In the heat of its cultural moment, 2016 was a time of unrest and uncertainty; in hindsight, it represents transition. Political campaigns characterized by conflict searched back through history to transform a dark, racist American past into a national plan for the future. It was in 2016, in this unsettled social condition, that Solange released A Seat at the Table. She too looked back into the past, not to resurrect atavistic notions of identity, but to revive a culture of strength and endurance. On the album, a magnificently coherent vision of self and community, Solange merges the domestic with the national, unites the personal and the political, elevates the vulnerable to the powerful. The album is masterful in that it is self-sustaining. It contains a woman and a community, it validates itself, it sifts through history to better envision the future. And above all, it carves out a space of beauty and power for her Black identity.
Under the shadow of centuries of French and British colonial rule, Dominica and its population exist for Kincaid on the “margins” of history. With this image we can better understand the relationship between history, story, and imperialism; for Kincaid, to be marginalized is to be “reduced,” to be deemed “foreign,” and to be excluded from the dominant white discourse. In utilizing the methods of a postcolonial resistance, Solange engages with an understanding of marginalization that is not limited to the explicitly colonial efforts of, say, the British Empire. A Seat at the Table, with its own oral history, reveals the extent to which the white American mainstream colonizes and excludes a Black experience from its own national story. The interlude “This Moment,” delivered by rapper and entrepreneur Master P, expresses this large-scale marginalization as a feeling of invisibility. He describes being lost, so to speak, in the system: “You know, when they come here, you invisible. You know, you don’t even have a To take one’s seat at the table is to enter a discus- number in the system. Nobody cares about you.” What sion. And in its interest in the politics of identity, rep- he articulates—the image of total inconsequence, of resentation, and space, A Seat at the Table inserts itself being “foreign” to the government system and invisas a postcolonial voice into the white mainstream dis- ible in white spaces—is, at its root, an image of life relcourse. For as much as a postcolonial approach criti- egated to the margins. cizes imperial forces, it also seeks restoration and recuperation for marIn many ways, A ginalized communiSeat at the Table is a ties; it’s motivated journey. As she looks by a rightful anger, back through histories but it also seeks to of family and nation, reclaim suppressed Solange stretches forhistories because it ward to a future of sees them as worth hope and power. Even preserving and celthe album’s final worlds ebrating. This is conclude the work with where we merge with the album’s headspace: Solange a sweeping vision of history: “Now, we come here as has “got a lot to be mad about,” but she’s also searching slaves, but we going out as royalty and able to show for and reclaiming her “glory.” In her study of Haitian we truly the chosen ones.” To encapsulate such a jourauthor Edwidge Danticat, scholar Nadège Clitandre ney—from “slave[ry]” to “glory”—within a single album is provides a helpful framework for understanding the ambitious, but Solange sustains her message of empowaims of a postcolonial critique. She notes that a postco- erment and transcendence with grace. The album is not lonial lens “critique[s] the impact of European hegem- just about one woman finding “her glory” and advoony in colonized societies,” “dismantle[s] various codes cating “self care,” but is about an entire community and strategies of imperial domination,” and rejects the and an entire experience emerging from the margins “dominant discourses that continuously position the to assert its power. “Everybody always wants us to be post-colonial subject into a denigrated, subjugated, packaged and ready-made and healed instantly from and oppressed state.” these instances and these traumas,” Solange herself comments on the transitional nature of the album, “And Such ambitions largely inform Solange’s own that was about me saying, “Hey, I’m working through approach to contemporary American culture; she chal- this transition.”” It seems that it is precisely this limilenges a “hegemon[ic]” historical narrative, the quotid- nal state that affords Solange her power; from such a ian maneuvers of “imperial domination”—now coded vantage point, she can look back upon the past with as microaggressions—and the systemic attempts to knowledge and ahead to the future with hope. These “subjugate” Black culture and expression. comments suggest an awareness of space and time, and her own navigation of both, that allow Solange It’s not uncommon for us to think of history as a to so artfully articulate and celebrate her identity as a narrative, as something “written by the victors.” But Black woman in 2016 America. what it actually looks like for history to be a consciously written text is, albeit crucial within postcolonial disThe album’s consideration of such imperial forces course, remains more vague. The term ‘marginalized’—a from systemic racism in education, housing, and law helpful way to concretize the concept of a narrativized enforcement to Western standards of beauty reflect history—has recently found itself firmly set in the com- Solange’s own keen awareness of the way in which mon parlance of the nation, but its mere prevalence her body and culture journey through the spaces of a has perhaps diminished the full effect of its mean- white world. ing. Antiguan-American author Jamaica Kincaid, in a 1996 novel, describes those who live on the island of Dominica as “the ones who…had long ago been reduced to shadows; the forever foreign, the margins.”
SOLANGE & A SPACE FOR SURVIVAL
