On Monday, April 24, 2023, at 6:00pm, join the Spring 2023 CLACS Colloquium for a workshop titled, Va y Ven of Afrobeats, featuring Mopelolade Ogunbowale (University of Buffalo) whose latest work examines creativity, rebellion and feminist resistance in Konto, an reggae-dancehall style from Lagos; Rosa Couto who is a São Paulo-based researcher and member of the band Funmilayo Afrobeat Orchestra; and Michael Veal (Yale) whose 2000 biography of the Nigerian musician Fela Anikulapo-Kuti uses the life and music of this influential African musician to explore themes of African post-coloniality and diasporic exchange.
This event is open to the public with RSVP. Please RSVP for all events via Eventbrite: nyuvaiven.eventbrite.com
About the Presenters
Mopelolade Ogunbowale is an Assistant Professor at the Department of Africana and American Studies, University at Buffalo. She specializes in Africana popular music, religious, gender, sexuality and urban studies. She is currently working on her book manuscript titled The Spirit is the Music: Osun’s Aesthetic Manifestations in Reggae-Dancehall where she studies the workings of Osun, an Afro-Atlantic deity associated with creativity, rebellion and feminist resistance in the musical, lyrical and embodied practices of Konto, an reggae-dancehall style music form produced in Ajegunle, an urban ghetto located in Lagos, Nigeria. Ogunbowale is also invested in studying Afrobeats music.
Rosa Couto holds a doctorate in History, researching African and African-Brazilian popular music. She is also a musician, and member of the band Funmilayo Afrobeat Orchestra. She’s the author of the book Fela Kuti: counterculture and contradi(c)tion in African popular music.
Michael E. Veal has been a member of the Yale faculty since 1998. Veal’s work has typically addressed musical topics within the cultural sphere of Africa and the African diaspora. His 2000 biography of the Nigerian musician Fela Anikulapo-Kuti uses the life and music of this influential African musician explore themes of African post-coloniality, the political uses of music in Africa, and musical and cultural interchange between cultures of Africa and the African diaspora. His documentation of the “Afrobeat” genre continued with the 2013 as-told-to autobiography Tony Allen: Master Drummer of Afrobeat. Professor Veal’s 2007 study of Jamaican dub music examines the ways in which the studio-based innovations of Jamaican recording engineers during the 1970s transformed the structure and concept of the post-WWII popular song, and examines sound technology as a medium for the articulation of spiritual, historical and political themes. His forthcoming book Wait Until Tomorrow surveys under-documented periods in the careers of John Coltrane and Miles Davis that encapsulate the stylistic interventions of “free jazz” and “jazz-rock fusion,” and draws on the language of digital architecture in order to suggest new directions for jazz analysis.
About the Colloquium
Organized by faculty members Sybil Cooksey and Yunior Terry, the colloquium "Música de Vaivén: The Habanera Diaspora" pairs a graduate seminar with a public event series. Learn more.
Supporters
The Spring 2023 colloquium is organized by the Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies, the Gallatin School of Individualized Study, and the Department of Music.
Additional sessions are made possible with support from the Center for Faculty Advancement, Gallatin Amplified Voices Series, Center for the Study of Africa and the African Diaspora, La Maison Française, and Haitian Creole Language Institute of New York.
