Reviews
Ain't I a Diva?: Beyoncé and the Power of Pop Culture Pedagogy, by Cheryl Clarke, Kevin Allred
walker's review against another edition
5.0
“Ain’t I a Diva?” is the natural culmination of Kevin Allred’s work teaching his class “Politicizing Beyoncé”, which originated in 2010 and gained national attention from media outlets and even Beyoncé’s own Parkwood team. The class aimed to explore Beyoncé’s body of work through various lenses including race, gender, and sexuality. While popular, it also proved to be controversial, as things with Beyoncé often are nowadays.
I’ve been following this class-to-book evolution since I first heard of it in 2015 when, even in a post-“Self-Titled” world, it was hard to find much legitimate academic discourse surrounding Beyoncé. With the release of “Lemonade” and a few other recent academic Beyoncé titles (by POC), I became excited and nervous to see how Allred (a white man) would approach this material.
Allred acknowledges his privileges right from the beginning and, in class and book, centers the work of black women by only placing Beyoncé’s work alongside black scholars and artists such as bell hooks and Octavia Butler. This leads to what I find to be the most exciting and invigorating aspect of the book: the syllabus. Allred essentially takes the readers on a crash course in critical thinking through the lense of Beyoncé. He explores ideas that even the most skeptical laymen could see as a natural extension of her work: The subjugation of the black female body, the emotional baggage that black women carry for men and America as a whole, and the generational impact of slavery. He also makes arguments that even Beyoncé stans might see as radical: Sasha Fierce as a queer figure and viewing Beyoncé’s embrace of capitalism as a simultaneous critique. Do I think Sasha Fierce is a queer figure? Not necessarily, but that is so not the point. Like any professor worth their salt, Allred is not interested in having the final say. He is encouraging his students, and now readers, to use Beyoncé’s extensive audio/visual catalog to explore those topics and to support any ideas with textual evidence that can be linked back to the black feminist canon.
Perhaps the best thing about “Aint’ I a Diva?” is that it demands that Beyoncé be taken seriously and that her body of work is worth legitimate academic thought, but believes that one does not need a PhD to be apart of that conversation. This book seeks to break down those racist, sexist, and classist barriers because Allred, like Beyoncé, writes for everyone and recognizes that pop culture can be a powerful tool for a revolution.
I’ve been following this class-to-book evolution since I first heard of it in 2015 when, even in a post-“Self-Titled” world, it was hard to find much legitimate academic discourse surrounding Beyoncé. With the release of “Lemonade” and a few other recent academic Beyoncé titles (by POC), I became excited and nervous to see how Allred (a white man) would approach this material.
Allred acknowledges his privileges right from the beginning and, in class and book, centers the work of black women by only placing Beyoncé’s work alongside black scholars and artists such as bell hooks and Octavia Butler. This leads to what I find to be the most exciting and invigorating aspect of the book: the syllabus. Allred essentially takes the readers on a crash course in critical thinking through the lense of Beyoncé. He explores ideas that even the most skeptical laymen could see as a natural extension of her work: The subjugation of the black female body, the emotional baggage that black women carry for men and America as a whole, and the generational impact of slavery. He also makes arguments that even Beyoncé stans might see as radical: Sasha Fierce as a queer figure and viewing Beyoncé’s embrace of capitalism as a simultaneous critique. Do I think Sasha Fierce is a queer figure? Not necessarily, but that is so not the point. Like any professor worth their salt, Allred is not interested in having the final say. He is encouraging his students, and now readers, to use Beyoncé’s extensive audio/visual catalog to explore those topics and to support any ideas with textual evidence that can be linked back to the black feminist canon.
Perhaps the best thing about “Aint’ I a Diva?” is that it demands that Beyoncé be taken seriously and that her body of work is worth legitimate academic thought, but believes that one does not need a PhD to be apart of that conversation. This book seeks to break down those racist, sexist, and classist barriers because Allred, like Beyoncé, writes for everyone and recognizes that pop culture can be a powerful tool for a revolution.
More...