Oct 17
Guest Lecture - Queens of Afrobeat: Women, Play, and Fela Kuti's Music Rebellion
Join us for this Guest Lecture with Dotun Ayobade, Assistant Professor of Performance Studies and Black Studies at Northwestern University. Co-Sponsored by Theater and Dance Department and Africana Studies.
Queens of Afrobeat: Women, Play, and Fela Kuti’s Music Rebellion takes a multifaceted approach to the storied lives of the working-class women behind Fela Kuti's Afrobeat music, a unique blend of jazz, soul, highlife, and West African rhythms. Drawing on previously untapped material, Queens of Afrobeat weaves together an intricate narrative of women's efforts in shaping Nigerian popular music and one of Africa’s iconic subcultures. Dotun Ayobade's wide-ranging research weaves together interviews with surviving Queens, ethnographic narratives, newspaper archives, and close readings of album covers, photographs, and promotional materials to paint complex portraits of Afrobeat women artists. Not only were these artists crucial performers and backup singers for Kuti's most important compositions, but they also played key roles in his activism and campaigns of social protest against the Nigerian government from the 1970s to the 1990s.
Dotun Ayobade is an Assistant Professor of Performance Studies and Black Studies at Northwestern University. He studies how embodied forms of popular culture shape the meanings of community, justice, and activism in West Africa. His writing covers late twentieth century dance, performance, and popular music cultures in Anglophone West Africa. He is the author of Queens of Afrobeat: Women, Play, and Fela Kuti’s Music Rebellion (2024), a pioneering book-length study on the lives and times of women in Fela Kuti’s Afrobeat music. His work has appeared in leading journals, including in The Black Scholar, Journal of African Cultural Studies (JACS), Dance Research Journal (DRJ).