On February 3, 2013, New Orleans became the American capitol for the day while the city hosted Super Bowl XLVII. The 2013 Super Bowl is most remembered for two events unrelated to the football game: the blackout and the halftime show. Beyoncé Carter-Knowles headlined, garnering praise for her performance of hits like “Run the World (Girls)” and “Independent Women Part I” with the backing of an all-female band and crew of dancers. It became, at the time, the second most-watched halftime show ever. Beyoncé returned to the Super Bowl in 2016, dominating the show (and eclipsing headliner Coldplay) with an explosive performance of her brand new single, “Formation.” Although the game occurred in the San Francisco Bay area—and the performance alluded to the Black Panthers, which originated in nearby Oakland—“Formation” also represented Beyonce’s return to the Crescent City; the track is laden with lyrical, sampled, and visual references to New Orleans.

Lemonade, the subsequently released visual album which includes “Formation”, became the most significant artistic and cultural production of the year (if not the decade). Much of the album was filmed in New Orleans and Southern Louisiana, and the artist and her collaborators use images of black life and black residents of the Crescent City to explore the album’s overarching themes of race, gender, feminism, marriage, southern identity, power, wealth, and status. “Formation,” in particular, resonated with fans for its revolutionary sound and lyrics.

Dr. Zandria Robinson at New South Negress argues that New Orleans is a character in Beyonce’s story, essential to understanding both the historical formation of blackness and black lives, and, more importantly, the potential for black re-formation and revolution. In Robinson’s analysis:

“[T]he visuals for ‘Formation’ offer up New Orleans as convergence place for a blackness that slays through dreams, work, ownership, legacy, and the audacity of bodies that dare move and live in the face of death. As an actual and imagined site of black southern ecstasy, tragedy, remembrance, and revolutionary possibility, NOLA is the pendulum on which Beyoncé rides a southern genealogy that traverses the Deep South from Alabama to Louisiana to Texas, back and through, with stops in between.”

Like a true boss, in “Formation” Beyoncé manages to bridge centuries of history and to offer a compelling and complicated critique of racism and misogyny in under five minutes.

In re-reading the past month’s coverage of New Orleans for The Metropole’s first Metropolis of the Month series, I was struck by the similarities between how urban historians and Beyoncé have examined the city. Indeed, historians are inherently interested in formation, and many of our posts spoke of creation, evolution, and revolution in the city. Lawrence Powell’s The Accidental City surveys New Orleans’ development in the eighteenth and nineteenth century to demonstrate how “the city’s collective attitude toward planning, culture, and economics emerged from a combination of human endeavor and environmental reality.” On a smaller scale, Emily Landau’s Spectacular Wickedness examines a single neighborhood in the Big Easy, the red-light district of Storyville, to demonstrate how “both its creation and its closing down were pushed by ‘progressive’ reformers.” In his essay contrasting masks and memorialization in New Orleans, Craig Colten describes how the city’s destruction by three major hurricanes in the twentieth century inspired the construction of the levee system that eventually failed during Hurricane Katrina—further perpetuating the cycle.

The “Formation” video begins with two allusions to Hurricane Katrina—the artist sitting on top of a submerged police car, amidst flooded homes, over which is layered a sample of late comedian Messy Mya asking, “What happened at the New Wil’ins?” “Beyoncé encourages us to hear [it] as a question about the comedian’s unsolved murder,” Robinson argues, “as well as a question about the city and black folks and the South: ‘What happened after New Orleans?’” Beyoncé plays with the ambiguity of Messy Mya’s question, using “What happened” as a way to look back at the city’s history of oppression against its black citizens, and to critique the present perception that black New Orleans has recovered from Katrina.

This longer chronological perspective also characterized our posts on The Metropole. Although references to the hurricane appeared in Colten’s essay and in our roundup of articles on New Orleans published in the Journal of Urban History, it served as an entry point to a broader examination of the city rather than the subject itself. As we wrote in our introduction to the JUH article roundup, “rather than rubbernecking at disaster, [scholars] have tried to use the hurricane to situate the city’s longer history; Katrina as organizing principle rather than a principle unto itself.”

In our discussions of urban histories of New Orleans, just as in Lemonade, the city’s legacy of slavery appeared as a consistent theme. While The Accidental City described how infrastructure built by slaves pulled “New Orleans out of the mud,” in her interview with with The Metropole, Landau explained how Storyville’s red-light district perpetuated the Southern sexual hierarchy whereby white men had ownership over black women’s bodies. And both Colten and Moira Donegan, whose piece on New Orleans in n+1 we featured in the introduction to the JUH article roundup, discussed how a certain form of hurricane tourism has emerged that privileges the desires of white, wealthy visitors over those of the city’s many communities of color.

Finally, if nothing else our coverage on The Metropole encouraged readers to “get information” on the city’s fascinating history. Beginning next week, we head southwest to Mexico City. We have some exciting posts planned, and hope you will enjoy reading essays by several scholars, including one by Professor Pablo Piccato on his new book, a bibliography, and some travelogues about visiting the Distrito Federal.

Thank you to Craig Colten, Emily Landau,  Brenda Santos, Steve Peraza, Stephen K. Prince, and Andy Horowitz for their various efforts in bringing New Orleans to life this month.