The Changing Landscape of Nollywood Studies

The three books considered in this article—Jonathan Haynes’s Nollywood, Noah Tsika’s Nollywood Stars, and Elizabeth Johnson and Donald Culverson’s Female Narratives in Nollywood Melodramas—appear during a period of rapid transformation in Nollywood, the English-language commercial movie industry in Nigeria. Since the appearance of the earliest Nigerian videos in the 1990s, the production and distribution of Nollywood movies have spread across the globe. In the last decade alone, advances in digital media and information technologies, coupled with the expanding reach of satellite signals, broadband cables, and cellular phone networks, have made connecting to Nollywood—both the individuals who participate in this loosely configured creative formation and the products generated within it—easier than was ever possible in an analog world. And as these three books illustrate, Nollywood’s broadening radius now enables research methods that might be described as deterritorialized. In 1999, when I started researching the Ghanaian movie industry, travel to Ghana was absolutely essential to achieve even the most basic objective: to find the movies that were the center of interest. Today, a researcher can study Nollywood without spending any time in West Africa. Nigerian and Ghanaian movies are easily obtained online, and although less common than even ten years ago, they still are sold as DVDs and video CDs in African stores located in major urban centers throughout the African diaspora. Scholars can conduct interviews via Skype or over e-mail and track developments in the industry by reading online newspapers and blogs and following Nollywood moviemakers on Facebook or Twitter. The problem, of course, is that these technological entryways, many of which originate from within and reach out to African diasporic communities and customers, provide restricted views of Nollywood and Ghallywood, popular industries that remain grounded in Nigeria and Ghana where low bandwidth and limited and expensive Internet connectivity continue to restrict the accessibility of online content. Most Nollywood moviemakers, even those who travel trans-nationally to produce or promote their films, live and work in West Africa, and they, like their counterparts in Ghana, continue to churn out low-budget movies for local audiences using the straight-to-video release model that has dominated the industry since the 1990s.

Jonathan Haynes’s Nollywood: The Creation of Nigerian Film Genres is an impressive historical survey of Nollywood genres based on the interdisciplinary methodologies developed within African area studies as well as on the author’s ethnographic research conducted over the course of almost three decades, including hundreds of interviews with people working in all branches of the industry. Haynes’s profound engagement with Nollywood and its places, the Nigerian cities and neighborhoods where Nollywood movies are made and sold, is immediately apparent in the beautifully written preface, which reads like an affective map of Nollywood in Lagos. Haynes begins in Surulere, “the Brooklyn of Lagos” (xv), a hub of production in Nollywood’s vast and jumbled network, evoking its sights and sounds as he details the experience of moving through this part of the city. He observes that “walking is taxing and hazardous” as one navigates tangled wires from illegal connections that “[cobweb] the sides of buildings” (xv). As he fans out from Surulere and toward the port, he describes the material transformations he has witnessed on Adeniran Ogunsanya Street, once “dotted with cybercafés” that have now disappeared (xvii). We follow Haynes across the grounds of the National Theatre, where “casting calls take place under the trees” (xix), and to the “celebrity hangout” (xix) on the side of the National Stadium, O’Jez Restaurant...