Highlights of LSA 2024
Author Meets Readers: Engaging Fela and Me by Sandra Izsadore (Kraft Books, 2019)
Chair and Panel Organizer: Rosemary Popoola (University of Wisconsin-Madison)
Discussants
Msia Kibona Clark (Howard University)
Oluwatoyin Olokodana-James (University of Lagos)
Jesse Weaver Shipley (Dartmouth College)
Micheal Veal (Yale University)
Panel Description
Most scholars of Afrobeat and popular music affirmed that Afrobeat is unlikely to be the genre of music that Fela founded without his African American lover Sandra Izsadore. Fela applied or domesticated the Global Blackness of everyday life to espouse the lived realities of postcolonial Nigerians. In this memoir, Sandra weaves together never-heard or told insider insights and stories about one of the most popular African genres-Afrobeat, drawing on a rich personal archive of pictures, memories, and moments to offer readers a window into her life and relationship with one of the most prolific and iconic music legends of 20th century Africa. From their first intimate encounter in the US in the late 1960s, her personalized lectures to him on Global Black histories, her first visit to Nigeria, the Queers/ing of Kalakuta, and other stories that will keep you turning the pages until the end. Her contribution enriches and shifts existing scholarly knowledge on Afrobeat as one of the most widely circulated African genres. Her writing is clear, vulnerable, transparent, with no holdback, and devoid of academic jargon, making it accessible to the public.
This book and Sandra's relationship with Fela, both at personal and creative levels, testify that the Global Black Atlantic connection is beyond the middle passage, slavery, and plantation. Instead, it is the connection and continuous flow of ideas, sounds, language, dress, a two-way and multiple-way movement, circulation, and arguably tensions that bind Africans and the African Diaspora in an inextricable bond that has been nurtured, cultivated, and cared for and maybe neutered. Atlantic, then, is the pattern of cultural, intellectual, and political exchange that makes the cultural identity of the Atlantic a culture of movement, flow, exchange, borrowing or loaning of ideas, syncretization, and hybridity that involves Blacks in places beyond their immediate environment.
This panel celebrates her contribution to Afrobeats, Fela, and Black Atlantic connections and opens new pathways for studying African and African Diaspora continuous connections. Regardless of limitations, a personal narrative like Fela and Me offers enhances literary and cultural studies and, more broadly the postcolonial African Incredibles.
Sandra Izsadore's book, co-authored with Segun Oyekunle "FELA and ME" now available on sandraizsadore.com
New Music "Run Run feat Erah Gunz, now available on Apple Music