The Secret Lives of Nigerian Oil Drums | Buffett First Friday Lunch with Dotun Ayobade

The Roberta Buffett Institute hosts a faculty research lunchtime talk series on the first Friday of every month. Faculty members give a half-hour talk intended for a broad, multidisciplinary audience of Northwestern students, faculty and staff, followed by a conversational Q&A. May’s Buffett First Friday Lunch will feature Dotun Ayobade, Associate Professor of Performance Studies at the School of Communications and Black Studies at the Weinberg College of Arts & Sciences at Northwestern. Professor Ayobade will examine the afterlives of retired oil barrels in Nigerian political life. Drawing on historical and conceptual analysis, he will reflect on the figuration of the oil drum in staged performances and other embodied media in the mid- to late twentieth century, with special attention paid to what these figurations suggest about questions of citizenship. He will explore how the transition from oil barrel to pipeline as the dominant mode of oil transportation and storage also occasioned new symbols in the Nigerian body politic in flux. Torso-like, sturdy, and supplicant, the oil drum might be seen as a usable member of the body politic, at once willful and captive, in the Nigerian state’s dramaturgy of power and subject-making. He will also discuss how artists have been especially skilled in capturing the sublime currents of the oil drum in an infrastructural and geopolitical context marked by seismic transitions. Doors open at 12:00 p.m., and lunch begins at 12:15 p.m. Please note that 720 University Place is not an ADA-accessible space. Increasing physical access to buildings and facilities is a goal of the University, but not all buildings and venues have been updated.