Dotun Ayobade (he, his, him) is an Associate Professor jointly appointed in Performance Studies and Black Studies. He studies the embodied modes of culture that foreground ideas community, justice, and activism in West Africa, from the late 20th century to the present. Ayobade is also interested in how West African artists activate aesthetic and everyday social performance to shape their lived realities, forge belonging, and declare being within the political economy of contemporary Africa. His work sits at the intersections of Performance Studies, Black Studies, and African Cultural Studies.
Ayobade is the author of Queens of Afrobeat: Women, Play, and Fela Kuti’s Music Rebellion (Indiana University Press), the first book-length study of the storied lives of Nigeria’s Afrobeat Queens, an iconic collective of women who gave potency to the activism of famed Nigerian musician Fela Kuti. This book examines how the Queens fashioned performance strategies to negotiate agency and visibility when confronted with military dictatorship and social rebuke, alongside and beyond Fela Kuti. Instead of viewing this collective in polarized fashion – as figures of Pan-African strength, or as victims/cyphers of Fela’s eccentric mode of activism – Ayobade mobilizes play theory to explore the women’s complex motivations, strategies, trials, and perennial struggles. Queens of Afrobeat weaves together the fault lines of Nigerian social life and the women’s emergence as figures of cultural and moral interest beginning in the early 1970s.
Ayobade research engages embodiment across a range of cultural genres — i.e., dance, theatre, sound, material culture, performance art, and photography — alongside the multiple significations of the performing body in contemporary Nigeria: as an archive of collective desires and underexplored histories; as fodder for subversive worldmaking; and as a space for rearticulating meaning between Africa and the African diaspora. Ayobade has been the lead convener of symposia around Afrobeats, a contemporary strand of Anglophone African electronic dance-music, fostering critical conversations around its global reach, cultural politics, and sonic innovations.
Ayobade’s emerging research project explores the intersection of crude oil extractivism and embodiment across global Black geographies. This emerging work investigates how extractive economies shape and are shaped by bodily experience, aesthetic expression, and political life. The project maps the entanglements of environmental degradation, racial capitalism, and embodied sensorium in African and African diasporic contexts.
His writing has appeared in The Black Scholar, African Studies Review, Journal of African Cultural Studies, Art Africa, Africa Today, in edited volumes, as well as in public fora including Africa is a Country.
Scholarly Work
Invented Dances, Or, How Nigerian Musicians Sculpt the Body Politic
Courses
- Performing Africa
- Africans and African Americans: Cultural Entanglements
- Analysis and Performance of Texts