Past-Present-Past in the Making of Future: What Can We Learn from Black is King?

Abstract

As a result of a monograph, this work focuses on the afrocentric and afroreferential elements present in the work The Gift/Black is King, by the multi-artist Beyoncé. In the seam between Afrocentrism and Anthropology, the latter in its artistic-musical dimensions, along with the circumscription of content analysis methods, we understand art, especially music, as the tensioning and potentially propositional locus of the black humanities, so that the rescue of elements in the African ancestry, in ways of weaving the present and the future in Afrofuturist narratives, culminate in other alternatives for black people that end with the racist status quo, universalizing and, therefore, Eurocentric. Thus, we discuss Sankofa and the Afrofuturism movement in line with elements present in Beyoncé's songs that resignify them in the present by weaving narratives for black human fulfillment, resulting in self-esteem and afroreference in African subjects in diaspora or not, allowing other meanings about the world that move away from definitions of being and being based on the Western colonial being.