SOMETHING AKIN TO FREEDOM: Sexual love, political agency, and Lemonade

Abstract

There is “something akin to freedom,” Harriet Jacobs writes in Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, within voluntary sexual love under slavery. This insight, the “kinship” of sexual love and freedom, can be seen in many black cultural productions, from literature such as Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God to music such as Beyoncé Knowles’s Lemonade. I would like to develop black love’s “kinship” to freedom within the intersection of black sexuality and spirituality in Lemonade. I will argue that the mode of agency displayed in the examples above is related, but not equivalent, to protest. I have chosen these examples because the controversy they have sparked bear striking similarities that underscore how our conceptions of political agency require improvement. For instance, Richard Wright collapsed political agency to protest, which hindered him from seeing the politics at work in Hurston’s novel. In response to Hurston’s critics, black feminists have done the hard work to show that black love is politically relevant. However, we still need to parse in what way black love is political. For example, bell hooks’s recent critique of Lemonade hinges upon a similar narrow conception of political agency that does not take into account the black spiritual traditions that inform the protagonist’s affects—including love. I will argue that exploring black love within the context of black spiritual traditions offers a different conception of political agency that both Wright and hooks miss. That is, in striking resemblance to Their Eyes Were Watching God, Lemonade’s use of West African-derived spiritual traditions guide the protagonist’s journey towards embodying what Patricia Hill Collins calls the “emergent woman.”

Publication Title

The Lemonade Reader

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