Beyoncé, Black Motherhood, and the Return of Wrenching Times

Abstract

This article contends that Beyoncé Knowles stages several spectacles in tribute to the mothers of slain Black sons as an homage to Mamie Till-Mobley, the mother of 14-year-old Emmett Till, and interrogates the role Beyoncé plays in supporting Black mothers in rescuing their dead children’s fate from the banlieues of racist logic, and thus the normalising of Black children dying out of sequence. Knowles’s effectiveness results from the appeals she makes to Black collective memory of the staggering offence the U.S. nation-state has perpetuated against Black children. This article asserts that the relationship Knowles has forged with highly visible Black mothers of murdered sons enacts what Daphne A. Brooks has defined as ‘Black feminist surrogation,’ which is ‘an embodied performance that recycles palpable forms of Black female sociopolitical grief and loss as well as spirited dissent and dissonance.’ To this end, Knowles, recuperates Mrs. Till-Mobley as an icon of grief and in doing so, helps to define the Mamie Till-Mobley narrative of Black motherhood as that which expresses the will to overcome the continued denigration of the integrity of Black parenting as well as the sustained assault against Black mothers’ pursuit of justice for their children since 2012.