The 2024 Two Icons Lecture will feature Francesca Royster, PhD from DePaul University. Dr. Royster will deliver the talk: 'This Ain't Texas': Cowboy Carter and Beyonce's demand for Black Creative Visibility in Country and Beyond. 

About the talk:

After a century of racist whitewashing, country music would seem to be finally reckoning with its relationship to Black people. Beyoncé's Cowboy Carter might be one of the most visible examples of this reckoning. And yet despite its success for Beyoncé, as well as her collaborators on the album, including Shaboozey and Brittany Spencer,  opening up the genre of country music has proven to be challenging, even for one of popular music's biggest stars. In my talk, I'll discuss some of the historic roots of the erasure of Black creativity in country music, and  I'll consider Beyoncé and her collaborators and fans' country music interventions as forms of joy, creativity and critique of historic erasure.

About Royster:
 

Francesca T. Royster is a Professor of English at DePaul University, where she teaches courses in Shakespeare Studies, Performance Studies, Critical Race theory, Gender and Queer Theory and African American Literature. She received her PhD in English from University of California, Berkeley in 1995. She is the author of Becoming Cleopatra: The Shifting Image of an Icon (Palgrave/MacMillan in 2003) and Sounding Like a No-No: Queer Sounds and Outrageous Acts in the Post-Soul Era (University of Michigan, 2013), which won Honorable Mention in the Modern Language Association’s William Sanders Scarborough Prize for an Outstanding Scholarly Study of African American Literature or Culture. She has also published numerous book chapters and scholarly essays in Biography, Journal of Popular Music Studies, Shakespeare Quarterly, Shakespeare Studies, Text and Performance Studies, Performance Research International and Women in Performance, among others. She is at work on a new book project that looks at Blackness in Country Music.
 

She has trained and volunteered as a counselor for the Chicago Rape Crisis Hotline and has served on non-profit boards such as Women and Girls CAN and Beyondmedia Education, a past organization focusing on grassroots media activism for women and youth. Her other interests include activism through performance and other forms of art, and learning to play jazz on the upright bass.