Details

Autor(en) / Beteiligte

• McGee, Alexis
• Brooks, Kinitra D.
• Martin, Kameelah L.

Titel

The language of Lemonade: The sociolinguistic and rhetorical strategies of Beyoncé’s Lemonade

Ist Teil von

• The LemonadeReader, 2019, p.55-68

Auflage

1

Ort / Verlag

Routledge

Erscheinungsjahr

2019

Link zum Volltext

Quelle

Alma/SFX Local Collection

Beschreibungen/Notizen

• This chapter highlights Beyoncé’s use of African American Women’s Language (AAWL) as a rhetorical methodology and praxis. I reflect, here, on Beyoncé’s linguistic evolution seen within her musical continuum and performance. In other words, the rate at which Beyoncé explicitly includes linguistic markers like codeswitching, signifying, and nonverbal sonic rhetorics—specifically “hush harbors” and laughter—becomes more and more apparent as her identity and transition into an icon becomes more solidified as part of a global pop culture context. In this manner, her use of linguistics, African American Women’s Language in particular, denotes her levels of un/comfortability regarding her identity as a Black woman within the context of America. Here, I specifically investigate her two visual albums, Beyoncé and Lemonade, to de/construct Black womanhood and put into conversations the legacy of Southern linguistic selfhood for Black women from which she builds. As we now see her evolution from a young Black woman superstar from Houston, Texas into the global figure she is today, the implementation of the Black woman’s Southern sociolinguistic features become more central to her understanding and her connection with other Black women. It is in this reading that I see Beyoncé’s lyrics as giving insight into Black women’s rhetoric, using language and discourse (like narrative strategies) as important methods of communication. Thus, I argue Beyoncé’s methodologies and narrative constructions through sound and language demonstrate her coming to consciousness and embracement of the complexities of Black womanhood. This chapter looks to explicate such sociolinguistic and rhetorical models addressed by Sonja Lanehart and Pamela Hobbs which ultimately complicate readings of Beyoncé from a perspective of language performativity. This chapter highlights Beyonce’s use of African American Women’s Language (AAWL), which includes both verbal and nonverbal rhetoric and linguistic features connected to AAWL, reflecting her construction of a Black feminist identity. It analyzes rhetorical cues and speech sounds performed and heard in Black women. The ways Beyonce performs the various songs in Lemonade announces her reconciliation with the same sociopolitical and historic context of language Smitherman asserts. Lemonade acts as a discursive call and response formed with AAWL, and Beyonce’s linguistic and rhetorical use of language are manifestations of the intersectional identities. Beyonce’s use of AAWL in Lemonade demonstrates her coalescing consciousness and provides examples of movement-creating, making her use of language a rhetorical tool. For Lemonade then, Beyonce’s album not only re/creates individual and communal identities reflecting and connecting with Southern, Black womanhood, but the metaphysical spaces of her utterances also develop an intersectional Black feminist “hush harbor.”