Carters claim blackness as an aesthetic and affective force of sociality incompatible with canonical archival methods. Instead, the genre of the contemporary music video emerges as a form of radical archival practice.

The identity of Black girls is constantly subject to scrutiny in various spaces, particularly within Hip Hop and education. Previous scholarship has noted that, as Black girls are compelled to navigate the margins of respectability politics, the images and messages of Hip Hop culture have always created a complicated and complex space for Black girls' identity development. The purpose of this article is to explore how Black adolescent girls construct their identities, particularly as it relates to ratchet-respectability identity politics, a concept called the Cardi B-Beyoncé complex. In examining the Cardi B-Beyoncé complex, I look at the intersection of ratchetness and respectability in educational settings and the influence of Hip Hop artists and images on the construction of ratchet-respectability identities. Further, this theme informs the need for a transformative, ratchet educational space for Black girls where the multiplicity of the Black girlhood experience will be appreciated and not silenced.

In 2016, Beyoncé published Lemonade, a work of art that exists in various manifestations: as a music album that includes twelve songs, as live performances (including her world tour and her appearance at the Superbowl halftime show), and as a “visual album,” an art film that consists of the music video clips for each individual song and visually and auditorily complex “chapters” which feature the poetry by Warsan Shire. This article focuses on the visual album as intermedial artwork that can be described as a soundscape in which the intermedial constellations fulfill a number of functions: Firstly, intermedial references are a means of cohesion that are responsible for the unified character of the visual album. Secondly, intermedial references result in a transcultural signature of the artwork. Thirdly, through intermedial references Beyoncé locates Lemonade within the cultural history of the United States and American music history in particular. Finally, intermediality acquires cultural-critical functions which in particular pertain to race relations and structural forms of discrimination against people of color in contemporary America.

This article conceptualizes “diasporic communion” as emerging from texts that perform as sites in which intimate connections among historically scattered people are animated toward resistance through an examination of Beyoncé‘s visual album Lemonade (2016) and its conversation with Julie Dash's Daughters of the Dust (1991). The works’ intertextual exchange, I argue, activate trans-geographic and trans-historic connections through layered citation of shared affective histories with the colonial encounter, slavery, and contemporary anti-Black violence. Highlighting the ways in which place functions as a metaphoric marker of diasporic communion in each of the texts, I contend that landscape both produces and extends geographic specificity through webs of referentiality. These webs of referentiality draw complex maps of African diasporic relations that do not rely on proximity, either temporal or spatial, in the creation of community, allowing for an expansive and fluid theorization of the African diaspora, even while it is attentive to specificity of experience. Such works, I conclude, encourage audiences to link their own diasporic experiences through them, which both cultivates discursive relationships and participates in the creation of living Black archives that are otherwise historically marked by absence.

The effectiveness of any haka performance is measured by the performers' ability to elicit an emotional and psychic response in the spectator: to incite ihi. The (re)action of US pop star Beyoncé to an impromptu haka sparked vigorous online debate. Stripping back preconceptions regarding tradition, gender, and ethnicity, this spontaneous performance is read as an unbound moment where reciprocal awe and respect invoke a powerful tripartite performative energy, the wana.

In this article, I argue that the spectacle of American football, and the performance practices of HBCU dance lines birthed within it and seasoned in queer nightclubs, propelled Black “femme-inintiy” from the sidelines to the center of choreographic and discursive practices of Black liberation. I wed queer Black feminism with Yoruba cosmology to analyze three protests instigated during three NFL events in 2016: Beyoncé's Super Bowl performance, the direct actions of Black Lives Matter activists at the Super Bowl, and Assata's Daughters’ protest at the NFL Draft. Ultimately, I theorize the generative potential of spectacle and uplift the organizing and labor of queer Black femmes and gender nonconforming people in the Movement 4 Black Lives.

Lauded a media genius, unmatched performer, and iconic symbol of black success, Beyoncé has become many things for many people. With the release of Lemonade (2016), audiences believed they had received even more intimate knowledge of Beyoncé, the private person. Grounded with the pain and struggles of ordinary people, she became more human and relatable. However, such conclusions are premised upon the assumption that Lemonade is autobiographical. In fact, we have no way of knowing which parts, if any, tell of her own experience, and we will probably never have that insight. A close reading of Formation exposes the contradictions at work in this manufactured intimacy. The song lyrics and video content are profoundly divergent; they send two different messages, and lack sensitivity toward survivors of traumatic events. The song itself continues to center Beyoncé, alluding to haters, paparazzi, and designer clothing. She ultimately places her stamp of approval on the same capitalist system that has oppressed generations of the same black people the song is said to empower.

This article reads the sonic and visual references of early solo career Beyoncé against the grain of a progress narrative of black feminist aesthetic and political development. Merging the work of contemporary scholars of black feminist visual culture and theories of black surface, it argues that disco and its legacies of black women's performative surfaces are a way to theorize black feminist politics away from the visual and sonic protocols of black cultural nationalism that still dominate understandings of black politics. Black feminist disco aesthetics instead imagine a politics rooted in the fantastic registers of black women's disco embodiment.