2017/08/28 by Laura M.F. Bertens · 21 citations
Arts and Humanities · Economics, Econometrics and Finance · Social Sciences · #Music History and Culture #Cinema and Media Studies #Media, Gender, and Advertising #Performative utterance #Cultural memory #Narrative #Performativity #Aesthetics #Visual arts #Ethnic group #Reading (process) #Sociology #Art #Literature #Linguistics #Gender studies #Anthropology
paper · pdf · doi:10.1515/culture-2017-0009
published in Open Cultural Studies 1(1), 88-98 (De Gruyter Open)
openalex publication_date 2017/08/28 · openalex created_date 2017/09/15 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/15
Abstract This paper explores strategies for constructing and perpetuating cultural memory through music videos, using Beyonce’s Formation (2016) and Janelle Monae’s Many Moons (2008) and Q.U.E.E.N. (2013) as case studies. The medium’s idiosyncrasies create unique ways of communicating and remembering, explored here within a framework of Cultural Studies and Memory Studies. Easy dissemination and the limited length of most videos ensure a large, diverse audience. The relative freedom from narrative constraints enables the director to create original imagery, and most importantly, the medium allows an intricate blending of performance and performativity; while the videos evidently are performances, they are strongly performative as well, not only with respect to gender and ethnicity but in significant ways also cultural memory. A close reading of Beyonce’s video Formation shows how she explicitly does the cultural memory of the New Orleans flooding. The videos by Monae are shown to produce counter-memories, relying heavily on the strategy of Afrofuturism. As such, these densely woven networks of visual symbols become palimpsests of black lived experience and cultural memory, passed on to millions of viewers.