New Books Network Bimbola Akinbola, "Transatlantic Disbelonging: Unruliness, Pleasure, and Play in Nigerian Diasporic Women's Art" (Duke UP, 2025)
Apr 6, 2026
Bimbola Akinbola, Assistant Professor of Performance Studies at Northwestern University and author of Transatlantic Disbelonging, explores Nigerian diasporic women artists. She discusses reframing diaspora from loss to playful self‑definition. Topics include unruliness as return, eroticism and anti‑respectability, speculative worldbuilding, cross‑media collaboration, and homemaking through art.
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Disbelonging As Active Creative Strategy
- Disbelonging reframes diasporic alienation as an enacted practice rather than passive loss.
- Akinbola realized artists she studied rejected trauma frames and instead used play, invention, and self-definition to make belonging.
Choosing Outsiderness To Make New Belongings
- Disbelonging embraces outsiderness, taboo, and alienation to create expansive modes of belonging.
- Akinbola positions disbelonging as a chosen tactic that resists assimilation and respectability pressures in homeland and diaspora.
How Ogunji And A Chance Meeting Shaped The Book
- Akinbola discovered Wura-Natasha Ogunji's performative return to Lagos started the project and led to meeting Ruby Amanze.
- She recounts meeting Ruby in Lagos and later seeing Amanze's work in New York and deciding to write about it.
