Reviewed by:

• Homecoming: A Film by Beyoncé by Beyoncé Knowles and Ed Burke
• Sheila Liming

Beyoncé’s history-making appearance at the 2018 Coachella music festival was about spectacle—in particular, about seizing the right to star at the center of it. But Homecoming, the Netflix film that documents making of her two Coachella concerts, is not just about the carefully honed image of a pop superstar but also the idea of the university community. Homecoming sets Beyonce’s image against the backdrop of the HBCU, and explores the kinds of campus culture that HBCUs have the power to foster. In this regard, it is both a provocation and a rarity: It chronicles a vital strain of university life that is usually deemphasized and viewed as simply a complement to sports and football, and it reenacts the historical spectacle of that culture in the service of bringing it to mass audiences.

In an immediate sense, I’m referring to the culture of marching bands, drum lines, majorettes, step teams, and the like—that is, all of the attendant features of the “ritual,” as the film repeatedly calls it, that is HBCU college football, minus the actual football. But the history of African American campus culture (some of the most recognizable features of which were, incidentally, introduced by Kwame Nkrumah) extends into deeper thematic territory in the film, with one of Beyoncé’s costumes featuring the letters BΔK (a play on her own initials, but with a nod to [End Page 348] Greek-named fraternities and sororities) and signaling her self-authorized induction into a milieu that she admittedly declined to join.

She explains early in the film that Destiny’s Child, the singing group she was in from age nine in 1990 (when it was called Girl’s Tyme) through 2006, “was my college, my college was traveling around the world and life was my teacher” (18:50). It’s a comment that celebrates, on the one hand, the cherished American mythos of self-making, à la the “School of Hard Knocks.” At the same time, it provides some context and explanation: Like many Americans, Beyoncé never attended college, but that did not prevent her from feeling drawn to the idea of the American university as a spectator, if not perhaps as a participant. That idea of spectatorship, as the film goes on to demonstrate, grows out of the incubation of unique cultural forms that lend definitive shape to the college experience and thus nurture the specific kinds of communities whose spirit and energy Beyoncé laments having missed. Homecoming foregrounds the history of these communities for Netflix audiences who may know little about HBCUs while also drawing attention, in very subtle ways (this is a festival, after all), to some of the problems that continue to plague them today.

Over the past few decades, the subject of institutional endowments has been an increasingly crucial one for most American colleges and universities. Concerns about inbuilt as opposed to tuition-generated capital have grown along with the pre-pandemic demand for more lavish campus facilities, on the one hand, and declining revenue from other sources, including state funding, on the other. As sources like Bloomberg report, the endowments of even the most well-funded HBCUs amount to a mere fraction of those enjoyed by their Ivy League and other private peers. This situation leaves HBCUs with fewer options for investing and growing their comparably meager endowments, and thus fewer resources over the long term. To that end, Beyoncé’s Homecoming serves the dual purpose of strategically highlighting this more neglected sector of American university education. Shortly after Homecoming premiered on Netflix, Beyoncé announced a scholarship program that would award $25,000 scholarships to individual students at four HBCUs (Xavier, Wilberforce, Tuskegee, and Bethune-Cookman) for the 2018-19 academic year.

The aesthetics of the film, meanwhile, gesture insistently toward the collaborative qualities of Beyoncé’s onstage performances and to the very fact of her celebrity as well. While much of the live show relies on luridly colored, professional Steadicam footage, there are also sections that appear grainy and...

审核人：

• 归乡：碧昂丝（BeyoncéKnowles）和埃德·伯克（Ed Burke）创作的电影
• 希拉·利明（Sheila Liming）

乙在2018年的Coachella音乐节eyoncé的历史，使外观约为眼镜特别是在关于它的中心抓住星权。但是，记录了她两次Coachella演唱会制作过程的Netflix电影《Homecoming》，不仅关乎流行超级巨星精心打造的形象，而且还关乎大学社区的想法。归乡在HBCU的背景下树立碧昂斯的形象，并探索HBCU有能力培养的校园文化。在这方面，这既是挑衅又是稀有：它记载了大学生活中的一种重要压力，通常不加强调，并被视为对体育和足球的简单补充，并重现了该文化的历史奇观，以期为人们带来面向大众。

从即时的意义上讲，我指的是游行乐队，鼓行，鼓槌，踏步队等的文化，即电影反复提到的“仪式”的所有伴随特征，即是HBCU大学橄榄球，减去实际橄榄球。但是非裔美国人校园文化的历史（其中一些最知名的特征偶然地是由夸梅·恩克鲁玛介绍的）延伸到了电影中更深的主题领域，碧昂丝的一套服饰中都带有字母BΔK（这是她自己的剧本）的首字母缩写，但要点赞[End Page 348]希腊语名称的兄弟姐妹和姐妹姐妹），并向她示意自己拒绝进入的环境发出了自我授权的感应。

她在影片的早期解释说，她从1990年9岁那年开始唱歌的乐队Destiny's Child（当时被称为“ Girl's Tyme”）一直到2006年，“是我的大学，我的大学环游世界，生活是我的老师” （18:50）。这一评论一方面赞扬了美国人珍视的自我创造神话，如“硬敲门学校”。同时，它提供了一些语境和解释：与许多美国人一样，碧昂丝从未上过大学，但这并没有阻止她对美国大学作为旁观者（如果不是作为参与者）的想法感到迷恋。随着电影的继续展示，这种观众观的想法，归乡为那些可能对HBCU知之甚少的Netflix观众提供了这些社区的历史，同时也以非常微妙的方式（毕竟这是个节日）吸引人们关注今天困扰他们的一些问题。

在过去的几十年中，机构捐赠的主题已成为大多数美国大学和学院越来越重要的主题。一方面，人们对内建而不是学费产生的资本的担忧随着大流行前对更豪华的校园设施的需求而增长，另一方面，来自其他来源（包括国家资金）的收入也在下降。正如彭博社报道的那样，即使资金最充足的HBCU的捐赠也仅相当于其常春藤联盟和其他私人同伴享有的捐赠的一小部分。这种情况使HBCU拥有较少的选择来投资和发展其相对微薄的捐赠基金，因此从长期来看，其资源也较少。为此，碧昂斯的归乡既有战略意义地突出了美国大学教育这一被忽视的领域的双重目的。在``Homecoming''在Netflix上首映后不久，碧昂斯宣布了一项奖学金计划，该奖学金将为2018-19学年的四个HBCU（Xavier，Wilberforce，Tuskegee和Bethune-Cookman）的个人学生提供25,000美元的奖学金。

同时，电影的美学始终坚持着碧昂丝在舞台表演中的协作特质以及她的名流。虽然大部分现场表演都依靠色彩斑Ste的专业Steadicam镜头，但也有一些部分显得颗粒感和...