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Afrobeats, a globalized musical genre from West Africa and especially Nigeria has become a fan favourite, traversing the globe from red carpet events to nightclubs and topping music charts. With digital spaces affording viralising of content across and beyond borders, cultural productions and artefacts become fluid, appealing to a diverse audience, and sometimes picking up novel trajectories in their ‘new homes’. This study on digital spaces investigates the identification of non-African artistes who leverage the Afrobeats tag in their musical productions, oftentimes sampling and remixing popular songs while also producing their own songs in the genre. I perceive this appropriative reality – of ‘white’ bodies in Afrobeats – as a form of counter-flow and cross-cultural influence. In the emergent narratives, I am interested in the interrogation of the iconography of Afrobeats and how the selected artiste, through language use, authenticates the performance of Afrobeats in his productions. Furthermore, I engage the consequent discourses that come to the fore when this artiste courts digital acceptance on Twitter. To this end, I explore the X (formerly Twitter) space of Luca Zuccotti @OfficialLucaZ, interacting both with his self-representations as well as the feedback from commenters on his activities. Beyond the valid appropriation panic which echoes the exploitative colonial experience, I see the transculturality and transnationality of Afrobeats as indicative of its transformative power particularly within the context of contemporary socio-political upheavals.
Paul Ayodele Onanuga is a STIAS Iso Lomso Fellow and an Associate Professor in the Department of English and Literary Studies, Federal University Oye-Ekiti, Nigeria. His research interests revolve around linguistic practices in Nigerian Hip-Hop Studies, New Media Studies, Nigerian queer discourse, and Computer Mediated Communication/Discourse Analysis. He is a member of the Editorial Board of Discourse Context and the Media. He is widely published.
