Reflection based on provided material (deadline today 1.24.2021 before 22:00 Chicago time) Late will not be accepted

12/24/2020 Beyoncé’s Knowing Ethnic Splendor in “Black Is King” | The New Yorker

https://www.newyorker.com/culture/culture-desk/beyonces-knowing-ethnic-splendor-in-black-is-king 1/8

Culture Desk

Beyoncé’s Knowing Ethnic Splendor in “Black Is King”

By Lauren Michele Jackson August 3, 2020

Above all, “Black Is King” is a tribute to the manifold ways that a body can be displayed, from root to toe, dressed up and painted. Photograph by Travis Matthews / Courtesy Parkwood Entertainment

he story of Disney’s “The Lion King,” about a cub who avenges his uncle’s

regicide, is said to have borrowed its bones from “Hamlet” (though Marlon

12/24/2020 Beyoncé’s Knowing Ethnic Splendor in “Black Is King” | The New Yorker

https://www.newyorker.com/culture/culture-desk/beyonces-knowing-ethnic-splendor-in-black-is-king 2/8

T James would say otherwise). “Black Is King,” the new “visual album” fromBeyoncé Giselle Knowles-Carter, borrows its bones from “The Lion King,” and is comparably interested in rehearsing the drama of its source

material—which is to say, not very interested at all. The project is a cinematic

adaptation of “The Lion King: The Gift,” the Beyoncé-produced companion

album to Disney’s 2019 remake of the �lm, in which she voiced the part of Nala

and for which she created an original song. “Black Is King” follows a young child

(Folajomi Akinmurele) whose wayward adventures and visions provoke the

question of what kind of man he will become. Royal titles are treated, with

urgency, as a means of affirming the innate worth of the human spirit, a message

that the �lm aims especially at the many Black peoples who were long denied the

status of human (and, depending on who is asked, still are). Anchored by the

lyrical grandeur of its soundtrack, which includes the fourteen songs co-written

and co-produced by Beyoncé for “The Gift” (“����� ������,” a bonus single on

the deluxe edition of the soundtrack, plays during the credits),“Black Is King”

expertly slides between talk of bloodlines and molded thrones and more modest

—but far from modest—footage of impeccably styled, beautiful Black people in

motion.

This is not Africa. “Black Is King” was �lmed in various natural and man-made

climes found in Ghana, Nigeria, Belgium, the U.S., the U.K., and South Africa,

but it consists mostly of dreamscapes, rhapsodies of high fantasy unfurled in

what may be called, without insult, a loosely twined collection of music videos—

which, in their serial form, more closely resemble the album “Beyoncé,” from

2013,” than “Lemonade,” from 2016. The detour from reality bene�ts “Black Is

King,” which would otherwise have been saddled with all the colonial baggage of

12/24/2020 Beyoncé’s Knowing Ethnic Splendor in “Black Is King” | The New Yorker

https://www.newyorker.com/culture/culture-desk/beyonces-knowing-ethnic-splendor-in-black-is-king 3/8

rendering Africa onscreen. For Americans, including those of the darker cast and

caste, Africa tends to be little more than an idea, a formless place in which to

house so much grief and longing. In this context—the context out of which both

versions of “The Lion King” emerge—whatever is called “African” functions as

shorthand, connoting, in a single English word, a literally unimaginable

plenitude of lives and livelihoods. The �rst teaser for “Black Is King,” released in

June, led some observers to doubt how that shorthand might read under

Beyoncé’s direction: there were worries that the �lm would yield yet another

primitivist sketch of so many bustling nations. They weren’t assuaged when

Beyoncé’s mother, Tina Knowles, in an Instagram post highlighting the project’s

Ghanaian-American collaborators, Joshua Kissi and Blitz Bazawule, accused

skeptics of “discrediting the work of their own people,” as if recruiting African

talent should preclude post-colonial critique. A clumsy word arose to describe

this in�ated reduction of the continent: “Wakanda�cation,” a reference to the

�ctional civilization brought to Technicolor in Ryan Coogler’s Marvel superhero

�lm “Black Panther.”

In fact, there’s nothing clumsy about “Black Is King”—other than its name,

perhaps. The album’s knowingly ethnic splendor is mesmerizing in its scope; it

does not attempt to provide cultural lessons but, rather, invitations to awesome

delights. Above all, “Black Is King” is a tribute to the manifold ways that a body

can be displayed, from root to toe, dressed up and painted in white, gold,

seafoam, lilac, electric green, and pink; in cowhide, denim and tulle, ink, acrylic,

lace, leopard, and satin, and fringe; cowry shells and goddess braids; bejewelled

everything; good shirts tucked into good chinos; pearl-drenched headdresses,

harnesses, thick gold rings; gowns and bleached tips, evening gloves, track

12/24/2020 Beyoncé’s Knowing Ethnic Splendor in “Black Is King” | The New Yorker

https://www.newyorker.com/culture/culture-desk/beyonces-knowing-ethnic-splendor-in-black-is-king 4/8

jackets, catsuits, tunics, chunky sneakers, mammoth gele; cornrows, ribbon-

wrapped feet, cargo pants, and trapezoidal shades. Also, the manifold ways in

which a body can move: legwork, footwork, shaku shaku, zanku, twerk, wine,

gbese, thrust, grind, shake—the grounded, weight-changing style of

choreography that Beyoncé has been fond of since working with the

Mozambican trio Tofo Tofo on “Run the World (Girls),” which is prominently

shown here in her duet with the Afrobeats artist and divine dancer Stephen Ojo,

in “�������,” performed with Shatta Wale and Major Lazer. Though Beyoncé,

when she appears onscreen, is usually at its center, “Black Is King” also cedes the

�oor to such charismatic movers as the Afropop artist Yemi Alade, who is

featured on “���’� ������� ��” and “�� �����,” alongside the South African

artists Moonchild Sanelly and Busiswa and also a supreme slate of professional

dancers. There is, in our present moment, a palpable, and reasonable, fatigue

when it comes to the superlative showiness of a certain class of celebrity. Some of

this sticks to Beyoncé, in particular, given the outsized scale at which she has

been working for a while now. But this production—or, rather, the dozens of

credited designers, stylists, artists, tailors, architects, weavers, seamstresses,

builders, braiders, jewellers, and dancers whose crafts are on display in it—

marvels in a way that is difficult to scoff at, especially given that we aren’t likely

to see such feats again soon.

12/24/2020 Beyoncé’s Knowing Ethnic Splendor in “Black Is King” | The New Yorker

https://www.newyorker.com/culture/culture-desk/beyonces-knowing-ethnic-splendor-in-black-is-king 5/8

“����� ���� ����,” a tribute to the glittering shades of brownness among Black people, is set at a débutante ball, featuring Blue Ivy Carter and Kelly Rowland. Photograph Courtesy Parkwood Entertainment

For all its texture and color, though, “Black Is King” envisions a fairly

conservative idea of Black being, one that is rooted inexorably in the integrity of

Mother and Father, Son and Daughter—this is Disney, after all. The emphasis

on an intact family structure will not come as a surprise to fans (or mere

observers) of Beyoncé’s work, which has long been informed by a sense of her

life’s calling as a matriarch, even when she’s at her baddest. (Speaking of royal

pronouncements, who can forget the feminist media hubbub surrounding the

branding of her �fth touring concert, the Mrs. Carter Show World Tour?) As in

“The Lion King,” the young cub in “Black Is King” suffers the profound loss of a

patriarch; in the end, the breakage is repaired by a restoration of the nuclear

tableau—both “Lion King” �lms and “Black Is King” conclude on the iconic

12/24/2020 Beyoncé’s Knowing Ethnic Splendor in “Black Is King” | The New Yorker

https://www.newyorker.com/culture/culture-desk/beyonces-knowing-ethnic-splendor-in-black-is-king 6/8

postnatal image, the next in line held skyward. In between, the album depicts the

magnetic sites of coupling: “����� ���� ����,” a tribute to the glittering shades

of brownness among Black people, is set at a débutante ball, featuring girls in

lush gowns and men in stoles (plus cheery cameos from Kelly Rowland, Naomi

Campbell, Adut Akech, and Lupita Nyong’o). In “���� 4 ���,” our young

prince is molded in Jay-Z’s image, with a young girl playing the princess to

Hov’s Beyoncé.

Connected to this narrative of succession is a notion of roots, though in a sense

more teleological than genealogical. Beyoncé returns, in “Black Is King,” to the

work of the Somali-British poet Warsan Shire, whose words resounded

throughout “Lemonade.” Shire’s selected aphorisms, spoken in a measured

cadence—“You are welcome to come home to yourself. Let Black be

synonymous with glory”—undertake the weight of history, but shakily so. The

time-honored cultural honori�cs of “ancestors” and “elders” begin to become

con�ated; this, along with lyrical entreaties to the motherland, impose a too-

linear account of culture and time, despite the insistence, elsewhere in the �lm—

in its sounds, fashion, settings—that Blackness is anything but straightforward.

And, given the �lm’s brilliant palette, I longed for a bit of the theoretical

sensibility of someone like Terence Nance (who collaborated with Bazawule on

the 2011 short �lm “Native Son”), whose television series “Random Acts of

Flyness,” with its vertiginous storytelling, makes a multidimensional case for a

contemporary Blackness that is not necessarily beholden to the legacy of a pre-

colonial continent—what the scholar Michelle M. Wright calls “epiphenomenal

time.” As far as archetypes go, I prefer the virtuosa to the Earth Mother: give me

12/24/2020 Beyoncé’s Knowing Ethnic Splendor in “Black Is King” | The New Yorker

https://www.newyorker.com/culture/culture-desk/beyonces-knowing-ethnic-splendor-in-black-is-king 7/8

Beyoncé in formation, in the pool, behind a mansion, for no reason other than

fabulosity.

When “Lemonade” was released, during the last Presidential election year, it felt

like Beyoncé and pop music could save the world, and knowing, deep down, the

folly of that belief did little to waylay the sentiment. I suspect that viewers of

“Black Is King,” watching the world as it presently turns, will not retain such

illusions. The energy once reserved for plumbing the political depths of Bey’s

speech will, perhaps, be redirected, preoccupied now with the awesome might of

the moving Black image. It is a much more local joy, witnessing something

lovely impress itself onto the senses, but one that rises to the limits of what pop

can do for us now.

Lauren Michele Jackson, a contributing writer at The New Yorker, is an assistant professor of English at Northwestern University and the author of “White Negroes.”

More: Beyoncé The Lion King Africa Blackness Music Film Art

12/24/2020 Beyoncé’s Knowing Ethnic Splendor in “Black Is King” | The New Yorker

https://www.newyorker.com/culture/culture-desk/beyonces-knowing-ethnic-splendor-in-black-is-king 8/8