Paper short abstract:

This paper analyses the commodification of the 'image' of rapid success in the Nigerian music industry. It ties the performance of success to notions of agency in a context where the reflexive management of appearances is seen as a path to participation in 'global' culture and economic networks.

Paper long abstract:

The neoliberal conception of agency calls for a reconfiguration of subjectivity supported by positive psychology. Optimism and confidence are extolled as means to achieve success that the neoliberal subject chooses to strategically deploy by working on her emotions. Shifting the focus from the cultivation of the self to the performative possibilities of such discourse, this paper suggests that for aspiring Nigerian artists the image of upward mobility has itself become a commodity to be cultivated. Under the coded terms 'confidence', 'pride', or 'happiness' ubiquitous in the booming Nigerian music industry, everyone understands that a particular narrative is expected. In the words of a 17-year-old rapper from Lagos, 'if you walk proudly in your slippers in Bariga [an overcrowded Lagos neighbourhood], there's no way'. Artists thus 'fake' rapid success and perform emotional labour, aware of the materialistic value system in which injunctions to positivity are embedded. Using ethnographic observations from Lagos as well as digital ethnography, this paper shows that the reflexive management of appearances is seen as a path to full participation in 'global' culture and economic networks. At every echelon of the Lagos music industry one can hear a neoliberal discourse postulating that the fashioned, enterprising, and commodified self can performatively transform its circumstances and contribute to changing Nigeria's—and Africa's—'place-in-the-world'. Thus, performing success and presenting oneself as 'confidently African' in the face of dire circumstances are ways of restoring a sense of agency that was robbed by failed development along evolutionary lines and the humanitarian discourse that followed.