Readers, before you begin, I encourage you to put on Beyoncé’s song “Ya Ya,” and read this piece with its percussion, syncopation, and roaring vocals playing loudly in the background. It is the only song on her 2024 Act II: Cowboy Carter—a terrain-shifting album that garnered her Grammy Awards for Best Country Music Album and Album of the Year—that name-checks the title of Beyoncé’s latest global performance, the “Cowboy Carter and the Rodeo Chitlin’ Circuit Tour,” which kicked off last week at Los Angeles’ SoFi Stadium.
There is some powerful signposting embedded in this name. The “Chitlin’ Circuit” began in the 1920s as popular shorthand for segregated routes of Black American touring performances. The circuit catered to Black audiences across the South, East Coast, and Midwestern states at notable venues including Harlem’s Lafayette Theatre, D.C.’s Howard Theatre, and the Frolic Theatre in Birmingham, Alabama.
Against the backdrop of both Jim Crow and the progressive Harlem Renaissance, Black artists worked the “Chitlin’ Circuit” with the intention of carving their own images and visions into the American imaginary. They created and performed across a wide range of genres, from minstrelsy, comedy, and circus acts to song, instrumental music, and dance routines. These performances aimed to counter the negative and stereotypical presentations of Black life that dominated American popular culture and to awaken Black-produced pleasure. Ya-ya.
But, what about those chitlins?
Any understanding of the “Chitlin’ Circuit” must begin with the food, which pre-dates the performances by hundreds of years. Stated plainly, chitlins or chitterlings are pig intestines that have been laboriously cleaned, seasoned, and cooked. Enslaved Black people developed this meal of sustenance to feed themselves and their families with the unwanted food scraps of plantation owners. Many 19th-century physicians, influenced by Charles Darwin and others who advanced theories of biological Black inferiority and difference, believed that pigs were effective nutritional catalysts for producing healthy Black workforces. As a result, plantation owners distributed the least desirable parts of the animal to their slaves.
Chitlins, then, dually symbolize an engineered hindrance to Black progress that was literally force-fed to Black populations and Black ingenuity.