ABSTRACT
The Lemonade Reader is an interdisciplinary collection that explores the nuances of Beyoncé’s 2016 visual album, Lemonade. The essays and editorials present fresh, cutting-edge scholarship fueled by contemporary thoughts on film, material culture, religion, and black feminism.
Envisioned as an educational tool to support and guide discussions of the visual album at postgraduate and undergraduate levels, The Lemonade Reader critiques Lemonade’s multiple Afrodiasporic influences, visual aesthetics, narrative arc of grief and healing, and ethnomusicological reach. The essays, written by both scholars and popular bloggers, reflects a broad yet uniquely specific black feminist investigation into constructions of race, gender, spirituality, and southern identity.
The Lemonade Reader gathers a newer generation of black feminist scholars to engage in intellectual discourse and confront the emotional labor around the Lemonade phenomena. It is the premiere source for examining Lemonade, a text that will continue to have a lasting impact on black women’s studies and popular culture.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
chapter |4 pages
Introduction: Beyoncé’s Lemonade lexicon
chapter |6 pages
Interlude B: Bittersweet like me
part I|2 pages
Some shit is just for us
chapter 4|13 pages
Pull the sorrow from between my legs
chapter 5|14 pages
The language of Lemonade
chapter |6 pages
Interlude D: Women like her cannot be contained
part II|2 pages
Of her spiritual strivings
chapter 7|10 pages
Beyoncé’s Lemonade folklore
chapter 10|10 pages
Signifying waters
chapter |11 pages
Interlude E: From Destiny’s Child to Coachella
part III|2 pages
The lady sings her legacy
