All Hail the Queen: Beyoncé Knowles and the Aesthetic Return Home in Contemporary Black Art and Popular Culture

In her ground-breaking opening performance at Coachella, Beyoncé Knowles brought us home. All Hail the Queen. This pivotal performance was themed on historically black college culture (HBCU) signified by a step-show, a marching band, and a dance-off with her sister Solange. Home in African American cultural production is not always attached to physical space. This deterritorialized consciousness is a result of historical dislocation and the experience of oppression that came with enslavement and Jim Crowism. Home resides in the idea of blackness transfigured through cultural production. Home functions as memory, metaphor, and lived experience in black art. This aesthetic return home has become increasingly visible in black popular culture at the present moment as illustrated in the work of artists such as Kendrick Lamar, Childish Gambino, and Beyoncé Knowles.

Culture has been the primary location of black identity formation in the history of the United States (U.S.). That said, cultural productions (music, art, dance, poetry, literature) have been one of the few arenas within which a sense of freedom was possible for African Americans. Work songs helped enslaved Africans survive a harsh existence, while spirituals such as “I Believe I Will Go Back Home” articulate an imagined freedom in a land beyond the nineteenth century plantation. These same songs such as “Steal Away” were used to guide runaway slaves on the Underground Railroad. Juke joint jazz and bawdy blues songs in the early twentieth…