The Possible Impossibilities of Home: Afrobeats and the Refusal of Unlivability
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Africa, from a colonial gaze, is often perceived as a dark continent and site of impossibilities, where humanities are configured as bare lives and disposable subjects (Agamben, 1998; Mbembe, 2019). Western media further reinforce this colonial perception with constant negative depiction of Africa as a site of war, hunger, terrorism, and other forms of violence, projecting the continent as unlivable and unworthy of being called home. In this paper, we explore Afrobeats as a sociopolitical site that negotiates the tensions between home and exile, belonging, and displacement. Situating Afrobeats within the broader discourse of migration, mobility, and African diasporic imaginaries, we examine how this music genre articulates a radical refusal of unlivability—rejecting the notion that transnational migration or return migration is impossible due to unlivable conditions often imposed on Africa by neoliberal structures and neocolonial logics. Through a lyrical analysis of songs of selected Afrobeats artists from Nigeria and drawing on Afrofuturism as a theoretical framework, we argue that Afrobeats does not merely document the complexities of African urban life but actively reconfigures notions of home as fluid, contested, and possible even within excruciating sociopolitical and economic conditions. As such, we conclude that Afrobeats depicts home as a site of insurgent joy, cultural vibrancy, world-making, and improvisations, thereby forging new futures of African-diasporic consciousness and belonging.
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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 | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 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".