Black women in the music industry - including Beyoncé, Janelle Monáe, and Nicki Minaj - become critical interpreters of identity, aesthetics, and contemporaneous politics when performing as their alter egos.

Exploring the concept of alter egos as an artistic and intellectual strategy within American music and culture, with a particular focus on Black women artists in pop and hip hop, this book investigates how artists such as Janelle Monáe, Nicki Minaj, and Beyoncé construct alter egos to navigate identity, performance, and sociopolitical critique. Drawing on cultural studies, performance theory, and Black feminist thought, the book situates alter egos within historical and contemporary contexts of naming, identity formation, and counter-practices of representation. In analyzing long-form music videos, or “visual albums,” including Lemonade (2016); Dirty Computer (2018); Black Is King (2020), by prominent recording artists, Alter Egos detects a critical optimism at play that symbolically counters white nostalgia and anti-Black state violence with hopeful modes of embodiment. Through practices of creating performer personas, a feminist artistic technique emerges that plays with the affective possibilities of popular, mainstream music in the post-Obama era.

Larissa Irizarry is a visiting assistant professor at Gettysburg College, USA. Her specialty areas include queer
theory, Black feminist theory and North American popular music, and opera in the era of MeToo. She has
been published in The Journal of American Culture, Women and Music, Lateral, Notes, and the Ethnomusicology Review.