Diasporic Communion and Textual Exchange in Beyoncé's Lemonade and Julie Dash's Daughters of the Dust

This article conceptualizes "diasporic communion" as emerging from texts that perform as sites in which intimate connections among historically scattered people are animated toward resistance through an examination of Beyoncé's visual album Lemonade (2016) and its conversation with Julie Dash's Daughters of the Dust (1991). The works' intertextual exchange, I argue, activate trans-geographic and trans-historic connections through layered citation of shared affective histories with the colonial encounter, slavery, and contemporary anti-Black violence. Highlighting the ways in which place functions as a metaphoric marker of diasporic communion in each of the texts, I contend that landscape both produces and extends geographic specificity through webs of referentiality. These webs of referentiality draw complex maps of African diasporic relations that do not rely on proximity, either temporal or spatial, in the creation of community, allowing for an expansive and fluid theorization of the African diaspora, even while it is attentive to specificity of experience. Such works, I conclude, encourage audiences to link their own diasporic experiences through them, which both cultivates discursive relationships and participates in the creation of living Black archives that are otherwise historically marked by absence.