Feminist Spaces Summer 2022

Black Women’s Blues in Nina Paley’s Sita Sings the Blues and Beyoncé’s Lemonade Yasmine Anderson While a lonely woman in San Francisco, comforted only by the presence of her cat, bemoans the end of her marriage, an animated Sita from The Ramayana sings Annette Hanshaw’s 1929 version of “Am I Blue?” vocalizing the San Francisco woman’s heartbreak. Clad in a swirling, yellow dress and clutching a baseball bat, a woman erupts, as if reborn, onto a city street where she damages parked cars and fire hydrants as she sings back to the cheating husband whose infidelity has quickly become public knowledge. These images from Nina Paley’s 2008 film Sita Sings the Blues and Beyoncé’s 2016 visual album Lemonade, respectively, speak to how Black women’s blues music’s most well-known themes continue to be relevant to artistic, political, and affective exigencies today.

Even though the blues may not be trending at the top of popular music charts, it still occupies a place of interest and relevancy. In the past ten years, Hollywood’s screens have notably featured a multitude of Black blues women in star-studded biopics. While it is worth asking what these instances tell us about the public representation and consumption of famous Black women in popular culture, the use of the blues woman in twenty-first century popular culture as reference to a particular critical aesthetic and politics involves much more than we can apprehend through their biographical representations on the silver screen. Media such as Paley’s film and Beyoncé’s album represent some of the ways individuals 158