Add free shipping to your order with these great books
Queens of Afrobeat : Women, Play, and Fela Kuti's Music Rebellion - Dotun Ayobade

Queens of Afrobeat

Women, Play, and Fela Kuti's Music Rebellion

By: Dotun Ayobade

Hardcover | 25 June 2024

Sorry, we are not able to source the book you are looking for right now.

We did a search for other books with a similar title, however there were no matches. You can try selecting from a similar category, click on the author's name, or use the search box above to find your book.

In Queens of Afrobeat, the women of Afrobeat music--a unique blend of jazz, soul, highlife, and West African rhythms--are finally given the recognition they deserve. This extensive study takes a multifaceted view of the storied lives of the women behind Fela Kuti's activist music.

Dotun Ayobade's wide-ranging research pulls from interviews with surviving queens, ethnographic narratives, the exploration of newspaper archives, and close readings of album covers, photographs, and promotional materials to help us see and understand the women who surrounded Fela Kuti on stage and in everyday life. Not only were these artists crucial performers and backup singers for Kuti's most important compositions, they also played key roles in his activism and campaigns of social protest against the Nigerian government in the 1970s.

Drawing on previously untapped material, Queens of Afrobeat weaves together an intricate narrative of women's participation in popular music. The stories of these remarkable women transform and uniquely personalize our understanding of the politics and performance of one of the major modern musical traditions in Africa.

Industry Reviews

"That Fela Anikulapo Kuti was a man of profound contradiction is perhaps nowhere more evident than in the lives of his collaborators, the Queens. These women-so crucial to Fela's success and arguably the "engines" of Afrobeat style and sound itself-were nevertheless consistently upstaged and disenfranchised from an empire they helped to build. In this book, Dotun Ayobade takes us backstage, back in time, and out into the community in search of the Queens' stories. Insightfully argued, rigorously researched, and lyrically written, Queens of Afrobeat portrays the creative contributions and personal hardships endured by these remarkable women as they navigated the charged geopolitics of intimacy and performed as savvy cultural managers within an unequal and highly gendered field."-Catherine M. Cole, University of Washington

"Of all the African musical innovators of the post-independence era, Fela Kuti was the one whose art was most strongly and explicitly predicted on the erotic. Until now, however, no writer has given full voice to Fela's queens, the female partners who helped him transmute the erotic impulse into sonic, political, spiritual, and philosophical forms of power. Dotun Ayobade's landmark study is thus a long-overdue corrective that gives the queens their rightful acknowledgment as crucial collaborators in one of the most revolutionary musical episodes in Africa's post-independence history."-Michael E. Veal - Henry L. and Lucy G. Moses Professor of Music, Yale University

"This book rocks! In lyrical prose, Dotun Ayobade brilliantly composes the much-awaited feminist account of the life, times, troubles, and triumphs of the women artists of Kalakuta Republic. Queens of Afrobeat: Women, Play, and Fela Kuti's Music Rebellion unearths their significant contributions despite their precarious positioning, sandwiched between the everyday male dominance of Fela's establishment and the brutal jackboot patriarchy of the military state. Reading the Nigerian Republic from the audacious experiment that was Kalakuta Republic, and the experiences of these female citizens, reveals much about the fragility of existence in a postcolonial state. By focusing skillfully on their performances, onstage, offstage, and in between, this treatise overturns, once and for all, the erasure and gender eclipse that has been their lot in the scholarship on Fela Kuti and Afrobeat. This is essential reading."-Oyeronk Oyewumi, author of The Invention of Women: Making an African Sense of Western Gender Discourses

More in Arts & Entertainment Biographies

Down With the System : A Memoir (Of Sorts) - Serj Tankian
You Never Know : A Memoir - Tom Selleck

RRP $35.99

$32.50

10%
OFF
Entrances and Exits - Michael Richards

RRP $34.99

$31.75

Strange Little Girl - Jessica Knight

RRP $36.99

$33.25

10%
OFF
The Life of Dai - Dai Henwood

RRP $34.99

$31.75

A Father's Son : Family, football and forgiveness - Mat Rogers

FREE SHIPPING

RRP $49.99

$39.95

20%
OFF
Who I Am : My Story - Melanie C

RRP $34.99

$28.50

19%
OFF
The Storyteller : Tales of Life and Music - Dave Grohl
I'm Glad My Mom Died - Jennette McCurdy

RRP $34.99

$31.75

Audrey Hepburn in Paris - Meghan Friedlander

RRP $59.99

$38.75

35%
OFF
Faith, Hope and Carnage - Nick Cave

RRP $34.99

$31.75

Making It So : A Memoir - Patrick Stewart

RRP $55.00

$39.90

27%
OFF
Being Henry : The Fonz . . . and Beyond - Henry Winkler

RRP $36.99

$31.50

15%
OFF
Behind the Seams : My Life in Rhinestones - Dolly Parton

RRP $85.00

$56.25

34%
OFF
Sons of Beaches - Bill McDonough

RRP $36.99

$33.25

10%
OFF
Book of Life - Deborah Conway

Paperback

RRP $34.99

$31.75

Rambling Man : My Life on the Road - Billy Connolly

RRP $49.99

$38.75

22%
OFF
Lies My Mirror Told Me : A Frank, Funny, Fearless Memoir - Wendy Harmer
My My! : ABBA Through the Ages - Giles Smith

RRP $34.99

$31.75

Frida Kahlo : Little People, BIG DREAMS - Isabel Sanchez Vegara

RRP $19.99

$18.95