Conference Agenda

This paper examines Dingqu(丁曲)—a grassroots remix subgenre on China’s video platform Bilibili inspired by Ding Zhen (丁真), a Tibetan youth who went viral in November 2020 and was quickly elevated as a tourism ambassador and a state-friendly symbol of “ethnic harmony.”

Building from this mediated celebrity, Dingqu (means Ding Zhen’s music) creators mimic Ding Zhen’s Mandarin accent, rewrite lyrics with irony, and circulate parodic songs that reframe his fame as an uneasy convergence of propaganda, commercial extraction, and anxieties about social mobility. In this paper, I ask: How does Dingqu resist state-sponsored narratives of ethnic harmony and meritocracy, and what does its participatory production reveal about the possibilities and limits of China’s digital public sphere?

This study utilizes a virtual ethnography of highly circulated Dingqu videos, ranging from the early 2021 breakout remixes that established genre conventions to later, intertextual works that weave together classical literature and online memes. I argue that Dingqu functions as networked, humorous dissent rather than mere entertainment. Through satire, mimicry, and dense intertextual play, remixers appropriate an officially celebrated figure to stage counter-narratives about fairness, ethnicity, and symbolic capital.

The paper connects Habermasian debates on public sphere to platformed participatory culture and highlights puns as a tactical aesthetic that enables critique while navigating censorship and platform governance. Ultimately, Dingqu crystallizes how digital musicking can open contingent spaces of commentary and agency—yet only within shifting boundaries of state and platform control.

Nigerian Afrobeats artist Asake (born Ahmed Ololade) rose to national and global pop stardom with the release of his first album Mr. Money with the Vibe (2022), under famed Nigerian hip-hop artist and music producer Olamide’s Yahoo Boy No Laptop Nation (YBNL) record label. One of the album’s singles, “Peace Be Unto You (PBUY)”, was released before Nigeria’s celebration of the Muslim Eid-el-Kabir. The hit song, which was secular in nature but utilized religious language in its lyrics, called for peace amid growing political insecurity that disproportionately affected Muslims. This paper argues that popular music opportunely centered Muslim religious expression during the holiday period, discursively challenging insecurity and generating revenue among Muslim music consumers. I draw upon Allottey-Pappoe’s (2024) description of Afrobeats as a hypernym, a broad categorization that elucidates sonic influences of Afro/Afro-Diasporic religious communities. I also use Osiebe’s (2016) conception of market-driven themes in Nigerian popular music to examine how Asake and other Nigerian Afrobeats artists address Muslim audiences in their music productions as morally attuned citizen-consumers. Their musical works subvert industry margins by sonically mediating the experiences of African Muslims, involving them as discursive citizens and popular music consumers contending with Nigeria’s daily precarities.

In Equatorial Guinea, a small Central African petro-state where music streaming has not taken hold, music circulates primarily via WhatsApp—a Meta-owned messaging app never designed for music distribution. This paper examines WhatsApp as an accidental alternative to the dominant infrastructures of digital music circulation and asks whether its architectural features circumvent core logics of platform capitalism—algorithmic recommendation, data extraction, copyright enforcement—more effectively than purpose-built alternatives such as P2P file-sharing networks, netlabels, and producer-oriented platforms like SoundCloud and Bandcamp. Drawing on 12 months of ethnographic fieldwork—including participant observation in recording studios, interviews with musicians and fans, and analysis of WhatsApp-based music sharing networks—the paper explores how digital music exchange in Equatorial Guinea is shaped not only by global technological infrastructures but also by local economic and political formations, most notably a longstanding oil-rich authoritarian state and the musical patronage it sustains. The analysis reveals a paradox: WhatsApp’s end-to-end encryption, absence of algorithmic recommendation, and lack of licensing agreements create a distinct space for circulation, yet these very features—combined with state control of internet access and entrenched patronage logics—prevent artists from monetizing their music, reinforcing their dependence on political elites. The paper contributes to scholarship on digital platforms in the Global South by showing that resistance to platform capitalism may emerge not from intentional design but from infrastructural accident.