Social-mediated Afrobeats culture and identity construction among young Africans in homeland and diasporic space

Abstract

This project investigates how young African people across homeland and diasporic contexts construct collective identity through their engagement in and with Afrobeats culture. Taking a multi-sited ethnographic approach, it examines the interconnections between locales in Accra and in London that, extended through a social media ecology, constitute a transnational cultural space. It explores how meanings of shared African identity, generated and/or validated within Afrobeats culture, are produced, circulated, and contested within this space. It relies on participant observation (offline and online) and semi-structured interviews to uncover practices, (re)presentations, and narratives that are mobilised by young Africans toward defining individual and collective modes of being and belonging. Drawing from literature across cultural studies, media & communications, sociology, psychology, migration studies, and cultural geography, the thesis analyses the interrelations of music culture, media, and space. It contributes to a spatial approach to identity, proposing concepts such as everywhereness and collocational homeliness that elucidate extended translocational conceptions of home. The empirical work builds on existing popular and scholarly discourse on how the global popularity of Afrobeats generates moments for affirmation and for cohesion; but, also, for contestation. The work scrutinises the role of music culture in processes of meaning-making and investigates how everyday modes of cultural engagement and popularised self-styling authenticate existing conceptions of Africanness and inform new ones. It also examines the sutures between homeland and diaspora and explores the symbolic boundaries that contour and clarify the meanings of Africanness. The thesis offers context-specific analytical categories for explaining logics of particularity, proposing interventions that support nuanced perspectives vis-à-vis dominant dichotomies in individualist/collectivist, constructivist/essentialist traditions. It reveals layers of conviviality and the expanses of Black joy, while also unravelling contradictory conceptions of race. Through this work, the thesis attempts to untangle the nuanced social and cultural mechanisms shaping the co-constitution of a digitally mediated collective African identity.