Performing the trenches and (re)branding poverty: subaltern visuality, performativity, and postcolonial politics in Nigerian popular media

Nigeria’s tumultuous colonial and postcolonial history has produced enduring structures of inequality and poverty that continue to shape the nation’s social and cultural life. Popular artists caught within these conditions have found both material and imaginative ground for expression to transform everyday struggle into creative resistance, giving rise to the cultural construct of the ‘trenches.’ Despite the prominence of the trenches in Nigerian popular discourse, scholarly engagement with the ‘trenches’ remains limited, particularly regarding its aesthetic, political, and epistemic implications. This study draws on postcolonial theory and Bourdieu’s concept of cultural capital to theorize the ‘trenches’ as both subject and object: a double-edged formation that embodies marginality, resilience, and hope, even as it becomes a commodified resource for authenticity and visibility in popular culture. Using an interpretive and multimodal analytical approach grounded in a decolonial positionality, it examines how selected Nigerian songs and music videos reconfigure poverty into cultural capital to translate survival into art, precarity into performance, and hardship into a brand that sells. The study ultimately raises ethical implications for the representation and performance of poverty, contributing to African popular culture studies by advancing a critical understanding of how deprivation circulates as symbolic capital in creative economies.