XXVIII AISNA Biennial Conference

“Facing West: Thinking, Living, Outliving the American West”

(Bergamo, Italy, 11-13 September 2025) Deadline: February 28 2025

PANEL 4

American Requiem: “Cowboy Carter” and Black Feminist Imaginings of the South-West

Gianna Fusco (Università degli Studi dell’Aquila) mariagiovanna.fusco@univaq.it

Giuseppe Polise (Università degli Studi dell’Aquila) giuseppe.polise@univaq.it

As in March 2024 Beyoncé announced the release of Cowboy Carter, an album leaning into a stagnating genre gatekept by a conservative demographic, its defining sounds and aesthetics being country was met with polarized reactions and invited predictable controversy rising at the intersection of music, race, and gender. As Beyoncé herself recounts in a lengthy Instagram caption, Cowboy Carter is born out of an experience— her infamous performance at the 2016 Country Music Awards—in which she was made to feel unwelcome: “Take that black bitch off that stage” people were heard screaming from the audience. In 2024, Beyoncé is exposed to the same vitriol of that night: she is not, nor will she ever be a real country singer, and she’d better stick to what(ever) she does. Here narratives of authenticity, recognition and belonging are interwoven with the ideological boundaries that define, delimit, and police them. Why can’t a Texas woman with a thick twang venture into country the way Canadian singer Shania Twain or Australian Keith Urban so easily have? As country is known for intercepting and catalyzing the nation’s nostalgic attachment to the American Dream to the point that even non-US citizens claim a right to access it, the root of this exclusion is easily revealed in some good ‘ole misogynoir. Removed from the whitewashed narrative of the West, the black woman in Cowboy Carter dares to create and pass on her story, journeying to and through a world defined by a soundscape that bends and blends the different musical elements converged into the country genre, which she deploys in the exclusive service of her own imagination.

This panel invites contributions that explore how Cowboy Carter exposes and/or explodes triangulations of music, race, and gender, the icon’s quasi-philological research into the genre’s origins and its revisions, the quintessentially camp star-spangled aesthetics she chose to promote the album, as well as the criticalities, the limits, the inconsistencies of narratives surrounding country as the defining music of the (South)West.