Transmedia Transpositions: Beyoncé and Rosalía

Abstract

[Abstract] In 2016, Beyoncé released Lemonade, a multilayered production consisting of the American singer’s intermedia reinterpretation of Warsan Shire’ poetry. In 2018, Spanish urban singer Rosalía published her second album, El Mal Querer, which is an aesthetic rewriting of the anonymous thirteenth-century romance Flamenca, composed in the Occitan language. Both Beyoncé and Rosalía were successful in recovering two apparently distant literary pieces for global audiences. After the release of the two albums, Warsan Shire’s works, as well as Flamenca, gained popularity among younger readers who otherwise would never have accessed the original texts. Beyoncé and Rosalía created innovative yet problematic cultural translations, and their reinterpretations caused controversy and courted accusations of cultural appropriation and deterritorialization. In this chapter, these works are analyzed with reference to their debt to Adaptation Studies and, most specifically, to the new strategies of bringing literary texts into forms of expression and communication that are more accessible to younger populations and thus open a renewed interest in the original texts. The difficulties—and controversies—of these transmedia transpositions are discussed in terms of ideological, spatial, and epistemological approaches.