The Renaissance Reader: Beyoncé and Black Queer Popular Culture offers a groundbreaking exploration of Beyoncés acclaimed album Renaissance, examining its celebration of Black queer aesthetics through disco, house, and bounce music.
Building on the success of The Lemonade Reader, this interdisciplinary collection brings together popular culture writers and scholars to analyse the albums profound impact on contemporary culture and artistic expression. Through the lens of Black feminist and queer theory, contributors examine how Renaissance engages with and reimagines African American musical traditions while centring Black womens experiences and queer aesthetics. This timely volume tackles crucial questions about Beyoncés evolving artistry, celebrity, and cultural impact, while exploring how her work intersects with contemporary Black feminist and queer theoretical methodologies.
The Renaissance Reader: Beyoncé and Black Queer Popular Culture is an essential text for scholars and students in Black womens studies, queer studies, and popular culture, as well as for fans seeking deeper insight into Beyoncés artistic vision and cultural significance.
Arvustused
"Until recently, writing on Beyoncés Renaissance felt akin to anatomizing a phantasmagoria. This collection of essays examines an album that reclaims house, disco and ballroom genres. Rooting their reflections in Black feminist thought, queer theory and Afrofuturism, contributors explore Beyoncés revival of neglected musical traditions, her homage to her beloved Uncle Johnny, who inspired the album, and her emergence as a Mutha figure for queer and trans communities. Through discussions of joy, spatial resistance and sonic innovation, the volume casts Beyoncé not simply as performer but as curator of Black queer heritage and legacy." - Ellis Cashmore, Professor of Sociology and author of Celebrity Culture
"A wonderful resource for readers and educators looking to connect history to Beyoncés expansive vision and onward to new queer, Black, and feminist futures. The contributors weave critical academic and personal insights together into a thrilling volume. - Leah DeVun, Professor of History at Rutgers University, USA
Introduction Part I: Black Joy
1. Beyoncés Renaissance: A Queer Portal
for Beylievers
2. I Love Myself When I Am Laughing: Joy and Spatial
Resistance in Beyoncés Renaissance
3. Everybody on Mute: Beyoncés Ability
to Silently Slay with Queer Call and Response
4. Welcome to the Renaissance:
Defying Distortion, Division, and Difference Part II: Queerness
5. The
Irresistible Terrorism of Beyoncé: On the War Between Desire, Representation,
and Black Queer Freedom
6. The World Uncle Johnny Made: Queers, Children, and
other Political Fantasies
7. They looped. I looped. The samples to feel
free: Renaissance and Modern Ballroom as the Loophole of Retreat in the
Afterlife of Slavery
8. Transcending the cis-tem: Interpolating Black queer
temporality Part III: Sound and Technology
9. Equestrian Monument, 2023:
Horses in Beyoncés Antihistoricist Renaissance World
10. Black Feminist
Sonic Rhetorics: Vocal Glitch and the Queering of Temporality in Beyoncé
Renaissance
11. Look Around, Everybody on Mute!: Renaissances Potential
Impact on Music Education
12. Media All Up in Your Mind: Accentuating Black
Queer Vitality through Cultivated Silence Part IV: Afrofuturism
13. The
Renaissance Age of Pleasure: The Afro(feminist)futurism of Beyoncé & Janelle
Monáe
14. Mothers of the Renaissance: The Beyoncification of Afrofuturism
15.
Church Girls, Blues Women, and the Future of the Black Queer South
16.
Breaking to Build: Lessons for a Renaissance A Reflection from a Black Queer
Artist
Kinitra D. Brooks is the Associate Chair of Graduate Studies and the Audrey and John Leslie Endowed Chair in Literary Studies in the Department of English at Michigan State University, USA.
Nicholas R. Jones is Associate Professor in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese at Yale University, USA, and the former King Juan Carlos I of Spain Centers Scholar-in-Residence at New York University, USA.
