Beyoncé’s Cowboy Carter isn’t just an album; it’s a calculated excavation and reconstitution of the American cultural imaginary. The critical acclaim surrounding the project stems not only from its genre-defying soundscape but from Beyoncé’s deft manipulation of Americana’s visual and ideological vocabulary—what we might call, borrowing from Said, her mining of the "cultural archive."
In the same way that Edward Said theorized Orientalism as a structured archive of Western fantasy about the East, Beyoncé taps into a similarly codified archive of "the West"—this time, the American West, the cowboy, country music, and its mythic associations with whiteness, masculinity, individualism, and settler violence. But rather than merely subverting or parodying these tropes, she embeds herself within them—reclaiming, rewriting, and re-performing these symbols from within the genre.
The critical acclaim has circled around several key points:
Genre as Ideological Terrain
Beyoncé doesn’t “cross over” into country—she exposes the gatekeeping logic that structures genre as a racialized and gendered mode of containment. Her work challenges the idea that country is inherently white or apolitical. Think of it as genre not just as a musical form, but as a disciplinary regime—a border wall. And she walks through it in heels.Reinscription of Iconography
The cowboy hat, the Southern flag-adjacent motifs, the aesthetics of Marlboro masculinity—all get queered, Blackened, feminized, and mythologized in new ways. Her iconography performs a visual détournement, flipping the semiotic script while never losing its sharp-edged glamour. It’s revisionist myth-making with a budget and a body count.Spectacle as Political Method
Beyoncé’s marketing machine is a masterclass in slow-burn mythos-building. The rollouts, the curated silences, the visual cues—this is not just PR, it’s propaganda-as-performance. She’s not participating in the culture industry; she’s orchestrating it.The Archive as Stage
To Said’s point: the cultural archive is not neutral. Beyoncé rummages through it like a trickster-historian, reactivating, sampling, and remixing the American narrative in order to expose its exclusions. By occupying the stage of Americana (both literally and symbolically), she inserts Black southern womanhood into a mythology that has long erased it.
Genre as Ideological Infrastructure
To describe Cowboy Carter as “genre-bending” misses the deeper operation at work. Beyoncé is not simply traversing musical categories—she’s laying bare the power structures that make genre itself a system of cultural containment. Genre here functions as an ideological infrastructure: a framework designed not just to organize sound, but to discipline who is heard, remembered, or excluded from the story.
Country music, in particular, has long operated as a “white site”—what Nicholas Mirzoeff identifies as a space of cultural production built to naturalize whiteness as invisible, dominant, and unmarked. Within this constructed landscape, the figure of the cowboy functions as both a symbol and a sorting mechanism. It encodes national identity, gender, race, and power into a tidy aesthetic package—one that relies on the erasure of Black, Indigenous, and migrant histories in the very spaces it romanticizes.
Beyoncé’s intervention destabilizes this archive. She does not “crossover” into country—she enters uninvited and exposes its historical amnesia. Rather than seeking validation from the genre’s gatekeepers, Cowboy Carter turns the genre inside out. It confronts the listener with the fact that country music’s supposed “purity” is a myth—an imagined community, to borrow Benedict Anderson’s term, built on selective memory and ideological performance. Genre, in this view, is less about sonic characteristics and more about social contracts—who gets to belong, and under what terms.
What Beyoncé performs, then, is not merely inclusion, but disruption. Her voice inside this genre is not assimilationist; it’s insurgent. By placing herself within the sonic and visual codes of Americana—boots, hats, twang, and all—she reclaims cultural terrain that was always already entangled with Black histories, but has been systematically disavowed.
In Cowboy Carter, genre becomes a site of cultural counter-memory. It is both the battleground and the critique.
Cowboy as Code
The cowboy is not just a character—it’s a code. A semiotic shorthand for conquest, independence, and white masculine authority. As an icon, the cowboy has carried centuries of ideological weight, from 19th-century dime novels to Hollywood westerns, where it functioned as a narrative device to naturalize settler colonialism and erase Indigenous and Black presence from the American frontier. In short, the cowboy has always been a symbol of a national fantasy.
Beyoncé doesn’t discard this iconography—she inhabits it. In Cowboy Carter, she dons the hat, rides the horse, and stages herself within the mise-en-scène of the Western mythos. But this is not mimicry—it’s subversion. Her image troubles the visual script: the Black woman as cowboy collapses the racial and gendered boundaries that have historically underpinned the symbol’s power. In doing so, she disidentifies with the myth while still performing inside its frame.
Here, we can turn to Linda Nochlin’s critical formulation in “The Imaginary Orient”—that representation is never neutral, especially when it stages the Other within systems of visual pleasure. Beyoncé reverses this dynamic. Rather than being constructed as Other within the cowboy narrative, she assumes the central gaze, seizing the icon not as spectacle but as subjectivity. The visual field is restructured around her presence.
Her iconography stages a quiet insurgency. The project is laced with references to American visual traditions—flags, leather, rodeos, prairie dresses—yet these references are recontextualized to foreground Black femininity, ancestral memory, and cultural reclamation. Linda Bolton, in Facing the Other, reminds us that looking is never innocent; it is always about power. Beyoncé does not simply reflect back at America—she repositions herself as both seer and subject, the face and the frame.
In the context of American cultural memory, this reauthoring is radical. The cowboy, like so many national icons, was designed to exclude. Beyoncé’s re-performance reveals its exclusions not as accidents, but as design features. Her presence inside that frame forces a re-reading of the archive itself, disrupting the visual consensus that has long coded whiteness as default and Blackness as deviant.
Spectacle and Soft Power
Beyoncé’s Cowboy Carter is not only a musical project—it is a calculated exercise in spectacle. And spectacle, as we know, is never politically innocent. In the context of visual culture, Beyoncé demonstrates a sophisticated understanding of how imagery operates as soft power—how aesthetic choices carry ideological weight.
Historically, propaganda in the arts has been state-driven, explicit, and overt—posters, murals, staged photographs, and state-funded cinema. But in the contemporary media ecology, propaganda has become ambient. It lives in algorithms, brand aesthetics, and image circulation. Beyoncé plays this game fluently, turning the tools of mass media into instruments of counter-propaganda.
Her rollout strategies—highly curated, slow-burning, visually saturated—mirror the tactics of political campaigns. They create anticipation, shape narrative, and assert symbolic authority. Yet her imagery works against the ideological grain. It does not attempt to universalize whiteness or suppress dissent. Instead, it amplifies cultural memory, challenges historical erasure, and destabilizes normative aesthetics of patriotism and pride.
This visual strategy aligns with what Linda Nochlin describes as “the gaze that constructs difference.” Beyoncé understands this gaze and turns it back onto itself—forcing the viewer to reckon with how iconography has been used to naturalize ideological violence. Her images do not ask to be read—they confront, command, and reframe.
Similarly, Bolton’s insistence that "facing the other" is an ethical, not just visual, act helps frame Beyoncé’s work not as appropriation, but as confrontation. Her glamour becomes a mode of accountability. The polished surface contains political teeth.
In Cowboy Carter, propaganda is not about deception—it’s about disruption. Beyoncé uses the image as method, the archive as arsenal, and the spectacle as a means of radical address.
Requiem as Radical Memory
Cowboy Carter is more than a genre experiment or a cultural statement—it is a requiem. A mourning for the American myth, and a refusal to let that myth pass unchallenged into the archive. Through sound and image, Beyoncé stages a burial, not of the cowboy figure itself, but of the racial and ideological scaffolding that has long upheld it.
This is not nostalgia. It is memory sharpened into critique. The project renders visible the systemic exclusions embedded in country music, American iconography, and cultural gatekeeping. It does so not through rejection, but through strategic occupation—inhabiting the forms, retooling the symbols, and speaking from inside the frame.
As Nicholas Mirzoeff reminds us, “white sites” depend on the unmarked nature of whiteness as default. Beyoncé makes that default visible—and therefore contestable. And in doing so, she troubles the fantasy of a unified national identity that Benedict Anderson described as “imagined community.” This is a re-imagining—one that insists on the presence of Blackness not as addendum, but as origin.
If propaganda historically functioned to consolidate power, Beyoncé’s counter-propaganda disperses it. Her spectacle does not serve the state; it destabilizes it. As Linda Nochlin argued, the politics of representation are not about who appears in the frame, but who controls the frame. Beyoncé flips the lens. In Cowboy Carter, she is the author of the archive, the curator of her own myth, and the mourner of a national dream deferred.
The album is not a crossover. It is a crossing over. A passage into new cultural terrain—where memory is fugitive, representation is political, and genre is no longer a prison, but a funeral procession.
SOURCES
Anderson, Benedict. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. Verso, 1983.
Been Country. Been Country, 2024, https://www.beencountry.com/. Accessed 11 June 2025.
Beyoncé. Beyoncé Official Website, 2025, https://www.beyonce.com/. Accessed 11 June 2025.
Bolton, Linda. Facing the Other: Ethical Disruption and the American Mind. Louisiana State University Press, 2004.
Mirzoeff, Nicholas. The Right to Look: A Counterhistory of Visuality. Duke University Press, 2011.
Nochlin, Linda. “The Imaginary Orient.” Art in America, May 1983, pp. 118–131.