“Arrest the dance!”: rethinking Tejumola Olaniyan’s “postcolonial antinomy” and the politics of art activism

Abstract

Drawing on fieldwork on the emerging radical street performance culture in Nigeria, I reflect on the implications of Tejumola Olaniyan’s approach to popular culture and political activism, with a particular focus on his profound and provocative analysis of Fela Anikulapo Kuti’s Afrobeat. In Arrest the Music!, Olaniyan adopts a cultural-materialist approach to locate Fela’s Afrobeat in the postcolonial conditions that generated its aesthetics and politics. Rather than concentrating exclusively on the oppositional messages in Fela’s lyrics, Olaniyan excavates the “antinomies” structuring Fela’s music practices and reads these antinomies as embodiments of an oppressive yet “enchanting” postcolonial modernity. In the context of Olaniyan’s readings, I interpret the production of a radical street performance culture in Lagos in relation to the extensive processes of neoliberal restructuring taking place in urban Nigeria, and I examine in which ways postcolonial antinomies continue to structure contemporary artistic practices. This paper calls for a more nuanced reading of the politics of activist art in contemporary Africa, and especially the agonistic entanglements of local artistic activism and the neoliberal agendas forced upon it.