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Paper long abstract:

In this paper, we will position hype-man performances as a form that evolved from traditional praise singing and is fuelled by both the neo-liberal economic moment and the socio-cultural capital of digital media. The griot, bard, or praise-singer in traditional African societies serves specific purposes; they normalize a certain African epistemic reality that privileges the deeds of great men and royalty. In the transfer of a provincialized European modernity to the African landscape, capitalism and its handmaiden – digital technology – came to mediate an indigenous system that prizes certain features and communal contributions. This mediation led to the commodification and consumption of cultural productions, one of which is the traditional praise performance. With the social acceptance and valorization of capital accumulation, praise-singers turned towards these new capitalists and inscribed a certain cultural logic into their now commodified art - hypeman performance. Typically performed in clubs and parties but popularized and distributed widely through digital media, these hypemen performances have become so popular in Nigeria that other performers have been influenced by their style. Following the transformation of the oral praise-singer into a modern hypeman through the economic logic of colonial capitalism, the hypeman, cannibalizing the poetics and performance of praise-singers, responds to the realities of capitalist modernity and youth hustler masculinity in the content and form of their performances. To understand these transformations and the development of the hypeman poetics, we examine some performances that are available on TikTok and Instagram. These performances on social media are actual performances by hypemen that are available on the internet, concretizing the economic value of the form: not only do they hype in clubs for economic capital, but they also derive cultural capital by posting them online. We ultimately argue that in this era of neoliberal globalization that accompanies Nigeria’s failing postcolonial state, traditional literary and performance forms are being transformed into the economic and digital logic of the present era.