Oladipupo Oyeleye

Lágbájá: Reinventing the Ancestral Return and Sensiotics in Bisade Ologunde’s Afropolitan Music.

The presentation will examine the transmutation of the Egungun ancestral return into a different aesthetic of artistic persona and music in Bisade Ologunde (a.ka Lágbájá)’s oeuvre. I will focus on Ologunde’s recreation of the Egúngún paraphernalia and its sensiotics to a portable artistic and aesthetic mode for a more contemporary and diverse audience. I will examine Ologunde’s ‘drum affirmations’, performative aura and the spectacle of ancestral invocation in the material, artistic and the social imaginary of the Egungun ensemble. The presentation will further prod beyond the immediate, live, multisensory, out-of-body-experience in Ologunde’s ancestral impersonation and performance to examine where he draws the line between the sacred and the profane in his music production.

Oladipupo Oyeleye is a P.h.D candidate in the Department of English, University of Wisconsin-Madison. He holds Master of Arts degrees in English and African American Studies from the University of Ibadan and the University of Wisconsin-Madison respectively. His research interests are in Black Diasporic Anglophone Literature; African Digital Rhetoric, Visual Art, and Music; African American studies and Foreign Language Pedagogy.