https://orcid.org/0000-0002-3596-0701
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ABSTRACT
This article offers a reading of the APESHIT music video by the duo The Carters (Beyoncé and Jay-Z) as an Afrosurrealist intervention in the White space of the Louvre. Against the backdrop of calls for decolonizing archives and public institutions such as the university and the museum, and arguing for the political potential of APESHIT, this article makes a case for the music video as an act of resistance against the enduring ‘coloniality of power' in the European museum and elsewhere in the public sphere. We argue that The Carters embrace the role of the public intellectual-activist - assumed to be within the remit of the Western, White, liberal intellectual for centuries. Our argument is threefold: (1) the aesthetics of the APESHIT music video builds on and contributes to the Afrosurrealist artistic tradition, engaging with contemporary Blackness via the strange and absurd; (2) the music video itself creates performance art that intervenes in and extends beyond the Louvre and audiovisually re-curates its exhibitions; (3) The Carters can be seen as celebrity ‘critical organic catalysts’ whose Afrosurrealist intervention targeted at the colonial legacies of museums activates a critical relationship with these museal spaces traditionally constructed as White spaces.
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No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Notes
1 Lanre Bakare, ‘From Beyoncé to Sorry to Bother You: The New Age of Afro-surrealism’, The Guardian, 6 December 2018, https://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/2018/dec/06/afro-surrealism-black-artists-racist-society.
2 Qujoted in Carol Vernallis et al., ‘Introduction: APES**T’, Journal of Popular Music Studies, 30(4), 2018, p 17.
3 In Vernalis et al., p 19.
4 We opted for capitalizing ‘Black’/’Blackness’ and ‘White’/’Whiteness’ to underscore that these identifiers refer to historically created racial identities.
5 Achille Joseph Mbembe, ‘Decolonizing the University: New Directions’, Arts & Humanities in Higher Education, 15(1), 2016, pp 29–45.
6 Moira G. Simpson, Making Representations: Museums in the Post-Colonial Era, London: Routledge, 1996. For a more recent intervention in the museum space, see: Felipe Espinoza Garrido and Ana Cristina Mendes, ‘The Politics of Museal Hospitality: Sonia Boyce’s Neo-Victorian Takeover in Six Acts’, European Journal of English Studies, 24(3), 2020, pp 283–299.
7 Jenny Gunn, ‘The Outside Meets the Institution: The Carters’ “Apeshit” Video’, Black Camera, 11(1), 2019, pp 385–398.
8 Aníbal Quijano, ‘Coloniality and Modernity/Rationality’, in Walter Mignolo and Arturo Escobar (eds), Globalization and the Decolonial Option, New York: Routledge, 2010, pp 22–32.
9 Paul Gilroy, After Empire: Melancholia or Convivial Culture?, London: Routledge, 2004.
10 Cedric Robinson, Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition, Chapel Hill and London: The University of North Carolina Press, 2000.
11 Miranda Fricker, Epistemic Injustice: Power and the Ethics of Knowing, New York: Oxford University Press, 2017.
12 Ivan Karp and Corrine Kratz, ‘The Interrogative Museum’, in Raymond Silverman (ed), Museum as Process: Translating Local and Global Knowledges, New York: Routledge, 2015, pp 279–298.
13 Karp and Kratz, ‘The Interrogative Museum’, p 281.
14 Joni Acuff and Dana Carlisle Kletchka, ‘Liberté, Egalité, Fraternité: A Black Feminist Analysis of Beyoncé Performing “APESHIT” in the Louvre’, The International Journal of the Inclusive Museum, 13(1), 2020, pp 13–36.
15 Liedeke Plate, ‘Dancing at the Museum: Parataxis and the Politics of Proximity in Beyoncé and Jay-Z's “APESHIT”’, Stedelijk Studies, 8, 2019, p 11.
16 Cornel West, ‘The New Cultural Politics of Difference’, in Simon During (ed), The Cultural Studies Reader, New York: Routledge, 1999.
17 For more contextualization of Afrosurrealist art, see: D. Scot Miller, ‘Afrosurreal Manifesto: Black Is the New Black – a 21st-Century Manifesto’, Black Camera, 5(1), 2013, pp 113–117.
18 Amiri Baraka, ‘Henry Dumas: Afro-Surreal Expressionist’, Black American Literature Forum, 22(2), 1988, p 164.
19 Baraka, ‘Henry Dumas: Afro-Surreal Expressionist’, p 164.
20 Baraka, ‘Henry Dumas: Afro-Surreal Expressionist’, p 166.
21 Miller, ‘Afrosurreal Manifesto’, p 114.
22 The term Afrofuturism refers to ‘speculative fiction that treats African-American themes and addresses African-American concerns in the context of twentieth-century technoculture – and, more generally, African-American signification that appropriates images of technology and a prosthetically enhanced future’ (Mark Dery, ‘Black to the Future: Interviews with Samuel R. Delany, Greg Tate, and Tricia Rose’, The South Atlantic Quarterly, Durham, NC: Duke University Press: 1993, p 736).
23 Miller, ‘Afrosurreal Manifesto’, p 117.
24 Terri Francis, ‘Introduction: The No-Theory Chant of Afrosurrealism’, Black Camera, 5(1), 2013, p 95.
25 Francis, ‘Introduction: The No-Theory Chant of Afrosurrealism’, p 97.
26 Vernallis et al., ‘Introduction: APES**T’, p 28.
27 Vernallis et al., ‘Introduction: APES**T’, p 26ff.
28 Vernallis et al., ‘Introduction: APES**T’, p 27f.
29 Elias Leight, ‘How Beyonce and Jay-Z Defy Western Art Tradition in “Apeshit” Video’, RollingStone, 17 June 2018, https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-news/how-beyonce-and-jay-z-defy-western-art-tradition-in-apeshit-video-665915/
30 Vernallis et al., ‘Introduction: APES**T’, p 31.
31 Charmaine Nelson, ‘Vénus Africaine: Race, Beauty and African-ness’, in Jan Marsh (ed), Black Victorians: Black People in British Art 1800–1900, Aldershot, Hampshire; Burlington, VT: Lund Humphries, 2005, p 47.
32 Paul Gilroy, ‘Never Again: Refusing Race and Salvaging the Human’, 31 May 2019, https://www.holbergprisen.no/en/news/holberg-prize/2019-holberg-lecture-laureate-paul-gilroy.
33 Paul Gilroy, The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness, Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1993, p 76.
34 West, ‘The New Cultural Politics of Difference’, p 265.
35 James W. Perkinson, Shamanism, Racism, and Hip Hop Culture: Essays of White Supremacy and Black Subversion, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005, p 85.
36 Gabriel Ellis, ‘One APESHIT’s “Trapness”’, Journal of Popular Music Studies, 30(4), 2018, p 22.
37 Vernallis et al., ‘Introduction: APES**T’, p 33.
38 Carol Vernallis is credited with identifying the sequence of paralleled shots as an Einsteinian montage in the video.
39 Ellis Cashmore, ‘Buying Beyoncé’, Celebrity Studies, 1(2), 2010, pp 135–50.
40 Cavan Sieczkowski, ‘Feminist Activist says Beyoncé is Partly “Anti-feminist” and “Terrorist”’, The Huffington Post, 9 May 2014, http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/05/09
/beyonce-antifeminist_n_5295891.html.
41 Nathalie Weidhase, ‘“Beyoncé Feminism” and the Contestation of the Black Feminist Body’, Celebrity Studies, 6(1), 2015, pp 128–31.
42 Patricia Hill Collins, Black Sexual Politics: African Americans, Gender, and the New Racism, New York: Routledge, 2004.
43 http://www.bellhooksinstitute.com/blog/2016/5/9/moving-beyond-pain. This is in line with hooks’s earlier arguments, for instance, as in ‘Eating the Other: Desire and Resistance’, in Black Looks: Race and Representation, Boston: South End Press, 1992, pp 21–39.
44 West, ‘The New Cultural Politics of Difference’, p 266.
45 Antonio Gramsci, Gli intellettuali e I’organizzazione della cultura, Rome: Editori Riuniti, 1977.
46 Vernallis et al., ‘Introduction: APES**T’, p 51.
47 John M. Hobson, The Eurocentric Conception of World Politics: Western International Theory, 1760–2010, New York: Cambridge University Press, 2012.
48 Eilean Hooper-Greenhill, Museums and the Interpretation of Visual Culture, London: Routledge, 2000, p x.
49 Eilean Hooper-Greenhill, Museums and Education: Purpose, Pedagogy, Performance, London: Routledge, 2007, p 1.
50 Lise Ragbir, ‘Can Beyoncé and Jay-Z’s Louvre Video Change Perceptions of Who Belongs in Museums?’, Hyperallergic, 28 June 2018, https://hyperallergic.com/449108/beyonce-jay-z-louvre-apeshit-museums.
51 Vernallis et al., ‘Introduction: APES**T’, p 12.
52 Vernallis et al., ‘Introduction: APES**T’, p 17.
53 Kathrin Thiele, ‘Entanglement’, in Mercedes Bunz, Birgit Mara Kaiser and Kathrin Thiele (eds), Symptoms of the Planetary Condition: A Critical Vocabulary, Lüneburg: Meson, 2017, p 43.
54 Vernallis et al., ‘Introduction: APES**T’, p 19.
55 ‘Beyoncé and Jay-Z's new “APES**T” video explained’, Business Insider, https://www.businessinsider.com/hidden-meanings-beyonce-jay-z-ape-video-napoleon-louvre-museum-2018-6.
56 Stuart Hall, ‘What is this “Black” in Black Popular Culture?’, in David Morley and Kuan-Hsing Chen (eds), Stuart Hall: Critical Dialogues in Cultural Studies, London and New York: Routledge, 1996, p 465.
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Notes on contributors
Ana Cristina Mendes
Ana Cristina Mendes is an Associate Professor in English Studies at the School of Arts and Humanities, University of Lisbon. Her research interests are visual culture, postcolonial theory, adaptation studies, and Victorian afterlives. She uses cultural and postcolonial studies to examine literary and screen texts (particularly intermedia adaptations) as venues for resistant knowledge formations to expand upon theories of epistemic injustice.
Julian Wacker
Julian Wacker teaches English, Postcolonial and Media Studies at the University of Münster. His current book-length project centres on spatial configurations in contemporary Black British music videos and how they respond to British neoliberal urbanism. Julian is co-editor of Black Neo-Victoriana (2021), and he has published articles and book chapters on grime poetry, queer Nigerian fiction and opacity in Teju Cole’s oeuvre, as well as co-authored a historical survey of Black and Asian British popular forms in The Cambridge History of Black and Asian British Writing (2020).