The Body Geopolitic: Afro-Asian Pluralities and Playful Masculinities in Nigerian Popular Culture

In this essay I consider these different modes, material and symbolic, through which China emerges as a place, an ethnoracialized and geopolitical entity, in the Nigerian cultural imagination. Here, drawing from Shanté Paradigm Smalls’ explorations of Afro-Asian plurality and hybrid masculinities, I...

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Bibliographic Details
Published inThe Black scholar Vol. 54; no. 3; pp. 30 - 41
Main Author Lu, Vivian Chenxue
Format Journal Article
LanguageEnglish
Published San Francisco Routledge 02.07.2024
Taylor & Francis Ltd
Subjects
African culture
African music
Black studies
Chinese culture
Geopolitics
Music
Popular culture
Popular music
Nigeria
China
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Summary:In this essay I consider these different modes, material and symbolic, through which China emerges as a place, an ethnoracialized and geopolitical entity, in the Nigerian cultural imagination. Here, drawing from Shanté Paradigm Smalls’ explorations of Afro-Asian plurality and hybrid masculinities, I consider gendered depictions of Asianness and Black Africanness in audio and visual popular culture, and how different modalities shape the imagery and ideologies of these encounters.In the Nigerian context, Dotun Ayobade has examined how Afrobeats music and dances ‘sculpt the body politic’ and generate various forms of collectivized consciousness.Footnote3 Threading through all of these representations and engagements with Chineseness and Asianness is a focus on Nigerian bodies that play, act, and transform their surroundings. Lingering old-school Chinese martial arts imaginaries meld with, interrupt, and are remade in the context of Chinese and Nigerian geopolitical relations rapidly shifting in the 2010s, as commercial exchanges intensified between the two demographic giants of their respective continents.
ISSN:0006-4246
2162-5387
DOI:10.1080/00064246.2024.2364573