Singing the Body: Postmodern Orality and the Female Body in the Nigerian Hip Hop Nation

Abstract

The current trend in the Nigerian Hip Hop Nation (NHHN) to transgress established socio-cultural codes of ‘adult-run society’ in the Nigerian nation state has become a phenomenal postmodern signifier of urban youth difference. While this development has been acknowledged in a number of academic submissions, there has however been a dearth of scholarship to account for the temporal socio-economic/cultural imperatives that have shaped it, and how these motivations have impacted new youth identity formations, intra-NHHN power relations and the remapping of gender. Recognising Nigerian hip hop as predominantly framed around a male entertainment orientation and counterhegemonic cultural outlook, this paper argues that the present-day circulation of hip hop in Nigeria is a deconstructive, transcultural, and capitalist practice that presents an arena of youth self-(re)encounter, especially in the area of an overwhelming politics of masculinity, rethinking nation/belonging and the discursive (re)drawing of the female body. In this context, I suggest that the representation/performance of the female body in the NHHN, quite against popular notions of its vulnerability to misogyny, revolves around a site of ambivalence in which woman is both visible and discursively veiled, claiming agency within a dominantly hyper-masculinist youth (sub)culture as much as getting objectified in it. In this context, it is difficult to posit a case of ‘Nigerian feminist hip hop’ within a definitive space of black sisterhood and this requires critical contemplation.

Keywords:

• The Nigerian Hip Hop Nation
• Youth Culture
• Postmodern Orality
• the Female Body, the Nigerian Nation State

Notes on Contributor

Yomi Olusegun-Joseph holds a doctorate in Literature-in-English, and is a senior lecturer in the Department of English, Obafemi Awolowo University, Nigeria. His research interests include postcolonial discourse, African and migrant literary/cultural studies, African urban-youth studies and African gender/sexuality studies.

Notes

1 In hip hop, ‘bling’ is a slang referring to an unpretentious, flashy and showy way of life in which expensive gold or ornaments are displayed as part of (sub)cultural identity.

2 The ‘Swahili Coast’ is a label used by Eisenberg to describe the coastal area of Mombasa, Kenya, where a social unit consisting of Swahili/Arabic-speaking Kenyan Muslims of Arab and South Asian descent live. They live in tension with a Black populace of Kenyans with an ‘authentic’ claim of being Kenyan in their ‘dominant national imaginary’. Thus, they are often objectified or subjectified in the milieu of an apparent ‘Black Orientalism’.

3 For an excellent discussion of stages in the development of Nigerian hip hop, see Tosin Gbogi (2016).