Introduction: Nollywood—An Archive of African Worldliness

This Black Camera Close-Up considers Nollywood as an ever-expanding and extraordinarily heterogeneous archive of Africa’s engagement with the world. It seeks to understand Nollywood as an everyday practice “through which Africans manage to recognize and maintain with the world an unprecedented familiarity.”¹ Presenting some of the most recent and exciting research on Nigeria’s English-language commercial movies, we suggest new avenues of investigation for the study of Africa’s most prolific and far-reaching cultural industry.

Quite deliberately, the articles published here do not retell the story of Nollywood’s beginnings. That is a story that has been told in many places before.² We assume, too, that readers have some familiarity with Nollywood and the smaller, affiliated industry in Ghana, and with “Nollywood Studies,” the growing body of writing attuned to these creative practices. We also are not interested in revisiting or entering debates that challenge Nollywood’s value as an aesthetic or political cultural product or object of scholarly investigation, although critics of Nollywood seem never to grow tired of reiterating the binary that pits African popular video movies against FESPACO films.³ We take for granted Nollywood’s significance as “the most visible form of cultural machine on the African continent”⁴ and do not feel compelled to make a case for its study. Additionally, as I have argued elsewhere, the recent history of African screen media has revealed the limits of this opposition, which has been diminished by advances in digital video technologies and greater degrees of formalization and professionalization in the Nigerian and the Ghanaian commercial industries.⁵ Internationally acclaimed big-budget African films, such as Djo Tunda Wa Munga’s gangster thriller Viva Riva! (2010), because they do not fit easily into either category, further trouble the simplistic binary between Nollywood, seen as an industry devoted merely to profit and entertainment, and FESPACO cinema, conceived of as the serious, politicized filmmaking tradition of Africa. And as several of the contributors to this volume note, the features of Nigerian moviemakers Tunde Kelani and Kunle Afolayan, two Nollywood auteurs whose films also circulate within film festival and academic networks, continue to challenge one-dimensional conceptions of Nollywood.

This Close-Up highlights current and original work by established Nollywood scholars Moradewun Adejunmobi, Akin Adesokan, Jane Bryce, and Jonathan Haynes, and introduces two new voices to the expanding field of Nollywood Studies: Noah Tsika and Connor Ryan. It also includes a piece by Kenneth Harrow, author of several groundbreaking books on African literature and cinema, who has only recently turned his attention toward Nollywood movies.

The idea of Nollywood as a “worldly” cultural practice riffs off the writings of Edward Said and Achille Mbembe—two postcolonial theorists who have scrutinized the interpenetration of cultural production and regimes of power. In “The World, the Text and the Critic,” Said proposes that it is the text’s worldliness—its solicitation of the “world’s attention”—that restricts its meaning.⁶ Intended as a critique of the disinterested humanist approach to literature, his practice of discourse analysis reveals what formalist and certain poststructuralist approaches ignore – that the material and symbolic lives of texts are interlaced and that the production of knowledge is worldly and political. He writes, “Words and texts are so much of the world that their effectiveness, in some cases even their use, are matters having to do with ownership, authority, power and the imposition of force.”⁷ To be of the world, then, is to be implicated in or constituted by power, and Said charges the scholar with attending to the worldliness of texts and “articulating those voices dominated, displaced, or silenced by the textuality of texts.”⁸

In “African Modes of Self-Writing,” Mbembe uncovers “the textuality” of dominant narratives of Africa, using the methods of discourse analysis to challenge the authority of Afro-radicalism and African nativism “to speak in the name of Africa as a whole.”⁹ He locates these intellectual currents within “an intellectual genealogy based on a territorialized identity and a racialized geography.”¹⁰ This paradigm defines African identity in absolute difference and “in opposition...