Representation, Performative Exchange and Afropolitanism: Rethinking Opera Production in Nigeria through <i>The Magic Flute</i>
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract In this article, I consider the 2012–13 productions of The Magic Flute in Lagos, Nigeria, by the Musical Society of Nigeria (MUSON), as a means of rethinking broad conceptions of opera performance in postcolonial Africa. I explore the extent to which visual representation in this production creates cultural contact, exchange and hybridity, affording a pathway for experiencing opera from both Western and African perspectives without homogenisation or a clash of differences. Arguing against notions of race that pit Africa against the West, this study privileges Achille Mbembe’s writings on Afropolitanism as a framework for examining the multiple modes of meaning and identity created through this production. By scrutinising the textuality of visual elements and conceiving them as sites of localised ideological or identity struggles, I argue specifically that opera in Nigeria requires a critical framework that moves beyond notions of ‘whiteness’ and indigenisation. I will show that this staging invokes indigenous knowledge from Nigerian traditional religious and socio-cultural conceptions. In other words, mixed codes of visual elements operate as cultural signifiers that perpetuate an Afropolitan identity through which audiences interact with this art form.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".