Beyoncé Giselle Knowles-Carter’s genre-hopping and country-influenced new album, Cowboy Carter, has been one of the biggest pop culture events of 2024 so far. It has also been a major event in aesthetics. What do we mean by that? Well, in his groundbreaking 2016 book, Black is Beautiful: A Philosophy of Black Aesthetics, the philosopher Paul Taylor characterizes Black aesthetics in the following way:
to do “black aesthetics” is to use art, criticism, or analysis to explore the role that expressive objects and practices play in creating and maintaining black life-worlds. The appeal to exploration here is more expansive than it may appear. One can explore something by trying to give an account of it, in the manner of a scientist. But one can also explore something by poking around, in the manner of an explorer. In this sense artists explore the roles that expressive objects can play by trying to make them play one role or another, or by participating in and commenting on previous attempts to do this.
On this understanding, Cowboy Carter is itself a work of Black aesthetics, one where Beyoncé explores Black life-worlds through the lens of country and genre, as well as a host of other themes. We invited five scholars working in aesthetics and philosophy of art to comment on the album, and to engage with Beyoncé on these issues. . Also, we wanted to make sure that the world knew that aesthetic thought about pop music reaches beyond the orbit of Taylor Swift.
In this roundtable, five aestheticians offer their reflections on the most recent work by Queen Bey:
- Jeanette Bicknell (she/her), Independent Scholar and professional mediator
- John Dyck (he/him), Lecturer in Philosophy at Auburn University
- Charles Peterson (he/him), Associate Professor and Chair of Africana Studies at Oberlin College
- Corey Reed (he/him), Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Butler University
- Nicholas Whittaker (they/them), PhD candidate at the City University of New York, Graduate Center