Queens of Afrobeat: Reflections on Book Writing, Revising and the Things I Would [Not] do Differently

Dotun Ayobade (he, his, him) holds a joint appointment as an Assistant Professor in Performance Studies and African American Studies. He studies how embodied forms of popular culture shape the meaning of community, justice and activism in late 20th century West Africa. Ayobade attends to how West Africans activate aesthetic and everyday social performance to shape their lived realities, forge belonging and declare being within the political economy of African states. His work considers the function of embodiment in and across a range of cultural forms— dance, theatre, sound, material culture, performance art and photography— alongside the multiple significations of the aestheticized body in contemporary Nigeria: as a container of collective desires and underexplored histories, as a site for worldmaking and as a space for rearticulating meaning between Africa and the African diaspora. Ayobade’s most recent writing “Invented Dances, Or, How Nigerian Musicians Sculpt the Body Politic” is published in the Dance Research Journal. This essay explores sonic embodiment in the musical, scriptive and affective transaction between Nigerian musicians and their listening publics. Ayobade’s writing has appeared in Journal of African Cultural Studies, Art Africa, Africa Today, in edited book volumes and in other public fora, including Africa is a Country.

Ayobade is currently working on the first book-length study of the storied lives of Nigeria’s Afrobeat Queens, an iconic collective of women that gave potency to the activism of famed Nigerian musician, Fela Kuti. Provisionally entitled Queens of Afrobeat: Gender, Play, and the Making of Fela Kuti’s Music Subculture, this work examines how the women of Afrobeat fashioned performance strategies to negotiate agency and visibility when confronted with censure and authoritarianism.