Afrobeats as Counter-archive in Postcolonial Nigeria

Please join the African Thought and Media Speaker Series for "Afrobeats as Counter-archive in Postcolonial Nigeria," a lecture by Adeshina Afolayan (Professor of Philosophy University of Ibadan, Nigeria, and Founder's Fellow at the National Humanities Center). Abstract: In this lecture, I argue that Afrobeats serves more than the purpose of a feel-good popular music that provides escapist entertainment for millions of Nigerians. Rather, it represents an aesthetic structure of feeling-the embodiment of a felt sense of the quality of life. This representation demonstrates that the postcolonial agon in Nigeria is a place "where the need to survive does not take precedence or swallow up the need to imagine, and where the need to imagine does not impede completely the ability to survive". I argue that Afrobeats represents aesthetic creativity that articulates the logic of the supplement which functions simultaneously as the instantiation of a lack and its replacement-the representation of an incompleteness that needed to be filled. It is in this regard that Afrobeats constitutes an archival dynamic which articulates and narrates the ambivalent trajectories of survival and creativity in Nigeria's postcolonial context. Listen to the playlist provided for the talk: https://open.spotify.com/playlist/0FIOC454LWYreUBBBecnKZ?si=WEdKOQumQwmUGjTdlX3XsA&pi=e-8O2vkmuSQQqW The event is presented by the African Thought and Media Working Group convened by Damilare Bello and Kasyoka Mwanzia, and is generously sponsored by John Hope Franklin Humanities Institute, Africa Initiative, and Lunaris Literary.