World Cinema versus Subjectivity: How to Read Tunde Kelani’s Abeni

In Nigerian Video Films (2000), Jonathan Haynes delineated the ways in which Nollywood called for new critical approaches that would differ from the ways in which African film had been mediated to European or American audiences. Nollywood decidedly did not lend itself to the familiar ideological readings that had marked African film criticism from the outset. Haynes turned to questions of globalization, the economic and social factors that accounted for their production and entertainment values, and sought in studies of modernism, of genre (particularly melodrama), and of cultural anthropology approaches that would make more sense in analyzing the phenomenon of Nollywood and its new approach to African film. The cultural and ideological framings he called for were necessary and invaluable but inevitably left us with the question of how to reconcile such approaches with those marked by poststructural or psychoanalytical analyses. This question has become all the more fraught as the ascension of “world cinema,” within the context of globalization studies, has heightened the emphasis on economic markers and their influence on “mediascapes” and global cultural flows. Where, in this focus on the place of new, popular entertainment genres, with their broad transnational appeals, can an account for agency and subjectivity be formulated?

This paper examines Tunde Kelani’s Abeni (2006), using Judith Butler’s The Psychic Life of Power to frame the question of how notions of subjectivity, formed between two exigencies, submission and revolt, can be deployed as a critical tool in an age of global exchanges in which individual agency would seem to have been eviscerated.