Description:

Come join PAS for our weekly lunch and lecture. Lunch provided by PAS.

Speaker: Mary Adekoya, PhD candidate, University of Chicago

Title: Narrating Nollywood, Narrating African Time

Info: Mary Adekoya is a PhD Candidate in the Department of Cinema and Media Studies at the University of Chicago. In her dissertation, Shadows of Cinema: Nollywood and the Vernacular Revolution in African Cinema, she takes up the emergence of Nollywood as a watershed moment in which the history of a vernacular media culture, deeply in dialogue with the everyday experience of life in Nigeria, comes to the fore. To this end, she examines how the formal language of Nollywood reflects certain sensibilities that have been found to mark the contemporary African experience, such as a loosening of faith in a developmental understanding of history and an acute conscientiousness about how to comport oneself as a respectable cosmopolitan subject. Beyond this project, her research interests include African-American cinema, transnational trends in Black cinemas, the representation of Black women, Black spectatorship practices, and new media cultures.