About

Babatunde Opeyemi Salami is a PhD candidate in African Cultural Studies at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, with a minor in Visual Cultures and Performance Studies. He holds a BA in English from the University of Ilorin and an MA in English Literature from the University of Lagos. His work sits at the intersection of African and African diaspora studies, literary studies, film and visual culture, and Global Black Studies, with particular interests in film, performance, and the cultural life of Nigeria and the wider continent.

Fieldwork for the project has taken him to masquerade shrines, museums, and art spaces across Lagos and Ibadan, and into conversation with filmmakers, artists, and custodians of Yoruba tradition. Salami’s research examines how African masquerade traditions are remediated across ritual performance, Nollywood, and Hollywood, and what these transformations make possible for audiences. Although his work centers on how film expands masquerade’s social and aesthetic possibilities, he situates this transformation within masquerade’s ubiquitous presence in ritual, literature, painting, sculpture, music videos, and museum installations. Drawing on ethnography, archival research, comparative film analysis, new media theory, and Black feminist and diaspora theory, he examines the cultural politics of gatekeeping, reception, and the global circulation of masquerade images in film. He teaches African film, African literature, Yoruba language at UW–Madison, where his courses incorporate creative practice, including a student-produced Yoruba film. His writing has been submitted to Black Camera and Africa Is a Country, and a book review is forthcoming in Africana Annual. He is a recipient of the Aliko Songolo Award, the Ebrahim Hussein Fellowship, and Graduate School Fellowships from UW–Madison. A native Yoruba speaker, he also speaks Nigerian Pidgin and Nigerian English.