“Afrobeats and the Popular Incredible in Nigeria,” Dr. Adeshina Afolayan | UMRF 23-24

“Afrobeats and the Popular Incredible in Nigeria”
Dr. Adeshina Afolayan, University of Ibadan and the National Humanities Center

Afrobeats, as the current preeminent articulation of popular music in Nigeria, participates in and embodies the reign of the postcolonial incredible in Nigeria. In this lecture, I will insert Afrobeats into the existential dynamics of the Nigerian postcolonial agon. The postcolonial agon in Nigeria is constituted around the agonistic struggles of Nigerians within the context of the governance failure of the postcolonial Nigerian state, and the universe of possibilities and impossibilities that the state’s sovereignty and absence reveal for Nigerians. The Nigerian postcolony and its morbid symptoms therefore raises a lot of challenges and possibilities for the understanding of not only a postcolonial aesthetic experience—the challenge of how survival can become subsistent and eventuate in surplus existentiality; the capacity to rise beyond the bareness of an agonal existence into living buoyantly. But the challenge of living and responding to the postcolonial agon also leads to the emergence of what I am calling the popular incredible which implicates and imbricates postcolonial aesthetics as a breach of normality and normativeness in the politics and distribution of the sensible. The popular incredible enables Nigerians to destabilize the sociopolitical demands of formal ad legal order in Nigeria, but also the moral universe constituted by religion, and especially Pentecostal Christianity. To parody Hegel, within the context of the popular incredible, the real is the popular and the popular is the real. By this I mean that popular culture facilitates a (re)mediation of reality by which Nigerians reinvent their present conditions and future aspirations. The popular in the abysmal Nigerian postcolonial agon enables the contestation of the real and the imaginary within an ambivalent framework unconstrained by any moral standards or religious strictures. And Afrobeats—like Nollywood, the social media comic and stand-up comedies, and other popular cultural forms—is the expressive articulation of this popular incredible through which the postcolonial incredible is refracted.

The UNC Music Research Forum hosts invited lectures by distinguished music scholars from around the world and informal research presentations by members of our department and colleagues across campus. It serves as an intellectual hub for the department and is open to all. The Forum is held on the final Friday of each month during the semester from 2-4 p.m. in Person Recital Hall.