Full Description
The Renaissance Reader: Beyoncé and Black Queer Popular Culture offers a groundbreaking exploration of Beyoncé's 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 album's 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 women's experiences and queer aesthetics. This timely volume tackles crucial questions about Beyoncé's evolving artistry, celebrity, and cultural impact, while exploring how her work intersects with contemporary Black feminist and queer theoretical methodologies.
The Renaissance Reader: Beyoncé & Black Queer Popular Culture is an essential text for scholars and students in Black women's studies, queer studies, and popular culture, as well as for fans seeking deeper insight into Beyoncé's artistic vision and cultural significance.
Contents
Introduction Part I: Black Joy 1. Beyoncé's Renaissance: A Queer Portal for Beylievers 2. I Love Myself When I Am Laughing: Joy and Spatial Resistance in Beyoncé's Renaissance 3. Everybody on Mute: Beyoncé's 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 Beyoncé's Antihistoricist Renaissance World 10. Black Feminist Sonic Rhetorics: Vocal Glitch and the Queering of Temporality in Beyoncé Renaissance 11. Look Around, Everybody on Mute!: Renaissance's 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
