Global Nollywood: The Transnational Dimensions of an African Video Film Industry ed. by Matthias Krings and Onookome Okome (review)

Nollywood scholarship in general has needed time to move beyond reiterating well-known facts about the industry and to pay more than lip service to its internal diversity, that of its viewership, and that of production circuits elsewhere inspired or influenced by it. In addition, it has grappled with the difficulties of qualitative and quantitative audience research, as well as the challenge of keeping pace with Nollywood’s different and evolving faces, narrative concerns, and modes of reception worldwide, as the industry has grown into a resolutely transnational phenomenon.

It is this international character that Global Nollywood: The Transnational Dimensions of an African Video Film Industry takes as a starting point and as its main focus. The book compiles a range of pieces of high-quality academic work, dealing with Nollywood’s transnational production, its uptake in different places in the world, and the various needs it serves of its many different audience groups in Africa and the diaspora. It also unveils a fascinating variety of the ways in which Nollywood cinema is viewed and interpreted, culturally remediated in new contexts, and its stories reproduced with a twist to cater to religious and cultural sensitivities.

Global Nollywood’s first part is aimed at historically and economically contextualizing Nollywood’s transnationalism (Jedlowski), as well as highlighting aspects of its films and industry dynamics determining its international mobility (Mistry and Ellapen). It then moves on to a series of studies of transnational Nollywood films, followed by audience studies in different places in the world, and finally Nollywood’s cultural appropriation outside Lagos—whether in the form of remakes, live dubbing and commentary, or merely inspiration.

Jonathan Haynes, who already in 2007 had called for more refined and dedicated theory-building around Nigerian and Ghanaian popular cinema, picks up that glove in his chapter, “The Nollywood Diaspora: a Nigerian Video Genre,” the first of five contributions on films dealing with international mobility that make up parts one and two of the collection, “Mapping the Terrain” and “Transnational Nollywood,” respectively. Haynes theorizes and circumscribes diaspora Nollywood as a genre and his insights are applied by Sophie Samyn, who discusses a series of Nollywood films produced in Europe, and Claudia Hoffmann, who deals with Nollywood produced in the United States, with a focus on the representation of urbanity.

Five contributions in Global Nollywood address audiences outside Nigeria in section three, “Nollywood and Its Audiences.” From upwardly mobile youth in Windhoek and Cape Town to viewers in Barbados and Kinshasa, Nollywood clearly “means” different things to different people. Southern African urban youth regard the films as a means to reconnect with a lost African past for which they feel nostalgia (Becker). As Jane Bryce shows, audience interest in Nollywood films in Barbados is linked to a popular imagination of a modern and transnational Pan-Africanness, in which people of dark complexions live in posh houses and modern surroundings and in which (transatlantic and transnational Pan-)Africa is part and parcel of today’s global modernity.

Katrien Pype moves the discussion to Kinshasa, where viewers are drawn to and fascinated by Nollywood films as much as they are scared of and even repulsed by them. Pype provides careful and nuanced insight into the complexities surrounding Nollywood’s appeal in Kinshasa and, in the process, does away with a number of common assumptions about its international distribution. Yet another set of social purposes served by Nollywood, those of Nigerian migrants in Turin, is described by Giovanna Santanera. According to Santanera, Nollywood films are used both as a form of corroboration of values and worldviews for recent immigrants and as a vehicle to stay up-to-date with the latest trends in Nigeria and to virtually “travel” there for those who have been in Europe longer.

The final section of the book, “Appropriations of Nollywood,” includes essays by Abdalla Uba Adamu, Matthias Krings, and Claudia Böhme...