The Lemonade Reader

The Lemonade Reader

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. 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, edited by Kinitra D. Brooks and Kameelah L. Martin, is a critical study on not only Black women, Black feminism, and Black popular culture, but what many deem as “Beyoncé Studies.” Why Beyoncé, you ask? Well, some might say because she’s iconic. Others might suggest because her business acumen runs circles around America’s top MBA programs. I say because she is a cultural phenomenon and because phenomena rooted in human experience, particularly that which moves us, must be studied — critically.

Tamura Lomax, The Feminist Wire

The following is an excerpt from an interview:

J.T. Roane: Books have creation stories. Please share with us the creation story of your book—those experiences, those factors, those revelations that caused you to produce this unique book.

Kinitra D. Brooks & Kameelah L. Martin: The Lemonade Reader evolved from a spirited Facebook Messenger discussion in the days following the release of Beyoncé’s visual album, Lemonade (2016). That social media discussion, which included some of our contributors like Janell Hobson, turned into a video chat session between the two of us— in our head scarfs and pajamas! We both have connections to New Orleans, and we were particularly struck by the imagery and trope of Louisiana as ancestral home space. Kinitra developed ideas around the bayou as liminal space; Kameelah coined the phrase “Creole Courtesan” to describe Beyoncé’s French lingerie-clad, parlor room aesthetic in the film. We were so inspired by the multilayered narrative of Spirit (conjure) work imbued in the visual album and the incessant critical debate happening, that we knew this was a huge cultural moment and wanted to participate in a tangible way. We co-wrote and submitted an essay for a special issue on Beyoncé organized by a leading academic journal. We focused on the simultaneity of the blues and conjure narratives we saw playing out in the visual album.

The essay was outright rejected, but that “no” quickly transformed into another opportunity. We thought bigger and envisioned a collection of smart, cutting-edge reflections on Lemonade that could be used to fuel conversations in a range of forums—amongst girlfriends during book club meetings or in discussions in specialized classes like Kinitra’s Beyoncé course. We wrote a successful grant proposal to host a Lemonade Seminar at the University of Michigan’s Institute for Research on Women and Gender in October 2017.

During the three-day intensive seminar, we gathered twenty-four of the best and brightest interdisciplinary scholars and thinkers to help set the groundwork for the project. We presented our ideas, watched Lemonade collectively and immersed ourselves in all things Beyoncé. It was cathartic and constructive and the birth of our collection, The Lemonade Reader. We left the seminar with a solid book proposal and shopped it around to several presses. Routledge was eager to produce the collection and we are glad it is available to the world (and Beyoncé).

woman in yellow dress posing on red chairs. She wears teal glasses that match her large beaded necklace.
Dr. Kinitra Brooks

Links for reading more about The Lemonade Reader:

Categories: Research