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The conjure woman11/25/2022 ![]() Her battle cry to the “ladies”-”Let’s get in formation”-also doubles as both a call to perfect the dance and a call to militarize, to come together in collective defense of our selves, our families, our neighborhoods, and our communities. As the Crunk Feminist Collective would say, Beyoncé is here to embrace “ disrespectability politics” in a bid to reclaim black female sexuality for us, by us. ![]() Their presence in the video suggests an ancestral backdrop to the more present-day twerking of the red-clad dancers in that same parlor, who already disrupt these respectability politics by donning shoulder pads, pearls that could be easily clutched and booty-hugging bodysuits that emphasize their raunchy sexiness. The pop star also gives her ancestral pedigree, “My daddy Alabama, Mama Louisiana/ You mix that negro with that Creole make a Texas bama,” against the backdrop of a parlor where portraits of an African king and queen hang from the walls.īedecked in Victorian dresses, the “parlor ladies” that Beyoncé and her group of women embody exist ambiguously between the respectability of “New Negro womanhood” from the era and the less reputable positioning of “Creole” courtesans and concubines that birthed the multiple colors of blackness. Empty swimming pools and parking lots suggest abandonment and an opportunity for rebuilding and resurrection. However, the video presents a catalog of visuals signifying Southern blackness, with echoes of the African Diaspora and the post-industrial world, as well as the historical. In reclaiming black life, Beyoncé returns to a simplicity of language, in which the simplest phrase-”Slay trick, or get eliminated”-is loaded with exponential meaning. ![]() Her lyrics are deceptively simple, reduced to local Southern lingo and repetitive phrases. But black culture has survived due to her resourcefulness in preserving the cultural memory from the African continent by remixing it with other cultures here in North America through food, healing rituals and practices and chanting-note how the song itself falls somewhere between Beyoncé singing and rapping. The black conjure woman herself has long been a figure demonized in American culture. She will conjure it, remix it and remind us of the inherent value of black lives (and why they matter). Beyoncé is here to reclaim all the aspects of black life that have been rendered as deviant, as waste, as toxic, as destructive. It is no coincidence that her first line, “Y’all haters corny with that illuminati mess,” both doubles as a refutation of the conspiracy theory of her involvement with a secret Satanic society as well as an embrace of an African religion that has long been demonized by church folks. Here is no clearer example of the pop star’s insistence on blurring the boundaries and inhabiting the crossroads: between the living and the dead, between the feminine and the masculine, between the heteronormative and the queer, between the sacred and the profane. The next image we see of Beyoncé-right after highlighting a preacher man in a local church-features her decked out in sacred attire (thanks to a conversation with Southern scholar Kinitra Brooks, I was told that she was channeling the Vodou loa Maman Brigitte, guardian of the souls of the dead who loves to curse and drink rum with hot peppers). Tellingly, the video not only remixes the voice of the dead-as heard in the opening audio, featuring the late Messy Mya inquiring, “What happened at New Orleans”-but the sounds of the storm (thunder rolls are audible), just before diverse images of black queer men reclaiming feminine/femme/queen moves through bounce music (along with an audio shoutout from Big Freedia, “queen” of bounce music) set the stage for the “queen” herself. As a modern-day black soul singer who already remixes hip-hop and R&B, Beyoncé serves up old-style conjure-woman magic by remixing local video footage from New Orleans with her own commercialized take on performing blackness, performing Southernness, performing black womanhood. This seeming paradox echoes throughout the video. At once invoking the tragedy of post-Katrina devastation and police brutality-both extensions of state violence against black lives-Beyoncé strategically positions her body, clad in a country-style red dress (a power of color, of life and bloodlines), at the crossroads between life and death. ![]() The first image we see of Beyoncé, in her newly released video for her song “Formation,” is the pop star atop a New Orleans police car, partly submerged in flood water. ![]()
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