Nigerian Afrobeats, the Irony of Belonging and Here–Elsewhere Dialectics

Abstract This article reports on a study that examined the reflective experiences of a few Nigerian Afrobeats artistes on irregular migration and identified overlapping contradictory impulses in the Nigerian migration discourse (NMD). Ten song texts of eight of these Afrobeats artistes were purposively deconstructed to evince the conception of irregular migration as a discursive formation and musical argument. Deconstructive paradigm helped to determine the specific communicative purposes of the texts and accentuate Jacques Derrida's dual oppositions which provided a theoretical basis for interrogating conceptual models in the texts. To further strengthen the deconstruction of the texts, the study leveraged critical insights from social dialectical theory and phenomenology, interrogating the interplay of opposing social forces in the NMD. It related the discourse to a dialectical thinking underlying the use of songs by Afrobeats artistes to raise public awareness against irregular migration among an increasing number of Nigerian youths who regard south-north migration as the only panacea to their socio-economic woes. The study also investigated dialectical tensions in the song texts in order to foreground the agency of migrant actors, the multivocality of here–elsewhere dialectics in the NMD, and the perceptions of migrant actors on how the dialectics evolved an interplay of competing discourses.