CAPAS RESEARCH PROJECT - Titus Olusegun Musicking Oil Extractivism, Biopolitics, and Ecological Apocalypse in the Niger Delta of Nigeria
Scholarship on Nigerian popular music abounds; however, very little has engaged issues of oil extractivism, biopolitics, and apocalyptic narratives, especially in the Niger Delta of Nigeria. The central thesis of this work is that the people of the Niger Delta hold distinct ideas, assumptions, and values about the environment, which are manifested as indigenous knowledge within the popular musical expressions encountered in daily life. These indigenous ecological knowledges encapsulate biopolitical narratives of both human and environmental bodies. Music produced by artists such as Victor Okafor, Burna Boy, and Jeru Klub, among others, serves as the symbols and sounds of the biopolitical, apocalyptic, traumatic, and displacement trajectories of human bodies under the control of the political class.
This music also expresses the forced mobility of bodies—where they go, why they move, and where they migrate as a result of a brutalized ecological system that further exacerbates the trauma, torture, and death of the human body. Employing cultural history, ethnography, and interviews, alongside textual, musical, and audiovisual sound analysis, this study relies on ecomusicological frameworks, theories of biopolitics and the apocalypse, Rob Nixon’s concept of "slow violence," and the environmentalism of the poor. I argue that music and the soundscape are powerful tools that express the entanglements of oil exploration, exploitation, biopolitics, apocalypse, trauma, ecocide, and human displacement in the Niger Delta. Ultimately, this project serves as a signifier for other global contexts where music has yet to be leveraged to analyze the intersections of oil, biopolitics, and apocalyptic narratives.