Latifah Then and Now

I am slightly embarrassed that reading George Lipsitz's "Diasporic Noise: History, Hip Hop, and the Post-Colonial Politics of Sound" reminded me of a certain scene from the film Beauty Shop starring Queen Latifah. I'm not going to admit that I've seen this (ridiculous) film, but many of the points Lipsitz makes in the article are underscored in the film.

In the article, Lipsitz writes that "Queen Latifah drew upon the diasporic history of Black people around the world to fashion an affirmative representation of women of African descent...Latifah appeared in a video that interspersed still photos of Angela Davis, Sojourner Truth, and Madame C. J. Walker with newsreel films of women prominent in the struggle against apartheid in South Africa...In telling its story about the achievements, ability, and desirability of Black women, 'Ladies First' inverted and subverted existing representations with wide circulation in mass media and popular culture" (504).

Even though Beauty Shop is set in 2005--many years after her release of "Ladies First" in 1989--Latifah still draws on the same notions of black female power as an actress. We can see an example of this in the clip below:

In this scene from Beauty Shop, a beautician in Latifah's salon suddenly starts reciting a Maya Angelou poem, "Still I Rise." The message of the poem even conveys black female power--"Out of the huts of history's shame/I rise/Up from a past that's rooted in pain/I rise/I'm a black ocean, leaping and wide/Welling and swelling I bear the tide." Everything about Beauty Shop invokes black female power, culminating in the final scene in which Latifah describes herself as a "magnificent woman"--another Angelou excerpt. Even alluding to Angelou in the film gestures towards Latifah's conscience choices to select powerful black women to mention in the film.