Description:

This convergence probes the often-invisible labor that underwrites the circulation of contemporary African electronic dance-music on the world stage. Public discourse and emergent scholarship have fruitfully explored the “products” and metrics of Afrobeats music – e.g., music charts and awards; songs and their impact in the world; or specific artists and their strategies. This convergence probes the networked world of labor, work, and collaboration, the subterranean economies of exchange and value that have flourished largely beyond the ambit of state and global corporate interests. What might it mean to approach Afrobeats from the standpoint of its success despite the blatant disinvestment by African states and amid the dwindling activity of Western record labels in African music markets? These disinvestments appear to have left behind a fruitful space for lively “Global South” actors whose improvised and fluid networks not only traverse national and continental terrains but also has made the most forceful case for the imagination and ambition of African youth on the world stage. This convergence also takes seriously the idea that Afrobeats, as a contemporary strain of African cultural production, has been engineered by the tireless work of ostensibly “minor” characters in the broader landscape of global pop. We invite a probing of the kinds of labors, and at what varying scales, have gone into creating a critically acclaimed meta-genre and, with it, African-identified superstars. What networked communities have invested their labors into “cracking the market code”? How has this labor produced new possibilities for capital flow, or revived entrenched uneven flows? What from the past facilitates clearer view of labor and the context-specific exertions that animate African popular cultural production in the present?