Description:

Abstract: The Nigerian video film industry was created as a popular art based in the informal economy, but corporations are developing various stakes in it. Profound transformations are underway as transnational corporations have taken control of Nollywood’s international distribution and have begun producing their own original Nigerian films and television serials on an ambitious scale. iROKOtv dominates the Internet dimension and applies Silicon Valley-style capitalist logic to Nollywood. In the brief history of this company, Nollywood’s creative capacities, disjunctions, and vulnerabilities intersect with the power and vertiginous instabilities of global media regimes and Internet entrepreneurialism. As the current complex and unpredictable historical moment plays out, the whole character of Nollywood hangs in the balance—its ownership, aesthetics, intended audiences, ideological and cultural orientations, media platforms, and experiences of viewership.

Bio: Jonathan Haynes is Professor of English at Long Island University in Brooklyn. A former Guggenheim Fellow and Fulbright Senior Scholar, he wrote Cinema and Social Change in West Africa (1995) with Onookome Okome and edited Nigerian Video Films (1997, 2000) and a special issue of Journal of African Cinemas (2012). His new book Nollywood: The Creation of Nigerian Film Genres is forthcoming from University of Chicago Press.