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Dotun Ayobade

Associate Professor of Performance Studies and Black Studies (On Leave Fall 2025 & Winter 2026)

About:

Dotun Ayobade (he, his, him) is an Associate Professor jointly appointed in Performance Studies and Black Studies. He studies the embodied modes of culture that foreground ideas community, justice, and activism in West Africa, from the late 20th century to the present. Ayobade is also interested in how West African artists activate aesthetic and everyday social performance to shape their lived realities, forge belonging, and declare being within the political economy of contemporary Africa. His work sits at the intersections of Performance Studies, Black Studies, and African Cultural Studies. 

Ayobade is the author of Queens of Afrobeat: Women, Play, and Fela Kuti’s Music Rebellion (Indiana University Press), the first book-length study of the storied lives of Nigeria’s Afrobeat Queens, an iconic collective of women who gave potency to the activism of famed Nigerian musician Fela Kuti. This book examines how the Queens fashioned performance strategies to negotiate agency and visibility when confronted with military dictatorship and social rebuke, alongside and beyond Fela Kuti. Instead of viewing this collective in polarized fashion – as figures of Pan-African strength, or as victims/cyphers of Fela’s eccentric mode of activism – Ayobade mobilizes play theory to explore the women’s complex motivations, strategies, trials, and perennial struggles. Queens of Afrobeatweaves together the fault lines of Nigerian social life and the women’s emergence as figures of cultural and moral interest beginning in the early 1970s. 

Ayobade research engages embodiment across a range of cultural genres — i.e., dance, theatre, sound, material culture, performance art, and photography — alongside the multiple significations of the performing body in contemporary Nigeria: as an archive of collective desires and underexplored histories; as fodder for subversive worldmaking; and as a space for rearticulating meaning between Africa and the African diaspora. Ayobade has been the lead convener of symposia around Afrobeats, a contemporary strand of Anglophone African electronic dance-music, fostering critical conversations around its global reach, cultural politics, and sonic innovations. 

Ayobade’s emerging research project explores the intersection of crude oil extractivism and embodiment across global Black geographies. This emerging work investigates how extractive economies shape and are shaped by bodily experience, aesthetic expression, and political life. The project maps the entanglements of environmental degradation, racial capitalism, and embodied sensorium in African and African diasporic contexts. 

His research has appeared in The Black Scholar, African Studies Review, Journal of African Cultural Studies, Art Africa, Africa Today, in edited volumes, as well as in public fora such as Africa is a Country and the podcast Fela Kuti: Fear No Man.

Research Interests

  • African/Black Performance Theory
  • African Popular Culture
  • Performance Ethnography/Historiography
  • Petrocultures and Extractive Economies
  • Dance in Contemporary Africa
  • Fela Kuti/Afrobeat Music

Books

  • Queens of Afrobeat: Women, Play and the Unmaking of Fela Kuti’s Music Subculture (Indiana University Press, 2024)

Select Articles

 Works in Progress

  • Burna Boy’s African Giant, Bloomsbury 33 1/3 Series (Series Editor, Michael Veal) 
  • “Island in a Sea of Oppression: Pan-Africa at the Art Institute,” Review of Project a Black Planet, African Studies Review. 
  • “A Phase of Concrete Action: Performance, African Studies, and Black Studies at the University of Texas, Austin,” Callaloo. 
  • Book Review Forum for Queens of Afrobeat on Journal of the African Literature Association (JALA) 
  • “Performing Etutu: Spectacle and the Paradox of Slow Violence in Jelili Atiku’s Processional Art,” a chapter submitted to A Companion to the Body in Performance (Routledge). Edited by Hershini Bhana-Young, Roberta Mock and Victor Ladron de Guevara. 
  • I have begun what is an emerging exploration of petrocultures and performance in Nigeria. I received a grant from the Office of the Provost (at Northwestern) to initiate archival and ethnographic work, and I have presented aspects of the project at conferences and public fora.

Public Writing