The New African Diaspora

19. African Video, Film Cinema, and Cultural Repackaging in the Diaspora

19 AFRICAN VIDEO, FILM CINEMA, AND CULTURAL REPACKAGING IN THE DIASPORA Folu F. Ogundimu The globalization of communications and culture at the end of the cold war in the late twentieth century has had at least three unintended effects on African diaspora populations worldwide. Firstly, the rapid diffusion of new and improved communications technology—such as Direct Broadcast Satellite (DBS) systems, the internet, and wireless telephony—has enabled previously remote areas of many African countries to become instantly accessible to a global metropolis, with far less restricted controls from authoritarian political institutions. Secondly, access to global markets and the need for African states to partake in the new globalizing arena has resulted in reforms of political and economic structures in many countries. One aspect of these reforms has been the implementation of painful structural adjustment programs of cutback management in various sectors; the end of state subsidies; and the privatization of vast areas of the domestic economy. When these changes have been coupled with the liberalization of currency exchange rules, import and export controls, and also travel, we have seen the emergence of a new, vibrant entrepreneurial merchant class that engages in transborder and transnational trade in goods and services. Thirdly, the revolution in the globalization of communications and culture has enabled African producers of cinematic culture to actively incorporate, reappropriate, and domesticate global culture in such a way that the African cultural imagination is finding resonance with global audiences, especially those in the African diaspora. Domesticating global culture is partly expressed by the fusion that enables Nigerian, Ghanaian, or Senegalese musical artists to produce local hip-hop music videos featuring rap music in local languages, Pidgin, English, or French with local beats but with all of the iconographic symbols of urban black American hip-hop culture, as seen on Black Entertainment Television (BET) or Music Television (MTV). Similarly, local stories, 387 388 Folu F. Ogundimu folk drama, and newer tales of urban and contemporary life in Africa are increasingly repackaged for cinematic audiences in both Africa and the diaspora. These types of fusion of the global and local, as well as depictions of African traditional cinematic genres, are, not surprisingly, finding much resonance among diaspora African communities, especially recent migrants to the global metropolis. Using the case of African video and film cinema, this chapter explores how contemporary discussions of globalization and transborder flows of communications and culture underreport, ignore, and misunderstand the dimensions and relevance of African film and video cinema representation in the global environment. The chapter will also show the limitations of explanations that still portray Africans as victims of cultural imperialism. Although the persuasive arguments by theorists of cultural reproduction and cultural imperialism cannot be easily dismissed, a case can just as plausibly be made that today’s African audiences and cultural entrepreneurs are not entirely passive consumers of alien cultural products . Indeed, it is far more likely that, given the robust and dynamic platforms for diffusing the global culture so easily available today, both vendors and consumers of culture are constantly negotiating the spaces for cultural diffusion in a complex market that makes Africans not just consumers of alien cultural artifacts but producers and exporters of African culture as well. C U LT U R A L R E P R O D U C T I O N A N D C U LT U R A L I M P E R I A L I S M Most cultural reproduction theorists assume there is a dependency relationship between foreign producers of mass media content and audiences in developing countries. This assumption holds that because the major producers of global culture are based in major industrialized countries of North America and Europe—Disney, Viacom, Warner, MTV, Paramount, CBS, Sony, Bertelsmann, Vivendi, and Pearson, to name a few—audiences in consuming nations (periphery countries) are essentially socialized “into a knowledge system or frame of mind that will make them more compatible or sympathetic to foreign ideas and consumer values.”1 Flowing from this argument is the notion of cultural imperialism, the thinking that only powerful nations have the capacity not only choose the type of information society most compatible with their cultural institutions but also to foster their alien cultural values onto unsuspecting citizens of periphery nations.2 This thinking is not new. The concern about cultural imperialism was first articulated by Third World scholars at the historic summit of nonaligned nations in Algiers in 1973. The Algiers summit is remarkable for two...