نبذة مختصرة : The thesis explores a particular historical moment: the integration of Nigerian music into the global flows of popular culture, popularly referred to as the “Africa to the world” movement by professionals and fans alike. The research is based mainly on ethnographic data from what is commonly referred to as the “Nigerian music industry,” a fluid network of structures and mobile agents organized around hubs all along the Nigerian ethnoscape, with Lagos its key nod. Data collection involved a year of physical ethnography in Lagos, several months of participant-observation and interviews in Istanbul, London, Dubai, and Paris, as well as four years of digital ethnography. Through the individuated mode of cosmopolitan success that Nigerian artists embody, the thesis explores the articulation of mobility, identity, and future-making in the age of global digital media. In particular, it takes seriously the popular hopes associated with the symbolic inclusion of “Africa” in the transnational commercial landscape in order to interrogate how imaginative, discursive, and affective practices interact with political economic processes. As masses of youths across the continent and diaspora root for music professionals who work tirelessly to hijack the structures of global capitalism and become “billionaires,” the thesis questions the empirical relevance and analytical power of seemingly entrenched and stable power dynamics inscribed in conceptualizations such as global/peripheral or capitalist/informal. It aims to move beyond categories that have limited emic resonance in order to analyze emancipatory world-making projects deployed by a postcolonial and post-privatization generation that appears to have internalized the flexible condition.
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