1st Edition

The Lemonade Reader

Edited By Kinitra D. Brooks, Kameelah L. Martin Copyright 2019
    286 Pages
    by Routledge

    286 Pages
    by Routledge

    The Lemonade Reader is an interdisciplinary collection that explores the nuances of Beyoncé’s 2016 visual album, Lemonade. The essays and editorials present fresh, cutting-edge scholarship fueled by contemporary thoughts on film, material culture, religion, and black feminism.

    Envisioned as an educational tool to support and guide discussions of the visual album at postgraduate and undergraduate levels, The Lemonade Reader critiques Lemonade’s multiple Afrodiasporic influences, visual aesthetics, narrative arc of grief and healing, and ethnomusicological reach. The essays, written by both scholars and popular bloggers, reflects a broad yet uniquely specific black feminist investigation into constructions of race, gender, spirituality, and southern identity.

    The Lemonade Reader gathers a newer generation of black feminist scholars to engage in intellectual discourse and confront the emotional labor around the Lemonade phenomena. It is the premiere source for examining Lemonade, a text that will continue to have a lasting impact on black women’s studies and popular culture.

    Foreword by Candice Benbow
    Preface by T. Denean Sharpley-Whiting
    Acknowledgements

    Introduction: Beyonce's Lemonade Lexicon: Black Feminism and Spirituality in Theory and Practice
    Kinitra D. Brooks & Kameelah L. Martin

    Interlude A: What Do We Want from Beyoncé?
    Maiysha Kai

    Interlude B: Bittersweet Like Me: When the Lemonade Ain’t Made For Fat Black Femmes and Women
    Ashleigh Shackelford

    Part I: Some Shit is Just for Us

    Chapter One--Some Shit is Just for Us: Intro
    Cheryl Finley and Deborah Willis

    Chapter Two--Something Akin to Freedom: Sexual Love, Political Agency, and Lemonade
    Lindsey Stewart

    Chapter Three--Getting to the Roots of "Becky with the Good Hair" in Lemonade by Janell Hobson

    Chapter Four--Pull the Sorrow from Between My Legs: Lemonade as Rumination on Reproduction and Loss
    LaKisha M. Simmons

    Chapter Five--The Language of Lemonade: The Sociolinguistic and Rhetorical Strategies Beyoncé's Lemonade
    Alexis McGee

    Interlude C: How Not to Listen to Lemonade: Music Criticism and Epistemic Violence
    Robin James

    Interlude D: Women Like Her Cannot be Contained: Warsan Shire and Poetic Potential in Lemonade 
    Shauna M. Morgan

    Part II: Of Her Spiritual Strivings

    Chapter Six--Looking for Beyonce's Spiritual Longing: The Power of Visual/Sonic Meaning-Making
    Valerie Bridgeman

    Chapter Seven--Beyoncé’s Lemonade Folklore: Feminine Reverberations of Odú and Afro-Cuban Orisha Iconography
    Nicholas R. Jones

    Chapter Eight--The Slay Factor: Beyoncé Unleashing the Black Feminine Divine in a Blaze of Glory
    Melanie C. Jones

    Chapter Nine--Beyonce's Diaspora Heritage and Ancestry in Lemonade
    Patricia Coloma Peñate

    Chapter Ten--Signifying Waters: The Magnetic and Poetic Magic of Oshún as Reflected in Beyoncé’s Lemonade 
    Martin A. Tsang

    Chapter Eleven--Beyoncé Reborn: Lemonade as Spiritual Enlightenment
    Lauren V. Highsmith

    Interlude E: From Destiny’s Child to Coachella
    L. Michael Gipson

    Interlude F: "Formation" and the Black-Ass Truth about Beyoncé and Capitalism
    Tamara Winfrey Harris

    Part III: The Lady Sings Her Legacy

    Chapter Twelve--The Lady Sings Her Legacy: Introduction by Daphne Brooks

    Chapter Thirteen--To Feel Like a "Natural Woman": Aretha Franklin, Beyoncé and the Ecological Spirituality of Lemonade
    Michele Prettyman Beverly

    Chapter Fourteen--Beyoncé’s Western South Serenade
    Tyina Steptoe

    Chapter Fifteen--Beysthetics: "Formation" and the Politics of Style
    Tanisha C. Ford

    Chapter Sixteen--"I Used to Be Your Sweet Mama": Beyoncé at the Crossroads of Blues and Conjure in Lemonade
    Kinitra D. Brooks & Kameelah L. Martin

    Chapter Seventeen--Beyoncé's Lemonade and the Black Swan Effect
    Kyra Gaunt

    Chapter Eighteen--She Gave You Lemonade, Stop Trying to Say It’s Tang: Calling Out How Race-Gender Bias Obscures Black Women’s Achievements in Pop Music
    Birgitta Johnson

    Interlude G: Erasing Shame – Beyonce’s Lemonade and the Black Woman’s Narrative in Cinema
    Aramide Tinubu

    Afterword by Regina N. Bradley

    Biography

    Kinitra D. Brooks is the Audrey and John Leslie Endowed Chair in Literary Studies in the Department of English at Michigan State University, USA. Dr. Brooks specializes in the study of black women, genre fiction, and popular culture. She currently has two books in print: Searching for Sycorax: Black Women’s Hauntings of Contemporary Horror (2017), a critical treatment of black women in science fiction, fantasy, and horror; and Sycorax’s Daughters (2017), an edited volume of short horror fiction written by black women. Her current research focuses on portrayals of the conjure woman in popular culture. Dr. Brooks is serving as the Advancing Equity Through Research Fellow at the Hutchins Center for African & African American Research at Harvard University for the 2018–2019 academic year.

    Kameelah L. Martin is Professor of African American Studies and English at the College of Charleston in South Carolina, USA, where she is also Director of the African American Studies Program. Dr. Martin’s research explores the lore cycle of the conjure woman as an archetype in literature and visual texts. She is author of two monographs: Conjuring Moments in African American Literature: Women, Spirit Work, and Other Such Hoodoo (2013) and Envisioning Black Feminist Voodoo Aesthetics: African Spirituality in American Cinema (2016). She is the Assistant Editor of the College Language Association Journal and has published in Studies in the Literary Imagination; Black Women, Gender, and Families; and the African American National Biography. She has edited special issues of Genealogy and South Atlantic Review, and co-edited a section of The Routledge Anthology of African American Rhetoric (2018).