Performing “Nigeria” in Dubai: A Worlding Project in the State's Blind Spot

Abstract Before it became a staple of global popular culture, Nigerian Afrobeats already resonated across Dubai’s mega-malls, luxury resorts, and other emblematic spaces of consumption. Migrant workers, music professionals, and average youths in Nigeria have mobilized this inclusion in the transnational commercial landscape to counter pathologizing depictions of “Africa” and the deeply felt devaluation of Nigerian citizenship. This article explores the intersecting itineraries of subaltern recognition between a West African cultural form and a West Asian city, leading to "Africa" being symbolically inscribed within a new, global yet decentered history—one that Dubai helps to structure. It examines how, through the performance of reified, metonymic expressions of ethnic and national identity in Dubai, young Nigerians leverage the emirate’s claim to represent the “world” and hijack its spectacle of urban futurity to assert their own presence on the global stage. Drawing on long-term ethnographic research, the article examines how the circulation of “Nigerianness” through music enables Nigerian workers to reinterpret their role in transnational economic migration as an act of empowering cultural nationalism while navigating ethnoracial hierarchies. By tracing individualized trajectories that maneuver through immigration regulations and economic opportunities, the article maps the construction of a decentered framework for globalized culture from below. Finally, it links the discursive, imaginative, and affective dimensions of music to a process of political subjectivation that unfolds in the blind spot of state institutions. As Nigeria’s contemporary music industry—built in the shadow of a (failed) state—embeds itself within Dubai’s development model, I argue that it feeds a specific African nationalist vision. This vision frames circulation, flexibility, and integration into global markets as pathways to progress—if not as progress itself—even as it demands the constant negotiation and reinvention of a system that increasingly runs on empty.