Afrobeat Music: How to Re-think Belonging and Political Action

In the last decades music is probably the aesthetic language around which a great variety of perspectives has been explored. Among these, music sociology has focused on the way music performs a constitutive action, in other words on the crucial elements that enable individuals to experience the reality and the social relations. Here, the emphasis is on the practical dimension of culture, how culture works in its sociomaterial aspects. Tia DeNora has been at the forefront of a new research agenda, where music is conceived as an artefact with its own agency and its ability to exert power. More precisely, music can act as a technology of the self, enabling subjects to act and to think of themselves in particular ways. This standpoint can be very useful to further investigate questions of collective belonging and the relationship between identity and community. Within this research direction, our contribution analyses music as a form of political participation and as an identity claim. Through the historical case study of Fela Anikulapo Kuti’s afrobeat music we analyse how music helps us to consider political discourses as material and operational. In this respect, we not only consider the lyrics, but also and especially the rhythm, the sounds, and the performances with which Fela Kuti shapes the strategies of political resistance to military authoritarianism and Western neo-colonialism.