Black is king: utopia is now

"Who are you? What are you afraid of". These are some of the provocations raised in the visual album “Black is King” written, directed and produced by Beyoncé, a decolonial work materializes memories and invites us to live in a universe of power, deepening a sensory experience of healing, affection and ancestry.

The production contrasts with the Eurocentric anthropology that reduces Africa to a bloc, disregarding multiple identities and insisting on designing the continent in a primitive and stereotyped way.

A disruptive narrative, Black is King subverts the Western reductionist worldview. The scarcity, chaos and subservience stereotypes fall apart. There is no room for a bloody trajectory, where blacks do not exist.

The atmosphere created in Black is King is much deeper. In the film, blacks are respected in their ethnic multiplicity, taking advantage of several different languages ​​and expressions, including aesthetics, style, poetry, art, music, rhythm and dance, blackness is established as potent and, especially, valuing the land.

Ethnic variations are seen not only in terms of territory, customs and clothing, but also in the many hair textures presented. Nagô, ombré, jumbo and box braind braids; the dreads, the mohawks, the black powers, the curls, the shaved heads; the designs, the wool, the kanekalon, the cuts and the colors, dismantle the fetish of whiteness that hair is “style”. Instead, the film expresses hair roots as the formatting of black identities.

The journey presented in the audiovisual production mixes elements of African tradition in order to project black people into a possible place to exist, so that the diaspora is recreated based on power and pride. The future of black people in Black is King is given. In this utopia, “black lives matter” because black people are in full dialogue with their existence, without being run over by westernity.

The production shows faces from South Africa, Ghana, Cameroon, Nigeria, among others, in positions of structural power such as elders, debutantes, judges, kings and queens.

This piece is arms each black person giving us a perspective of future because the story talks about sharing, belonging, celebration and love. As they say in the movie “We are beautiful before they knew what beauty was”.