Abstract

This article reports on a study that examined the reflective experiences of a few Nigerian Afrobeats artistes on irregular migration and identified overlapping contradictory impulses in the Nigerian migration discourse (NMD). Ten song texts of eight of these Afrobeats artistes were purposively deconstructed to evince the conception of irregular migration as a discursive formation and musical argument. Deconstructive paradigm helped to determine the specific communicative purposes of the texts and accentuate Jacques Derrida's dual oppositions which provided a theoretical basis for interrogating conceptual models in the texts. To further strengthen the deconstruction of the texts, the study leveraged critical insights from social dialectical theory and phenomenology, interrogating the interplay of opposing social forces in the NMD. It related the discourse to a dialectical thinking underlying the use of songs by Afrobeats artistes to raise public awareness against irregular migration among an increasing number of Nigerian youths who regard south-north migration as the only panacea to their socio-economic woes. The study also investigated dialectical tensions in the song texts in order to foreground the agency of migrant actors, the multivocality of here–elsewhere dialectics in the NMD, and the perceptions of migrant actors on how the dialectics evolved an interplay of competing discourses.

摘要

本文报道了一项研究，该研究检查了一些尼日利亚 Afrobeats 艺人对非正常移民的反思经历，并确定了尼日利亚移民话语 (NMD) 中重叠的矛盾冲动。这些 Afrobeats 艺术家中的八位艺术家的十首歌曲文本被有意解构，以证明不规则迁移的概念是一种话语形式和音乐论点。解构范式有助于确定文本的特定交际目的，并突出雅克·德里达的双重对立，这为审问文本中的概念模型提供了理论基础。为了进一步加强对文本的解构，该研究利用了社会辩证理论和现象学的批判性见解，探讨了 NMD 中对立的社会力量的相互作用。它将论述与一种辩证思维联系起来，这种思维是 Afrobeats 艺人使用歌曲的基础，以提高公众对越来越多将南北移民视为其社会经济困境的唯一灵丹妙药的尼日利亚青年对非正常移民的认识。该研究还调查了歌曲文本中的辩证张力，以突出移民演员的能动性，NMD 中的其他地方的辩证法，以及移民行为者对辩证法如何演变的看法是相互竞争的话语的相互作用。