No full-text available
To read the full-text of this research,
you can request a copy directly from the author.
West African Video-Movies and Their Transnational Imaginaries
Abstract
This chapter centers on West African (Nollywood) popular movies about travel. Produced in Ghana and Nigeria and in global cities like New York, London, and Amsterdam, the earliest West African travel movies such as Amsterdam Diary (2005) and Mr Ibu in London (2004) narrate the experiences of the first-time Ghanaian or Nigerian traveler who leaves Africa in search of prosperity abroad. They warn against the dangers and hardships found in Europe and North America while at the same time offering African audiences pleasures derived from imaginary travel. Focalized through the perspective of the African migrant, the spectator in Africa who watches a transnational travel movie virtually experiences global mobility and imaginatively consumes the tourist experience. A spatial binary between an African city and a foreign city structures the narratives of these transnational movies, and the movement back and forth between Africa and the West temporally and spatially constructs a relationship of proximity between the two locations and in this way expresses Africa's “worldliness.” More recently produced travel movies such as London Got Problem (2006) and Love in America (2008) turn away from tourist views and chronicle the experiences of Africans who are well established in the diaspora.
... In contrast, characters in Sareena lack depth and grasp of their lines, for the narratives are apparently built on the mechanics of melodrama (Garritano 2013) that are themselves poorly copied from another foreign film. In sum, to borrow from Singer, everything about the movie is 'outrageous coincidence, implausibility, convoluted plotting, and episodic strings of action that stuff too many events together ' (2001: 46). ...
Against many odds, the Hausa film industry alias Kannywood has come of age. The film industry survives several pressing challenges from within and outside Nigeria, perhaps more than its counterparts anywhere else. Although there is no denying that the quality of its output has significantly improved, its survival has little or nothing to do with that. Many critics, including the Motion Pictures Practitioners Association of Nigeria (MOPPAN) leadership, call ‘bad’ films, are still being made. Romantic movies, laden with a typical and predictable pattern of the love triangle, song and dance sequences among other appropriated and plagiarized Bollywood modalities, remain the favourite of producers and arguably that of the audience. However, according to some surveys, such films lack merit in the realm of critical film discourse in Africa and beyond. This article is set out to discuss this issue through a content analysis of a recent film titled Sareena (Nuhu 2019). The movie, released in 2019, is a bloated, implausible melodrama and a direct mimicry of a famous Indian film, Kaabil (Gupta 2017).
Prior studies that emphasize a one-way flow of US programming to the periphery of the world system are now being reassessed in light of the increasing volume and velocity of multi-directional media flows that emanate from particular cities, such as Bombay, Cairo, and Hong Kong. These emerging centers of transnational cultural production suggest a need to supplement the current scholarly emphasis on national media systems with a more intensive examination of media capitals. Examining the histories of Hollywood, Hong Kong, and Chicago television, this essay illustrates how scholars might use media capital as a concept that would foster empirically grounded analysis of the temporal dynamism and spatial complexity of the global media environment.
Concerned with the relations among the population dynamics, social organisation, and culture of human populations and the environments in which they live, ecological anthropology provides a materialist examination of the range of human activity. This review examines the theoretical assumptions and methods adopted in each of the three stages of development in ecological anthropology, namely that characterised by the work of Julian Steward and Leslie White, the second which is termed neofunctionalism and neoevolutionism, and the third called processual ecological anthropology. -John*Sheail
This classic work chronicles how New York, London, and Tokyo became command centers for the global economy and in the process underwent a series of massive and parallel changes. What distinguishes Sassen's theoretical framework is the emphasis on the formation of cross-border dynamics through which these cities and the growing number of other global cities begin to form strategic transnational networks. All the core data in this new edition have been updated, while the preface and epilogue discuss the relevant trends in globalization since the book originally came out in 1991.
In the twenty years preceding the First World War, cinema rapidly developed from a fairground curiosity into a major industry and social institution, a source of information and entertainment for millions of people. Only recently have film scholars and historians begun to study these early years of cinema in their own right and not simply as first steps towards the classical narrative cinema we now associate with Hollywood. The essays in this collection trace the fascinating history of how the cinema developed its forms of storytelling and representation and how it evolved into a complex industry with Hollywood rapidly acquiring a dominant role. These issues can be seen to arise from new readings of the so-called pioneers - Melies, Lumiere, Porter, and Griffith - while also suggesting new perspectives on major European filmmakers of the 1910s and 20s. Editor Thomas Elsaesser complements the contributions from leading British, American, and European scholars with introductory essays of his own that provide a comprehensive overview of the field. The volume is the most authoritative survey to date of a key area of contemporary film research, invaluable to historians as well as to students of cinema.
Beyond Bollywood is the first comprehensive look at the emergence, development, and significance of contemporary South Asian diasporic cinema. From a feminist and queer perspective, Jigna Desai explores the hybrid cinema of the "Brown Atlantic" through a close look at films in English from and about South Asian diasporas in the United States, Canada, and Britain, including such popular films as My Beautiful Laundrette, Fire, Monsoon Wedding, and Bend it Like Beckham.
African Video Movies and Global Desires is the first full-length scholarly study of Ghana's commercial video industry, an industry that has produced thousands of movies over the last twenty years and has grown into an influential source of cultural production. Produced and consumed under circumstances of dire shortage and scarcity, African video movies narrate the desires and anxieties created by Africa's incorporation into the global cultural economy. Drawing on archival and ethnographic research conducted in Ghana over a ten-year period, as well as close readings of a number of individual movies, this book brings the insights of historical context as well as literary and film analysis to bear on a range of movies and the industry as a whole. Garritano makes a significant contribution to the examination of gender norms and the ideologies these movies produce. African Video Movies and Global Desires is a historically and theoretically informed cultural history of an African visual genre that will only continue to grow in size and influence. © 2013 by the Center for International Studies Ohio University. All rights reserved.
William T. Pilkington and Don Graham, eds., Western Movies (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1979–13.95/6.95)
William R. Meyer, The Making of the Great Westerns (New Rochelle, New York: Arlington House, 1979 – 11.95)
Gerald Mast's The Comic Mind (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1979– $7.95 paper)
Public Culture 14.1 (2002) 239-273
Gilles Deleuze, Cinéma 2: L'image-temps
Over the past two centuries, intellectual currents have emerged whose goal has been to confer authority on certain symbolic elements integrated into the African collective imaginaire. Some of these trends have gained a following, while others have remained mere outlines. Very few are outstanding in richness and creativity, and fewer still are of exceptional power.
At the intersection of religious practices and the interrogation of human tragedy, a distinctively African philosophy has emerged. But governed though it has been, for the most part, by narratives of loss, such meditation on divine sovereignty and African people's histories has not yielded any integrated philosophico-theological inquiry systematic enough to situate human misfortune and wrongdoing in a singular theoretical framework. Africa offers nothing comparable, for example, to a German philosophy that from Luther to Heidegger has been based not only on religious mysticism but also, more fundamentally, on the will to transgress the boundary between the human and the divine. Nor is there anything comparable to Jewish Messianism, which, combining desire and dream, confronted almost without mediation the problem of the absolute and its promises, pursuing the latter to its most extreme consequences in tragedy and despair, while at the same time treating the uniqueness of Jewish suffering as sacred at the risk of making it taboo. It is true that, following the examples of these two metanarratives, contemporary African modes of writing the self are inseparably connected with the problematics of self-constitution and the modern philosophy of the subject. However, there the similarities end.
Various factors have prevented the full development of conceptions that might have explained the meaning of the African past and present by reference to the future, but chief among them may be named historicism. The effort to determine the conditions under which the African subject could attain full selfhood, become self-conscious, and be answerable to no one else soon encountered historicist thinking in two forms that led it into a dead end. The first of these is what might be termed Afro-radicalism, with its baggage of instrumentalism and political opportunism. The second is the burden of the metaphysics of difference (nativism). The first current of thought -- which liked to present itself as "democratic," "radical," and "progressive"--used Marxist and nationalist categories to develop an imaginaire of culture and politics in which a manipulation of the rhetoric of autonomy, resistance, and emancipation serves as the sole criterion for determining the legitimacy of an authentic African discourse. The second current of thought developed out of an emphasis on the "native condition." It promoted the idea of a unique African identity founded on membership of the black race.
Fundamental to both currents of thought are three historical events, broadly construed: slavery, colonization, and apartheid. A particular set of canonical meanings has been attributed to these three events. First, on the level of individual subjectivities, there is the idea that through the processes of slavery, colonization, and apartheid, the African self has become alienated from itself (self-division). This separation is supposed to result in a loss of familiarity with the self, to the point that the subject, having become estranged from him- or herself, has been relegated to a lifeless form of identity (objecthood). Not only is the self no longer recognized by the Other; the self no longer recognizes itself.
The second canonical meaning has to do with property. According to the dominant narrative, the three events have led to dispossession, a process in which juridical and economic procedures have led to material expropriation. This was followed by a unique experience of subjection characterized by the falsification of Africa's history by the Other, which resulted in a state of maximal exteriority (estrangement) and deracination. These two phases -- the violence of falsification and material expropriation -- are said to be the main components of African history's uniqueness and of the tragedy that is at its foundation.
Finally, there is the idea of historical degradation: slavery, colonization, and apartheid are supposed to have plunged the African subject not only into humiliation, debasement, and nameless suffering but also...
The full implication of the identification of the rights of man with the rights of peoples in the European nation-state system came to light only when a growing number of people and peoples suddenly appeared whose elementary rights were not safeguarded by the ordinary functioning of the nation-state.
Much of what is classified today as the literature of migration does not reflect the conditions of extreme duress of those who are trafficked from one part of the world to another. In many instances, postcolonial theories of hybridity and the literary forms in which such theories are instantiated were the product of elite forms of migration that have little connection to the experience of working-class migrants (Ahmad 2008). Even literary works that are more grounded in mass experience nonetheless reflect the tribulations of first- or second-generation diasporic populations who migrated to the developed nations of Western Europe and the United States legally. Such migration was largely a product of what were the now clearly anomalous conditions of labor shortage that obtained for the thirty or so years following World War II and the creation of the postwar social compact between capital, government, and the organized working class within developed nations. In the United States, for example, Congress established the bracero contract-labor program, which lasted from the early 1940s through the mid-1960s, in response to such labor shortages; similar guest worker programs were set up in Western European nations such as Germany, France, and Britain after the war (Bacon 2008). While residence was often initially tied to work, the communities who settled in developed nations, tied to such nations by colonial history, generally ultimately established formal citizenship. Literature produced by writers within this context, from, to take the British context, Sam Selvon’s Lonely Londoners to Zadie Smith’s White Teeth, thus deals largely with the efforts of these migrant communities to establish a sense of self and community within nations that recognize their right to residence in formal terms but frequently do not do so in cultural or racial terms. The struggle reflected in such literary works consequently tends to pivot on assertions of belonging that mongrelize the national community (Dawson 2007).
The novel has not been particularly responsive to the growth of displacement on a global scale during the post-Fordist era that began in the 1970s. In his discussion of the dearth of literary representations of migrant workers in the oil industry, for example, Amitav Ghosh suggests that this aporia results not simply because it is in the interest of dominant elites to mute awareness of the political machinations and human rights violations that attend resource extraction. In addition, Ghosh suggests, the novel is constitutionally averse to representing the polyglot communities of labor migrants whose toil in the oil fields of the Middle East keeps crude oil flowing (1992, 30). The novel is tethered to traditions of naturalistic dialogue within monolingual speech communities; within, that is, the nation-state. As Benedict Anderson argued, it is the primary vector for the imagining of stable, bounded communities within the empty time of modernity (2006). The novel also thrives through creating a rich sense of place. The experience of the modern-day helots who populate the shadow economy, however, is lived out in a world that is displaced, heterogeneous, and international. This is a world, Ghosh asserts, that offers “a radical challenge not just to writing but to much of modern culture, to the idea of distinguishable and distinct communities or civilizations” (1992, 30). Ghosh, writing during the first decade of full-blown neoliberal globalization, argues that we do not yet possess literary forms to give true expression to the experiences of global migrants.
In recent years precisely such a literature of displacement has begun to emerge. The denizens of this literary corpus do not possess even the tenuous rights enjoyed by the ethnic minority groups—black Britons, French Muslims, and German Turks, for example—who settled in the developed countries before the onset of neoliberalism in the 1970s. Once they cross national borders, contemporary displaced people are largely denuded of the legal rights that come with national belonging. Lacking...
Melodrama and Modernity: Early Sensational Cinema and Its Contexts
- B. Singer
Africans abroad: a theme in film and video
- Haynes J.
Media Worlds: Anthropology on New Terrain
- M.M. Yang
- Garritano C.
African modes of self-writing,” trans. Steven Rendall
- Mbembe