African Video Movies and Global Desires: A Ghanaian History

5: Transcultural Encounters and Local Imaginaries

5 Transcultural Encounters and Local Imaginaries Nollywood and the Ghanaian Movie Industry in the Twenty-First Century In his widely anthologized essay “Toward a Regional Imaginary in Africa” (1998), film critic Manthia Diawara argues that in the context of globalization and liberalization, regional zones of exchange in Africa, and the transnational flows of capital, people, imaginaries, technologies, and commodities that produce and sustain them, generate a type of “disorder” that challenges the homogenizing forces of multinational corporations and resists the state’s complicity with global capitalism. Diawara points out that because cultural nationalism “has lost some of its explanatory power in the era of globalization ” (77), what is needed in Africa is the cultivation of “regional imaginaries” that are built on “linguistic affinities, economic reality, and geographic proximity, as defined by the similarities in political and cultural dispositions grounded in history and patterns of consumption ” (81). Diawara says little about transnational or regional cultural production in Africa, focusing instead on African markets as transnational spaces of trade and consumption, but as Moradewun Adejunmobi (2007) has shown, Nollywood functions in precisely this way. It has emerged from and contributed to the production of a regional identity and to regional movements of culture and commodities in Africa, and as a minor transnational and popular commercial form detached from formal networks, she argues, it presents local or regional cultural producers with “the best chance for competing with or even displacing cultural products circulating through the official global economy within national and regional contexts” (11). Put Nollywood and the Ghanaian Movie Industry / 155 differently, Nollywood’s informal and fragmented networks exploit the kind of disorder and chaos that Diawara credits with holding off cultural homogenization and bypassing state control. In both Diawara’s and Adejunmobi’s accounts, then, regional cultural economies in Africa have resisted assimilation into dominant economies and given expression to local voices, concerns, and desires. Though both critics celebrate the regional generally, they tend not to look very closely at particular regional configurations in Africa or the many dynamic and heterogeneous horizontal movements of culture that contribute to regional cultural formations, instead adopting a vertical sightline that places a unified and static conception of the regional in opposition to multinational corporations or American mass media. This perspective positions the marginalized African cultural region in relation to the Western center, and from this point of view, regional African culture becomes synonymous with local African culture . In this chapter, I want to suggest another way of seeing regional zones of culture. Here, we adopt a lateral and transnational view of Nollywood from within Ghana’s national borders, a position from which Nollywood appears far more ambivalent than Adejunmobi suggests . According to many Ghanaian producers, whose national market has been inundated with Nollywood movies, Nollywood has had a deep and lasting impact on the “local” industry. A regionally dominant cultural force, it has pushed Ghanaian videomakers out of production and exerted significant control over their more minor industry. For others , however, collaboration with Nollywood videomakers has allowed their products to travel far beyond national borders, providing access to transnational circuits of distribution and facilitating the creation of new transnational forms of African cultural expression. At the level of the text, too, the opposition between the regional and the global imposes limited visibility. It overlooks the incredible mingling and mixing that contribute to the locally made movie’s appeal . African video movies continually dialogue with global mass media. They are extroverted (Julien 2006), but unlike the African literary text, video movies have no interest in presenting African worlds to outsiders. Instead, they are extroverted in style and, to borrow Eileen Julien’s term, in their “mood” (689). They enthusiastically embrace aspects of global mass culture and reinvent it for presentation to African audiences. As Karin Barber (1987) noted, syncretism is perhaps the most pronounced feature of African popular arts. They seek elements of foreign cultures as a renewable source of innovation and creation. 156 / Transcultural Encounters and Local Imaginaries This chapter describes the affiliation, imitation, and competition that characterize the Anglophone West African video economy in the twenty-firstcenturyanddiscussesthetypesof moviesthathaveemerged from it. It first examines the regional flows of financing, people, ideas, and media that move between the Nigerian and Ghanaian movie industries and describes the collaborations and coproductions that have resulted in unique transcultural practices. Within this regional economy , the English-language “professional” movie described previously becomes more deeply intertwined with transnational...