Abstract
When Kenneth Nnebue, a Nigerian electronics dealer, produced the film Living in Bondage in 1992, he probably had no idea of what its release would represent 20 years later. But today, among Africans of all nationalities, the title of this film is synonymous with the birth of the largest entertainment industry in Africa.’ The Nigerian video film industry, commonly referred to as Nollywood, is indeed considered to be one of the largest film industries in the world.2 The films produced there circulate all over Africa and throughout the African diaspora in Europe and elsewhere.3 To many, the emergence of the Nigerian video industry represents the most important event in the recent history of African media. The video industry has managed to develop autonomously without any support from the government. It created independent and informal systems of production, distribution, and exhibition, which enabled the production of low-budget films that were released straight to video and watched in most cases at home or in informal neighborhood screening venues.4
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
Notes
Living in Bondage was not the first video film released in Nigeria. After the collapse of the local celluloid film industry in the mid-1980s, a number of video films were produced, particularly in Yoruba. Nnebue’s film, however, was the first to achieve widespread commercial success and it marked the beginning of what would later become the Nollywood video industry. See Jonathan Haynes, ed., Nigerian Video Films (Athens, OH: Ohio University Press, 2000).
UNESCO Institute for Statistics (UIS), Analysis of the UIS International Survey on Feature Film Statistics (Montreal: UIS, 2009), accessed April 8, 2013, www.uis.unesco.org. The term Nollywood was introduced ten years after the beginning of the video phenomenon by a New York Times article. It was initially rejected but local fans and media gradually adopted it. It is often used to refer to the entire Nigerian video phenomenon but many critics now prefer to limit its use. They therefore only use the term to refer to Nigerian videos in English or pidgin (creolized English) that are produced in southern Nigeria and differentiate them from the local language production that takes place in other parts of Nigeria. See Norimitsu Onishi, “Step Aside, L.A. and Bombay, for Nollywood,” New York Times, September 16, 2002.
Pierre Barrot, ed., Nollywood: Le phénomène video au Nigeria (Paris: L’Harmattan, 2005);
Haynes, Nigerian Video Films; Jonathan Haynes, “The Nollywood Diaspora. A Nigerian Video Genre,” in Global Nollywood: Transnational Dimensions of an African Video Film Industry, eds Matthias Krings and Onookome Okome (Bloomington: Indiana University Press 2013), 73–99.
Brian Larkin, Signal and Noise: Media, Infrastructure and Urban Culture in Northern Nigeria (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2008);
Ramon Lobato, Shadow Economies of Cinema: Mapping Informal Film Distribution (London: British Film Institute, 2012); Onookome Okome, “Nollywood: Spectatorship, Audience and the Sites of Consumption,” Postcolonial Text 3, no. 2 (2007), accessed April 8, 2013, http://journals.sfu.ca/pocol/index.php/pct/article/view/763/425.
Alessandro Jedlowski, “From Nollywood to Nollyworld. Processes of Transnationalization in the Nigerian Video Industry,” in Global Nollywood: Transnational Dimensions of an African Video Film Industry, eds Matthias Krings and Onookome Okome (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2013), 25–45.
Jonathan Haynes, “Africans Abroad: A Theme in Film and Video,” Africa Mediterraneo 45 (2003): 22–29; see also Haynes, “The Nollywood Diaspora.”
See Daniela Berghahn and Claudia Sternberg, eds, “Locating Migrant and Diasporic Cinema in Contemporary Europe,” in European Cinema in Motion: Migrant and Diasporic Film in Contemporary Europe (New York and London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), 16. Most of the directors and producers whose work is discussed in this chapter belong to the “migrant” category. However, I used the term “diasporic Nigerian production” to refer, in Homi Bhabha’s terms, to diaspora as a “third space,” a space of hybridity within which the encounter between different articulations of identity and culture generates original solutions.
Homi K. Bhabha, The Location of Culture (London: Routledge, 1994).
Daniela Berghahn and Claudia Sternberg, eds, European Cinema in Motion: Migrant and Diasporic Film in Contemporary Europe (New York and London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010);
Eva Rüschmann, ed., MovingPictures, Migrating Identities (Jackson: University of Mississippi, 2003). For an in-depth analysis and definition of the concept of popular culture within the sub-Saharan African context,
see Karin Barber, “Popular Arts in Africa,” African Studies Review 30, no. 3 (1987): 1–78. A discussion about the applicability of this concept to the analysis of the Nigerian video film industry can be found in Haynes, Nigerian Video Films.
Berghahn and Sternberg, European Cinema in Motion; Laura Marks, The Skin of the Film. Intercultural Cinema, Embodiment, and the Senses (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2000);
Hamid Naficy, An Accented Cinema. Exilic and Diasporic Filmmaking (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001).
See, for instance, Vicki Mayer, “Bringing the Social Back In: Studies of Production Cultures and Social Theory,” in Production Studies: Cultural Studies of Media Industries, eds Vicki Mayer, Miranda Banks, and John T. Caldwell (New York: Routledge, 2009), 15–24; see the entire aforementioned collection,
and also Toby Miller, Nitin Govill, John McMurria, and Richard Maxwell, Global Hollywood (London: British Film Institute, 2001)
and Tejaswinti Ganti, Producing Bollywood. Inside the Contemporary Hindi Film Industry (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2012).
Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London: Verso, 1983).
Abdelmalek Sayad, La double absence: des illusions de l’émigré aux souffrances de l’immigré (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1999).
Thomas Elsaesser, European Cinema: Face to Face with Hollywood (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2005), 118.
Mariagiulia Grassilli, “Migrant Cinema: Transnational and Guerrilla Practices of Film Production and Representation,” Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies 34 no. 8 (2008): 1244.
Françoise Lionnet and Shumei Shih, eds, Minor Transnationalism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005); Moradewun Adejunmobi, “Nigerian Video Film As Minor Transnational Practice,” Postcolonial Text 3, no. 2, accessed April 8, 2013, http://journals.sfu.ca/pocol/index.php/pct/article/view/548/405.
Cf. Jigna Desai, Beyond Bollywood: The Cultural Politics of South Asian Diasporic Film (New York: Routledge, 2004).
Aswin Punathambekar, “Bollywood in the Indian-American Diaspora. Mediating a Transitive Logic of Cultural Citizenship,” International Journal of Cultural Studies 8, no. 2 (2005): 151–173.
Ganti, Producing Bollywood; Daya K. Thussu, “The Globalization of ‘Bollywood’: The Hype and the Hope,” in Global Bollywood, eds Anandam P. Kavoori and Aswin Punathambekar (New York: New York University Press, 2008), 97–116.
Alessandro Jedlowski, “On the Periphery of Nollywood: Nigerian Video Filmmaking in Italy and the Emergence of an Intercultural Aesthetics,” in Postcolonial Italy: Colonial Past in Contemporary Culture, eds Cristina Lombardi-Diop and Caterina Romeo (New York and London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), 239–252.
For a description of the relationship between corruption, politics, economics, and citizenship in Nigeria, see D. J. Smith, A Culture of Corruption: Everyday Deception and Popular Discontent in Nigeria (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2007).
Brian Larkin, “Indian Films and Nigerian Lovers: Media and the Creation of Parallel Modernities,” Africa 67, no. 3 (1997): 406–440.
Here, I am implicitly referring to Dipesh Chakrabarty’s work and to the range of processes that it has helped to identify and interpret. Dipesh Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000).
Editor information
Copyright information
© 2013 Petr Szczepanik and Patrick Vonderau
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Jedlowski, A. (2013). Exporting Nollywood: Nigerian Video Filmmaking in Europe. In: Szczepanik, P., Vonderau, P. (eds) Behind the Screen. Global Cinema. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137282187_11
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137282187_11
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, New York
Print ISBN: 978-1-349-44851-7
Online ISBN: 978-1-137-28218-7
eBook Packages: Palgrave Media & Culture CollectionLiterature, Cultural and Media Studies (R0)