From Lemonade To Homecoming: Beyoncé´s Visual Spaces
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.28914/Atlantis-2022-44.1.04Abstract
With the publication of her visual album Lemonade (2016), pop singer Beyoncé transformed her career. In this album the artist defines her identity according to her own parameters, not those imposed by the politics of respectability. Her later visual productions continued with this unique departure from her previous works. In asserting her aesthetic, Beyoncé engages in a visual paradigm that centralizes the African American experience. In Lemonade, the singer performs on a plantation, adopting a powerful role; in “Apeshit” (2018), Queen Bey and her husband Jay-Z dance within the Louvre, making visible how this space excludes African art from its displayed pieces, and on her live album Homecoming (2019) Beyoncé uses the space of the Coachella festival to make visible this African American college celebration. This article reflects on the artist’s employment of these settings to destabilize and contend with the imposed norm, that of whiteness.
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