Material Afterlives: The Quilted Poetics of Daughters of the Dust (1991) and Lemonade (2016)

This article examines Daughters of the Dust (Julie Dash, 1991) and the visual album Lemonade (Beyoncé Knowles, 2016), which cites Julie Dash’s portrayal of a community of former slaves in its depiction of the histories of plantation labor. In a poetics I am calling quilted , I argue that these works use textiles to picture the means by which enslaved women practiced freedom despite the designation of their bodies as mere “material,” to be bought and consumed. Additionally, these works are indicative of how the textural matter of the screen has absorbed material residues from the afterlives of slavery.