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This volume brings together fifteen scholars from Africa, Europe and the United States to explore how Africa is represented in and through the performing arts and cinema. Essays include discussions of Lorraine Hansberry’s A Raisin in the Sun, American influences on Nollywood, Nigerian video films, the representation of women in cinema, African dance in the diaspora, children’s music, and media portrayals of savagery from pop cinema through news reports of Ferguson, Missouri. Using a variety of methodologies and approaches, the contributors consider how African societies and cultures have been represented to themselves, to the continent at large, and in the diaspora. The volume represents an extended dialogue between African scholars and artists about the challenges of representing themselves and their respective societies within and without Africa. Many of the contributors are scholar-practitioners, offering practical guides on how to approach these performance and media forms as artists. As such, this book will serve as both model and building block for the next generation of representors, students, and audiences.
The Journal of Integrative Humanism Ghana is a publication of the Faculty of Arts, University of Cape Coast, Ghana. All papers, reports, communications and contributions published in this journal and copyright in the same are the property of Faculty of Arts, University of Cape Coast, Ghana and the University of Calabar, save where otherwise indicated.
Trends in Nollywood: A Study of Selected Genres is a welcome addition to the growing body of works on the Nigerian cinema. It is part film history and part film theory and criticism. The history part traces the origin of the Nigerian cinema up to the present era of video productions. The work examines in detail, the contextual issues which have helped to define emergent trends within the industry.
The book identifies and critically analyses Hausa contemporary films known as Kannywood. The focus is on video films with particular emphasis on sources in oral literature. How traditional theatres are re-enacted and re-framed during filmmaking, and how far are traditional traits captured, changed, or enriched in video film are some issues the book negotiates on. The harmony between orature and technology, as generated by means of the transported film medium is expressed in the book. The new medium is integrated into the ongoing traditional and cultural surroundings, where native narrative traditions have been adopted into the global film medium, which is in alignment with contemporary medial culture. Yusuf Baba Gar is the lecturer for Hausa at the Department of African Studies, Humboldt University, Berlin.
Yabbing and Wording: The artistry of Nigerian stand-up comedy is a long-overdue academic interrogation of the novel stand-up practice in Nigeria as performance. 'Yabbing' comes from the Nigerian Pidgin English verb, 'yab', which means a satirical jibe thrown at individuals, groups or institutions. Nigeria's Fela Anikulapo-Kuti used this effectively in his recorded and live music performances against successive military regimes. 'Wording' derives from the English term 'word' and refers to a game in which parties exchange insults. It is a modern-day coinage for traditional forms of joking that existed across Nigeria and elsewhere in precolonial times. In this book, Nwankw? identifies 'yabbing'...
African cultural productions of humour have increased even in the face of myriad economic foibles and social upheavals. For instance, from the 1990s, stand-up comedy emerged across the continent and has maintained a pervasive presence since then. Its specificities are related to contemporary economic and political contexts and are also drawn from its pre-colonial history, that of joking forms and relationships, and orality. Izuu Nwankwọ's fascinating collected volume offers a transnational appraisal of this unique art form spanning different nations of the continent and its diasporas. The book engages variously with jokesters, their materials, the mediums of dissemination, and the cultural value(s) and relevance of their stage work, encompassing the form and content of the practice. Its ruling theoretical perspective comes from theatre and performance, cultural studies, linguistics, and literary studies.
How does social media activism in Nigeria intersect with online popular forms—from GIFs to memes to videos—and become shaped by the repressive postcolonial state that propels resistance to dominant articulations of power? James Yékú proposes the concept of "cultural netizenship"—internet citizenship and its aesthetico-cultural dimensions—as a way of being on the social web and articulating counter-hegemonic self-presentations through viral popular images. Yékú explores the cultural politics of protest selfies, Nollywood-derived memes and GIFs, hashtags, and political cartoons as visual texts for postcolonial studies, and he examines how digital subjects in Nigeria, a nation with ...
Collectively, the essays brought together in this book represent a discursive confluence on Nollywood as a local film culture with a global character, aspiration and reach. The governing concern of the book is that texts, including film texts, are animated by a particular sociology and anthropology which gives them concrete existence and meaning. The book argues that Nollywood, the Nigerian video film text, is deeply rooted in the sub-soil of its social and cultural milieux. Nollywood is therefore, engaged in the relentless negotiation and re-negotiation of the everyday lives of the people against the backdrop of their cultural traditions, social contradictions and the politics of their ethnic/national identity, longing and belonging. The essays weave an intricate and delicate argument about the critical role of Nollywood to the idea of nationhood and the logic of its narration with implications for language, politics and culture in Africa. The book is a valuable addition to the critical discourse on the important place of film and cinema studies in national engineering processes.
This book introduces the emerging, but still little-known, phenomenon of Nollywood-inspired filmmaking by African migrants in Europe. Using the unique example of a performance ethnographic case study in Switzerland, it shows how members of the African diaspora represent themselves through audio-visual media and what influence the post-colonial images of the Nigerian video film industry have on their image production. Drawing on Jean Rouch’s Shared Anthropology and the methods of Performance Ethnography, this book provides an in-depth look at the complexity of migrants’ everyday lives and showcases Nollywood-inspired transnational filmmaking practices. In its refreshing and accessible writing style, it also illustrates the performance ethnographic research process, highlights the pitfalls and challenges of collaborative film projects, and critically engages with fundamental questions of social research in decolonial settings.
This volume focuses on the directions that African cultural studies has taken over the years and covers the following central themes: contemporary issues in African cultural studies; Gender and the making of identity; the dual discourses of Afropessimism and Afrofuturism; problematizing the African diaspora and methodology and African cultural studies. The second of two volumes, the book predominantly pulls together a rich reservoir of previously published articles from Critical Arts: South-North Cultural and Media Studies. Taken together the two volumes re-expose for international readers sets of theories, methodologies and studies that not only have been influenced by global trends, but wh...