Datum/Zeit
Date(s) - 19. Mai 2026
16:15 - 17:45

Veranstaltungsort
Hörsaal HZ 8, Hörsaalzentrum Campus Westend

Kategorien Keine Kategorien

The Sonic Logic of Migration: Fújì, African Popular Music and Urban Infrastructures in Frankfurt

Oladele Ayorinde (Humboldt Fellow, Goethe-Universität)

Institut für Musikwissenschaft

In this presentation, Humboldt-Fellow Oladele Ayorinde reintroduces African popular music as a form of urban infrastructure that reshapes how migration, belonging, and cities are understood in contemporary Germany and Europe. Focusing on Fújì, a Nigerian urban popular music genre, he develops the concept of a ‘sonic logic of migration’—a way of understanding how sound organises social relations, belonging, spaces, economic activity, and transnational connections across cities. Using ethnographic mapping, he conceptualises leisure and sonic spaces (clubs, grocery shops, restaurants, churches, concerts, social and historical narratives) as urban infrastructure and argues that these sites function as informal yet important for the urban economy. Within Frankfurt, African popular music enables forms of sociality, economic exchange, and transnational networking that extend across Germany, Europe, and Africa. He approaches Fújì both as a musical genre and as an analytical lens for interpreting African diasporic presence. Through its logic of composition, circulation and improvisation, Fújì offers a framework for understanding how migrant communities produce space, sustain livelihoods and articulate belonging in the city. Situated at the intersections of ethnomusicology, urban studies, migration studies, and anthropology, this project argues that migrant sound worlds are not peripheral to European cities but constitutive of their contemporary social and economic formations.