‘Cause I Slay: A Beyoncé Timeline for February 2016 by Simone C. Drake

‘Cause I Slay: A Beyoncé Timeline for February 2016by Simone C. Drake | @SimoneCDrake | NewBlackMan (in Exile)
I would like to construct a timeline and consider how it calls for a much deeper analysis of Beyoncé Knowles-Carter’s recent trending on social media as well as traditional news media. Almost two weeks ago, Beyoncé was featured in Coldplay’s new music video release, “Hymn for a Weekend.” The following week and approximately twenty-four hours prior to her scheduled performance at the 50th Super Bowl with Coldplay (the headliner) and Bruno Mars, she surprised the world when she dropped a new music video and song, “Formation.” Before media pundits and bloggers could fully get a grip on what had happened, Beyoncé and a cadre of black women took over the turf at the Super Bowl and stole the show from Chris Martin, the lead vocalist of Coldplay.
Because “Hymn for a Weekend” features Beyoncé in a Sari and head scarf, oddly adorned matha patti, and Mendhi painted on her hands, accusations of cultural appropriation circulated globally in blogs and news media (all of these sartorial practices are also prevalent in East Africa).
Because “Formation” opens with the first shot showing Beyoncé poised on top of a half submerged New Orleans Police Department cruiser, cuts to Victorian parlors, Hurricane Katrina turmoil, Mardi Gras parades, plantation doorsteps, wig shops, police officers surrendering to a young black boy dancing in all black, and then back to a final shot of Beyoncé once again atop the cruiser that is fully submerged as the screen fades to black, she has been proclaimed by largely black female academics and cultural critics to be “unabashedly black.”
And because her Super Bowl performance continued the narrative of formation, in a literal sense, with Beyoncé and her dancers clad in black leather and black berets, producing the letter X—undoubtedly paying homage to Malcolm X—in drum line formation on the Super Bowl turf, it became clear that Beyoncé chose to honor the 50th Anniversary of the Black Panther Party rather than the 50th anniversary of the Super Bowl on the most important Sunday of the year.
In a period of less than two weeks, much ado has been made on both sides of the spectrum about the whirlwind of performances. For some Beyoncé is a savior who is finding a political voice. For other she is an anti-white Benedict Arnold. And still to others she is nothing more than a capitalist appropriator or hyper-sexualized stereotype. I have no interest in debating or adding to the proclamations and indictments. Instead, I want to read between the lines of her performances and flesh out a different set of politics I think are at play.
In her “liner notes” Regina Bradley begins to dig deep into the creolized landscape and culture of Louisiana, identifying the African rootedness of black life and culture that are illuminated by the haunting past depicted in “Formation.” Bradley moves even further in the direction I want move in her Washington Post article that posits Zora Neale Hurston as a foremother to Beyoncé. The politics I would argue that are overlooked by Beyoncé enthusiasts stuck on the celebration of blackness are how the lack of recognition of a black women’s tradition of cultural production in the US is political. These politics fuel the anti-Beyoncé/anti-black backlash.
In my forthcoming work on black masculinities, I propose that black men deserve the grace Toni Morrison’s Baby Suggs insists black people must not only imagine for themselves, but that while doing so, they must also love their blackness. This concept of grace is relevant when thinking about how Beyoncé’s three recent performances can be read together as one self-affirming, black woman’s narrative of belonging.
Like some critics, when I wrote about Beyoncé’s “Beautiful Liar” duet and video collaboration with Shakira on her B’day [deluxe edition] album, I could have simply labeled it cultural appropriation and criticized her for capitalist pursuits. That would have been easy. Just as it is easy to watch the Coldplay video and say Beyoncé has no business embracing Desi culture, because she is both African American and a capitalist. Just as it is easy to question whether a multimillionaire gets to be a voice that critiques white supremacy and structural inequalities.
It takes a bit more critical thought, however, to think about if there are any alternative and less polarizing ways of interpreting the surely intentional scheduling of three controversial performances in less than a two-week period. Political? Yes, but I think the politics extend beyond Stokely Carmichael conjured Black Power.
My analysis of “Beautiful Liar” is part of a larger book project. In Critical Appropriations: African American Women and the Construction of Transnational Identity I propose that select African American women culture producers appropriate various theories of African Diasporic cultural identity in order to construct a transnational identity that they are often denied. Because African American women often are not mobile or do not take up residence outside of the US, they tend to be overlooked in African Diaspora and transnational studies.
However, when African American women appropriate Latinidad, as does Beyoncé in “Beautiful Liar,” or Vodoun and creolité, as she does in “Formation,” or Candomblé and Brasilidade, as do other artists I study, I argue we see a more complex blackness emerging—one that moves outside of nation-based and race-based identity constructs.
For Beyoncé, this looks like the creolized blackness Bradley registers in “Formation.” It also looks like the appropriation of Latinidad in not only the “Beautiful Liar” lyrics and music video but also in the re-release of the B’day album with Spanish-language tracks and duets with Shakira and Alejandro Fernández.  And where so many others only see either cultural appreciation or cultural appropriation, I see a much more critical—meaning consciously deliberate—act of appropriation in “Hymn for a Weekend.” In that video Beyoncé has positioned her undeniable black body—a lighter complexion and bleached hair does not make anyone not register her as black—as a transnational black body. In each instance, then, hers is a black body (and intellect) that is aware of a world outside of the spaces in which she dwells, whether Houston, New York, or her roots in Louisiana and Alabama. It is a black body that is learning to know itself through a mélange of African Diasporic theories of cultural identity and global expressions and practices.
It is also a gendered black body that is coming into her own as she thinks about how her feminist ideologies are put into conversation with her evolving racial pride and investment in a broad ranging social justice. Is that coming into being messy? Always. Is it perfect? Never. Can it result in performances of Orientalism in both “Beautiful Liar” and “Hymn for a Weekend?” Absolutely. Did I mention that finding one’s self is a messy endeavor? I sure did. I believe, however, that what I refer to as her cultural appropriations of everything from Latinidad to Vodoun to Desi culture represents a far more complex blackness than allotted to African American women by both dominant society and by many African Americans.
And when we think about the role gender plays within racial identity formation and social standing, her retraction of “You just might be a black Bill Gates in the making” to “I just might be a black Bill Gates in the making” in “Formation” says something about her larger project not simply being grounded in capitalism (something nonetheless really important to post-emancipated blacks).
With those lines and her brigade of afro-coiffed soul sistahs, Beyoncé is critically appropriating a transnational blackness that positions black women at the center of both progress (read capitalism) and activism (think Black Lives Matter). These appropriations and centering lets us know what Beyoncé told us she already knows, “You know you that Bitch when you cause all this conversation.” Because in many ways, there is no more palpable of a claim of citizenship than when the, “Best revenge is your paper.” I see that revenge as twofold. Yes, it is the revenge that affords her Givenchy, but it is also the revenge that affords her (and her husband) the ability to donate $1.5M to the Black Lives Matter movement and for her to have ever so quietly donated $7M for a housing complex for low-income and homeless Houstonians. And that is how Beyoncé truly slays.
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Simone C. Drake is Associate Professor of African American and African Studies at The Ohio State University.  She is the author of Critical Appropriations: African American Women and the Construction of Transnational Identity (LSU Press) and her second book, When We Imagine Grace: Black Men and Subject Making will be published  later this  year by the University of Chicago Press.