IAH Fellows Forum: Antonia Randolph

On Oct. 30, American studies Assistant Professor Antonia Randolph (FFP ’22) will give a Fellows Forum presentation titled “It’s All Love? Beyoncé and Jay-Z and the Re-enchantment of Black Romance in the Age of the Manosphere.”

This talk will examine Jay-Z and Beyoncé’s post-2010 output, with an emphasis on Everything Is Love (The Carters, 2018) and Renaissance (Beyoncé, 2022), to show how their defense of romantic love converts their need to salvage their brand as hip-hop and R&B’s happily married power couple into a story about saving the Black nation through heteronormative marriage.

To satisfy R&B audiences, they infuse their marriage with Black nationalist significance, with its survival serving as a proxy for the survival of the Black nation. They link social mobility and wealth with heteronormative marriage, simultaneously turning marriage into an aspirational luxury item while encouraging people to look to marriage, rather than the state, to escape poverty.

At the same time, they satisfy hip-hop’s norms by constructing Beyoncé as uniquely deserving of empathy as the ultimate “ride or die” chick, denying that other Black women deserve the care and consideration she receives. These individualized, anti-redistributive responses to shifting gender norms and the erosion of the social safety net in the post-Civil Rights Era provide a cultural commonsense that supports the Black manosphere.

Antonia Randolph is the Jonathan M. Hess Career Development Term Assistant Professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Her interests include diversity discourse in education, Black feminist thought, non-normative Black masculinity and sexuality, and hip-hop culture. Her book, The Wrong Kind of Different: Challenging the Meaning of Diversity in American Classrooms (Teachers College Press, 2012), examined the hierarchies elementary school teachers constructed among students of color. Her current book project, That’s My Heart: Queering Intimacy in Hip-Hop Culture, forthcoming from the University of California Press, examines portrayals of Black men’s intimate relationships in hip-hop culture.

RSVP for the Fellows Forum on Jotform.

See all events in the IAH Fellows Forum series.