The Possible Impossibilities of Home: Afrobeats and the Refusal of Unlivability

Africa, from a colonial gaze, is often perceived as a dark continent and site of impossibilities, where humanities are configured as bare lives and disposable subjects (Agamben, 1998; Mbembe, 2019). Western media further reinforce this colonial perception with constant negative depiction of Africa as a site of war, hunger, terrorism, and other forms of violence, projecting the continent as unlivable and unworthy of being called home. In this paper, we explore Afrobeats as a sociopolitical site that negotiates the tensions between home and exile, belonging, and displacement. Situating Afrobeats within the broader discourse of migration, mobility, and African diasporic imaginaries, we examine how this music genre articulates a radical refusal of unlivability—rejecting the notion that transnational migration or return migration is impossible due to unlivable conditions often imposed on Africa by neoliberal structures and neocolonial logics. Through a lyrical analysis of songs of selected Afrobeats artists from Nigeria and drawing on Afrofuturism as a theoretical framework, we argue that Afrobeats does not merely document the complexities of African urban life but actively reconfigures notions of home as fluid, contested, and possible even within excruciating sociopolitical and economic conditions. As such, we conclude that Afrobeats depicts home as a site of insurgent joy, cultural vibrancy, world-making, and improvisations, thereby forging new futures of African-diasporic consciousness and belonging.