Interrogating diasporic identity and media: distribution flows, reception practices, and video film interpretations of Nollywood audiences in Newark, New Jersey

https://muse.jhu.edu/journals/the_global_south/v007/7.1.alabi.pdf

Introduction: Nollywood and the Global South

In the Nigerian context, and especially in the traditional Igbo setting, women have never featured prominently in the enterprise of politics and power play. Even when they do rise to power, their achievement is usually attributed to the seductive use of their bodies. This sexist attitude is clearly seen in the true story of Ahebi of Igbo land, who was arguably the only female warrant chief in colonial West Africa (late 19 th century). Her rise to fame and authority was attributed to her ability to utilize the power of the female body to seduce the colonial masters into giving her the position. Ahebi did not only use her beauty but her sexual attraction was as well used as a strategy to lure herself into the King’s palace, where she met the controller of the land (the British). This article will investigate this sexist attitude and, using some feminist hermeneutic keys, will try to analyse the phenomenon of female body power politics. The question is: can we always attribute the rise of women to power only to the way they use their bodies or to their own sheer intellectual and political ability?

https://journals.ezenwaohaetorc.org/index.php/NJP/article/download/248/186

Is sex a currency for female power? a philosophical and trado-ethical investigation using ahebi ugbabe as a case study

ABSTRACT Nollywood, the Nigerian film industry, is the second largest globally in terms of the number of films produced annually. Women, through roles as actresses and, more recently, as producers and directors, have gained avenues to grow their careers and social status within both the industry and broader Nigerian society. However, despite this visibility, research reveals that women are often confined to stereotypical roles and subjected to public vitriol for their personal and professional choices. Although existing studies have examined female representation on screen, few have engaged directly with women working within Nollywood to explore their lived experiences. This paper analyses ten in‐depth interviews with female filmmakers to explore the complex realities they navigate. Our findings show that although progress is being made, with more women occupying leadership positions, many continue to face systemic challenges such as sexual harassment, exploitation, gender stereotyping, and symbolic violence. Crucially, the analysis draws on postfeminist sensibilities to understand the “psychic work” these women perform: the internal negotiation of agency, ambition, and vulnerability in a male‐dominated industry. This includes the self‐regulation of emotions, the pressure to present their struggles as individual choices or triumphs, and the balancing act between personal empowerment and structural constraint. This study thus provides a unique contribution by foregrounding the affective and cognitive labor required of women in Nollywood, situating their experiences within broader postfeminist logics of individualism, resilience, and self‐discipline under neoliberal gender regimes. It contributes toward a transnational understanding of the operation of postfeminist sensibilities that undermine women's equality and rights within the film industry. 

Negotiating Nollywood: Women, Violence, and Postfeminist Sensibilities in the Nigerian Film Industry

Trauma of migration has been seen as not only peculiar to African immigrants in the West. This is because Africans, on returning to their roots also experience other dimensions of trauma, meted and shielded by the custodians of culture all in the name of ‘Communal Child Raising’ manifest in culture shock, stereotyping, abuse and general disillusionment. Using the theory of Adultism, this paper examines how Sade Adeniran; a member of the Yoruba community interrogates the popular Yoruba adage- “it takes a village to raise a child”. This paper unravels the datum that this adage has been adversely wielded by African parents and guardians to mentally, financially, physically and emotionally abuse Africans under their care. Imagine This as a literary work, captures the injustice on the self image, identity and dignity which our African culture in this regard impose on affected young population. The theory of Adultism foregrounds the seeming undiscussed issue of oppression meted to children by adults who take advantage of the position of authority which they occupy in the lives of these young people. When custodians of societal values neglect their responsibility of building the human dignity in their wards via a more humane culture of child raising, it engenders a dysfunctional society with problems which eventually lead to social change. This paper there submits that education and respect for the human self, regardless of the age involved remain panaceas for sustainability of human dignity grounded in our Africaness.

Child Raising in African Culture, a Blight on Human Dignity?

This article discusses Sade Adeniran’s novel Imagine This and its portrayal of the protagonist’s pain and the efforts she makes to recapture the stable life that preceded her traumatic suffering by telling her story in form of diary entries. It follows theoretical models of trauma as explicated by Cathy Caruth and in particular, Shoshana Felman and Dori Laub’s idea that the subject’s testimony as a necessary catalyst to healing. The article argues that rather than a linear movement from trauma, through testimony, to healing, Imagine This re-conceptualizes traumatic experience and healing as a complex journey that is shaped by multiple trauma events rather than a single one. Thus, the subject’s testimony is constantly interrupted successive sufferings, thereby postponing closure and healing. This relation between the subject and pain implies the individual produces many testimonies rather than one, a crucial strategy for re-imagining the self and to begin the complex journey towards healing. 
  
  
 

Recovering the Uneventful: Trauma and Survival in Sade Adeniran's Imagine This

ABSTRACT:Of Sefi Atta's expanding oeuvre, which includes Swallow, A Bit of Difference, News from Home: Short Stories, Lawless and Other Stories, and Everything Good Will Come, centralizes the debate over the female body more than any other precisely because it demonstrates the extent to which some women's introjection of society's models of bodies affirms that the body is never a neutral object, but one that exists within a sphere of patriarchal power. Yet, an evaluation of this novel's engagement with the body is often missing from its rich corpus of criticism. Its general reception as feminist text tends to concentrate on the patriarchal repression and social devaluation of women. The initial violence of rape that structures the plot of the novel looms so large that other subject matters escape visibility, especially the relentless microaggression that the protagonist experiences for not possessing society's idealized body. The fact that other issues tend to become marginalized does not imply that the rape is not crucial to the criticism of the text but that its connection to other pertinent issues, such as sexual objectification, microaggression, and trauma, should also enjoy sustained critical attention.

The "Other" Body: Microaggression and Trauma of Female Objectification in Sefi Atta's Everything Good Will Come

This essay examines the increasing display of female sexuality in Yoruba video film. The investigation focuses on this development especially because these sexualized female images have now become an integral part of a video film tradition that emphasizes moral discipline alongside entertainment. The images and motif of discipline tend to constitute two seemingly parallel discourses and it is this apparent contradiction, in relation to spectatorship, that this essay explores. As a result of the liberal deployment of female sexuality in Yoruba video film, almost all the genres are suitable for this investigation. However, Omotara Johnson I, II, III, Eye E , and Iwajowa have been selected for analysis not only for presenting the female body, but also for interrogating the filmic process. These video films are examined within the contexts of objectification and gender theories, including the Yoruba notion of “good character.” Crucial observations that emerge from the research include the discovery that eroticized female body functions as a component of the film’s didactic motif, obliterating possible contradictions between the images and instructional goals of the narratives. In other words, female objectification becomes justified through its centrality to the development of the film’s instructional machinery. The implication of eliminating the opposition between female objectification and didacticism is the creation of a unique spectatorship, which is male and heterosexual. This spectatorship supplants the previous undifferentiated one, because until about ten years ago, Yoruba video film was more preoccupied by dialogue and narrative than capturing the female body. Objectification of the female form and the emergence of specifically male and heterosexual audience are recent phenomena in the development of Yoruba video film.

https://muse.jhu.edu/journals/the_global_south/v007/7.1.ogunfolabi.pdf

Female Body, Discipline, and Emerging Male Spectatorship in Yoruba Video Film

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Kayode Omoniyi Ogunfolabi

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Recovering the Uneventful: Trauma and Survival in Sade Adeniran's Imagine This

The "Other" Body: Microaggression and Trauma of Female Objectification in Sefi Atta's Everything Good Will Come

Female Body, Discipline, and Emerging Male Spectatorship in Yoruba Video Film