‘Is Beyonce the Diana Ross of our generation?’ a television reporter asked Oprah Winfrey on the red carpet at the premiere of the 2013 documentary Beyonce: Life Is But a Dream. Her response was clear: ‘No, she is the Beyonce of our generation. You cannot compare her to Diana Ross. Diana Ross was Diana Ross, and Beyonce is Beyonce’ (Graham 2013). Winfrey is right, of course, as the careers of these two African-American female superstars are more than three decades apart, during which the media landscape has changed drastically. Much more than Ross ever was, Beyonce is ‘an ambulant brand, an advertisement for a new gilded age when commodities overpower everything – including race’ (Cashmore 2010: 138). Back in the post-civil rights era of the 1970s, when Diana Ross became a solo superstar, no one could have envisioned an African-American female pop star featured on the cover of the ‘The 100 Most Influential People’ issue of Time magazine, as Beyonce was in May 2014. As with many of her achievements, Beyonce's appearance on the Time cover has been perceived as a sign of a ‘post-racial’ era in which race is no longer a barrier to superstardom. However, as Farah Jasmine Griffin argues, although Beyonce does ‘occupy a space unimagined by earlier generations’, this does not signify a ‘post-racial’ time, but ‘a historical moment in which race and racism operate differently than in the past’ (Griffin 2011: 132–3). To perceive the shift from the ‘post-civil rights’ Ross to the allegedly ‘post-racial’ Beyonce as sheer progress fails to recognise how race and racism still function in society and media today.

Beyonce might not be the Diana Ross of our generation, yet the similarities between the two superstars cannot be ignored. Both Ross and Beyonce started as out as lead singer of a very popular African-American ‘girl group’, the Supremes and Destiny's Child; both were managed by a strong male father figure from whom they had to distance themselves publicly to claim their independence; and both became global superstars, not just as bestselling pop singers performing in grand stadiums around the world, but also as movie actresses and fashion icons featured on the covers of glossy magazines.