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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.

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Samuel Oloruntoba (Political Science, University of South Africa)

Oloruntoba places the unfolding governance of trade between the global north and global south in the context of EU-ACP Economic Partnership Agreements in analytical perspective. Using Nigeria as the case study, the book contains the debates on regionalism under a faltering multilateral trade regime. It also places the current state of development in Nigeria in the context of the potentials that are available to the country if the economy is diversified. The importance of regional integration and regional trading agreements as necessary conditions for facilitating economic development both at the national, regional and continental levels was also analysed. The book also contains the analysis of the history of Euro-Africa relations, dynamics of power relations that underpin the EU-ACP negotiations as well as the potential implications of the agreements on Nigeria’s economy. The author emphasise the imperative of credible institutions, building state capacity, diversification of the economy as well as trading partners as necessary conditions for fostering socio-economic development in Nigeria and Africa in general.

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Abstract
In 2001, the Rome Statute established the International Criminal Court (“ICC”)—the first and only permanent tribunal with a mandate to prosecute international crimes. African states, individually and through the African Union’s (“AU”) predecessor, actively participated in establishing the ICC. Today, African states make up the largest regional bloc of ICC member states, yet the AU has become by far the most vocal detractor of the ICC and its effort to fulfill its mandate.
Among advocates of international criminal justice, the dominant approach to analyzing the AU/ICC tension: (1) largely discredits the AU’s criticisms of the ICC, and (2) focuses on proving or improving the impartiality of the ICC. Few have been willing to engage the possibility that impartial implementation of the Rome Statute regime would itself have perverse implications for the very constituency that many argue the ICC primarily intends to benefit—victims of mass human rights violations in national jurisdictions that are unable or unwilling to prosecute these violations. This presentation will engage this possibility, and suggest that the AU’s criticism are most productively understood as directing attention to the various troubling ways the contemporary international justice regime undermines the political authority of African states and their populations.

Bio
E. Tendayi Achiume is Assistant Professor of Law at UCLA School of Law, where she is a core faculty member of the Critical Race Studies Program and the Epstein Program in Public Interest Law and Policy. Her research and teaching interests lie in international human rights law, international refugee law, migration, international criminal justice, and property. She earned her B.A. from Yale University and her J.D. from Yale Law School. She is a former law clerk of Deputy Chief Justice Dikgang Moseneke and Justice Yvonne Mokgoro on the Constitutional Court of South Africa.

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Abstract: To many observers, the form of African cities appears chaotic. Although some neighborhoods may be laid out in formal grids, other so-called “spontaneous” neighborhoods are perched on hills, nestle in flood plains, and increasingly, invade villages on the urban periphery. This presentation, based on short-term ethnography in Dakar, Ouagadougou, and Bamako, will show how the contemporary form of major West African cities reflects the conflicting interests and visions of different groups. On the one hand, urban planners and municipal authorities hold rationalist views of ideal cities; they should have clear zoning and infrastructure that meets national, even international, standards. On the other hand, residents want a place to call their own; although they desire water and electricity, schools and clinics, they often prioritize access to building plots, legal or illegal. Long-term residents of inner-city neighborhoods strategize to preserve their homes even as they negotiate with authorities to get better services. Younger residents and immigrants often turn to the urban periphery, where they collude with existing customary owners to procure building lots. Because these groups indeed have different goals, the resulting form of cities, a result of their negotiations, is usually far from the rational vision of planners.

Bio: Dolores Koenig is Professor of Anthropology at American University in Washington DC. She is on sabbatical at NU this year as a Buffett Center Visiting Scholar and an affiliate of the Department of Anthropology. She has worked extensively in West Africa on issues of agricultural development and forced resettlement caused by rural and urban development projects. Her work following those relocated at the Manantali Dam in western Mali has appeared in articles such as: Notions of Participation in Development Projects: Involuntary Resettlement at Manantali in Cultures et pratiques participatives: Perspectives comparatives and The Environmental Effects of Policy Change in the West African Savanna: Resettlement, Structural Adjustment and Conservation in Western Mali (with Tiéman Diarra) in Journal of Political Ecology. More recent work on urban relocation in West Africa and India includes: Activists in Urban Forced Resettlement in Development-induced Displacement and Resettlement: Revisiting the Knowns and Revealing the Unknowns and Multiple Actors and Contested Terrains: Strategies of Pro-poor Action in Contemporary Urban Restructuring in Journal of Developing Societies.

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Abstract: In 2008, I sat with a group of Malawian data collectors in a mini bus in rural Malawi where they were administering household-level surveys for an American-led longitudinal project. They joked that a colleague sitting under a tree, pencil in hand and head bent over a survey’s pages, was “cooking data.” Cooked data, or data that are fudged, falsified or inaccurate, haunts global health science and points to tensions between standardization and improvisation that preoccupy demographers who seek to measure and quantify population based phenomenon in Africa. In this talk and my larger book project, I borrow this phrase from fieldworkers to consider two main questions: How does “raw” information—responses recorded on to the pages of a survey—acquire value as evidence that will inform national policy? How do on-the-ground dynamics and practices of AIDS research cultures influence and mediate the production of good, clean numbers? Drawing on ethnographic work with survey projects, this talk shifts attention from the researchers, experts and clinicians we often associate with global health to a set of actors at global health’s lowest echelons: fieldworkers. I show how the value of survey data is constituted by the labor performed by hundreds of fieldworkers, foregrounding how they learn to (imperfectly) embody demographers’ epistemic investments in clean data. Centering analyses of pre-fieldwork training sessions, research encounters between fieldworkers and respondents, and the tools and technologies employed by fieldworkers (maps, surveys, HIV tests, GPS devices, e.g.), I trouble racialized rhetoric dating from the colonial-era that casts fieldworkers and data collectors as unreliable, unskilled, or a liability to good data by showing how their embodied tactics and forms of expertise coalesce demographers’ standards for high quality data as they implement them in the field. The paper draws from a chapter of my larger book project, which shows how quantitative data reflect and cohere new social relations, persons, practices and forms of expertise in their sites of production.

Bio: Crystal Biruk is Assistant Professor of Anthropology at Oberlin College and a member of the Gender, Sexuality, and Feminist Studies Committee at the College. Her research and scholarship is at the intersection of critical global health studies, science studies, and African studies. Her book project, titled Cooking Data: Culture and Politics in an African Research World, is an ethnography of knowledge production in foreign-led survey projects collecting AIDS-related health data in rural Malawi. The book considers the social lives of quantitative data, and analyzes how data reflect and cohere the social worlds they claim to represent. Her second ethnographic project takes interest in the emergence of same-sex identities and evidence-based activism in Malawi, with particular focus on how LGBT people come to occupy, perform and know their vulnerability in the context of transnationally circulating human rights frames and global health science. She has a PhD in Anthropology from the University of Pennsylvania and a BA in Anthropology from Bryn Mawr College, and held a postdoctoral fellowship at Brown University’s Pembroke Center in 2011-12. At Oberlin, she teaches courses in cultural theory, medical anthropology, science studies, and critical humanitarianism.