Abstract: With over 2000 movies produced annually, and an estimated $200 million in U. S. earnings in 2006, the Nigerian film industry is now the third largest in the world after those of the United States of America (Hollywood) and India (Bollywood). The unprecedented rise of Nollywood in the past two decades attests to its successes in uniquely telling African stories from the perspectives of Africans, a storytelling role that had for too long been left in the hands of many who portrayed the continent as the bastion of dangers and backwaters of human civilization. However, despite Nollywood’s contributions to the telling of African stories to the rest of the world, the need to contribute to the remaking of Nigeria – its home base – has now become necessary at a time when the country is beset with numerous social, economic, cultural and political problems that threaten national unity. In the three sections of this article, a short history that provides a background to Nigeria as a state and highlights the taproots of the current problems being encountered in the country, an argument for a redefinition of the Nigerian state which supports the idea of remaking the country as a viable postcolonial African state in the 21 st century, and the role of Nollywood in Nigeria’s national rebirth are presented.

Abstract: In this article, I argue that “Nollywood” – Nigeria’s English-language video film industry, which emerged in the early 1990s – is possible because of both the postcolonial nation-state’s subjection to global capital and the various networks to which a system of global capital gives rise. Processes like these have been operating concurrently in Nigeria since at least the time of the transatlantic slave trade, but they have surfaced in Nigerian cinema culture rather unevenly. At certain historical moments, subjection to capital has played a largely determining role in filmmaking and film policy; at other times, links to transnational networks have been more instrumental. I trace what Fredrick Copper refers to as the “territorializing” and “deterritorializing” processes of global capital by looking at the role that different vectors have played in the development of a particular genre, the epic, and by looking at either side of the historical moment in which a Nigerian motion picture expert, Pete Edochie, made the transition from state motion picture production to the video film industry.

Abstract: Since the beginning of the twenty-first century, the Nigerian video industry has been the subject of a large number of documentary films and festival retrospectives around the world. Their objective was, in most of the cases, introducing the Nigerian video phenomenon to non-African audiences. As much of the literature on the video industry has evidenced, Nollywood’s specific modes of operation made the Nigerian video industry almost incommensurable to other experiences of filmmaking in the world. As a consequence, during its first decade of existence the Nigerian video phenomenon remained practically “invisible” to non-African audiences. The retrospectives and documentaries that appeared since the early 2000s had the objective of filling this gap and making Nollywood visible within the global cinematic arena. However, the representation of the video phenomenon that these “metacultural” constructions (Urban) circulated have participated in creating a rigid (and in some cases stereotypical) definition of Nollywood, which has had a specific role in defining the position of the Nigerian video industry in the global cinematic landscape. In this article, I analyze these discursive constructions in order to understand and interpret the representation of the video phenomenon that they have produced. As I will argue, the representation of Nollywood that they circulated can be considered as the result of a specific form of “postcolonial exotic” (Huggan), one in which the fascination for non-Western declinations of modernity takes the place of the fascination for the archaic, the traditional, and the tribal. As I will show in the last section of this essay, in reaction to this kind of representation a number of directors and producers moved toward new economic and narrative strategies. By doing this they aim at moving Nollywood away from the marginal position in which the “postcolonial-exotic” discourse implicit in these representations has positioned it.

Abstract: In this essay, I explore the impact of Panamanian secession and lost canal rights on Colombian domestic affairs. In particular, I focus on Bogota officials’ efforts to assert greater control over the nation’s only insular Caribbean territory: the archipelago of San Andres and Providencia. These islands are located less than one hundred miles away from the Canal Zone and their populations have a long history with coastal Panama. Through an examination of official correspondence, newspaper publications, travel accounts, and published memoirs; I put forth a two-part argument. First, I contend that the loss of Panama and rights to the canal forced central authorities in Bogota to reengage generally with their frontier populations—and more specifically, with the English-speaking Afro-Caribbean populations of San Andres and Providencia. Second, the historically loose commercial, cultural, and even kinship ties to mainland Colombia weakened central and local functionaries’ claims of territorial sovereignty to these islands, which in turn forced functionaries to compare island agitation, mobilization, and demands for political autonomy with the earlier efforts of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Panamanians.

Abstract: This article focuses on the communities created by West Indian Panamanians in the U.S.-controlled Panama Canal Zone from the 1930s to the 1950s. Neither nationalist nor diplomatic initiatives could supplant the rights of West Indian Panamanian Zone residents to forge livelihoods on the Isthmus. Such initiatives also clashed with communal efforts to create alternative understandings of citizenship and home. Policies of population removal and re-education in the Canal Zone, particularly connected to treaty negotiations between Panama and the United States (1953–1955), serve as the backdrop for the analysis. These policies increasingly sought to push out or silence West Indian Panamanian Zone residents. This study traces the history of West Indian Panamanian community formation in the Zone, engaging with the memories of former Canal Zone residents. Speeches and letters by community leaders are carefully deconstructed to provide a counter-narrative to government reports and commentary by the Panamanian media on the “problem” of West Indian Panamanians. So doing, the piece touches on the evolution of the practice of citizenship and living “active lives” among West Indian Panamanians by the end of the 1950s.

Abstract: This essay situates Chilean poet and artist Cecilia Vicuña’s 2010 film Kon Kon within its postdictatorship context in order to explore the relationship between performance, cultural memory, and neoliberal erasure. Returning to the coastal landscape of Concón, where she created her first precarios, or fragile installations, Vicuña documents how the privatization and deregulation of Chile’s natural resources—as a result of policies initiated under the Pinochet dictatorship but pursued into the present—has negatively impacted “the way of feeling for the land that is a memory of place.” Vicuña’s formally innovative film refigures precarity, as the fragility of life and culture under conditions of neoliberal globalization, into planetarity. Composed of both ritualized re-enactments of the artist’s oeuvre and documentary footage of the disappearing culture of the dunes, the film presents the dissonant flute-playing orchestras of the local indigenous fishermen as both threatened by, and performing an alternative to, the destructive forces of globalization. In turning to the bailes chinos of the fisherman, Vicuña—like Gayatri Spivak, whose theorization of planetarity is mobilized to elucidate this conjuncture—looks to precapitalist cultures to imagine a planetary future that collapses the distinction between nature and culture. At stake in both the bailes chinos and site-specific installations the film documents is the transmission of planetary forms of cultural memory that predate the neoliberal turn.

Abstract: This paper examines the representation of women in Tunde Kelani’s video films through an analysis of Ti Oluwa Ni Ile 1, Campus Queen, The Narrow Path, and Thunderbolt. I use Kelani’s films as a counterpoint to argue that women are not always essentialized in Nigerian video films. The paper also interrogates the revisioning of Nigeria’s colonial history and portrayal of modernity in Nigerian movies using third-world feminist and post-colonial theories. I develop an inductive typology introducing the five analytical categories of normative pre-colonial, dominant colonial, polemical post-colonial, pervasive neo-colonial, and persistent pseudo-colonial for examining the representation of women in the four video films. Nigeria’s emerging video film2 industry takes its cues from American and Indian cinemas, although most of the stories are unique to the homeland. Following the demise of the theatrical exhibition of films in Nigeria in the 1980s, video films became the main staple of Nigeria’s national cinema3 (Haynes). The Yoruba4 traveling theatre groups strongly influenced celluloid film production in Nigeria, but their stage plays became expensive as economic hardship hit the country. The traveling theatre consists of artists who were engaged in live theatre productions, but later incorporated the screening of recorded films into their work. Attendance at movie theatres dwindled while patronage of the theatre groups’ works was overtaken by the citizens’ primary needs. Necessity led the Yoruba traveling theatre to diversify its artistic productions. Its members sought alternative means and media for practicing their art. In the turn to video production, the group explored producing their works in Yoruba language with English subtitles. Igbo video film producers would later adopt this strategy.5

Abstract: This essay argues for the bodily, material, and performative dimensions of translation in Turkish-German author Emine Sevgi Ozdamar’s 2003 novel Strange Stars Stare to Earth , a semi-autobiographical work about a young Turkish actress who comes to Germany in 1976 in order to work at the People’s Theater in East Berlin. Ozdamar’s text continually renegotiates the spatial, monetary, linguistic, and scriptorial contours of divided Berlin in playful engagement with the concepts of exchange, equivalence, and translation. In this literary project, translation emerges not only as a semantic phenomenon, but as inseparable from the materiality, corporeality, and performativity of language as realized in writing. In addition, translation does not operate on a structure of equivalence but on unexpected transformations and transpositions of written material. Using Leslie A. Adelson’s concepts of Turkish-German “literature of migration” and “touching tales,” Venkat Mani’s and Azade Seyhan’s analyses of memory work in Ozdamar, as well as Yasemin Yildiz’s consideration of literal translation and trauma, this study draws critical attention to the productive dimensions of textual elements on the move rather than the recuperation of lost histories. Additionally, it places at its core a shift from translation as the reproduction of something familiar to the creation of something new.

Abstract: The pastoral mode has historically been dismissed for what some scholars see as its aestheticization of the brutal realities of agricultural labor and rural life. This essay, however, complicates what critics have considered the inherently conservative ideology of the pastoral. I contend that contemporary Irish poets such as Seamus Heaney and John Montague mobilize the literary mode’s generic conventions to critique the processes of modernization at work in postwar Ireland that displaced their rural communities. In and , the pastoral opens up a language of socioeconomic critique unavailable in political discourse, dominated as it often was by proponents of modernization who derided the rural community as a bastion of backward nationalism or by conservative politicians who idealized it as a sanctuary of traditional values. These poets are acutely aware of the multiple ironies embedded within the pastoral, the discursive power of which can reveal the contradictions in politico-economic ideology and cultural expression in modern Ireland.

Abstract: In claiming the writers Claude McKay and Eric Walrond for the Harlem Renaissance, literary scholars have often elided these writers’ Caribbean origins, treating them as a seamless part of that move-ment’s nationally-oriented racial contestation. More recently, McKay and Walrond have been held up as exemplars of black transnationalism, in which their peripatetic careers illustrate the restless, expansive networks of diasporic connection forged in the early part of the twentieth century. This essay instead examines the two authors with an eye toward their status as displaced exiles from the Caribbean who consciously sought both personal and professional success in the United States. Focusing particularly on Walrond’s Tropic Death (1926) and McKay’s A Long Way from Home (1937) the essay explores the authors’ ambivalent (and differently classed) embrace of the United States as a crucial site of artistic and political possibility. In doing so, it demonstrates how, for Walrond and McKay, the United States represented a complicated horizon of aesthetic production, functioning simultaneously as a liberating, bohemian site for experimental literary practice and as a frightening locus of racializing imperial power. Against the reflexive dismissal of the United States as merely a reprehensible perpetrator of global imperialism, the essay employs these two authors’ experience to suggest that the affective, aspirational aspects of United States culture can also be seen, from particular vantages in the Global South, to offer (in both literal and figurative ways) an attractive, politically productive form of belonging in the world.

Abstract: This article examines visions of cosmopolitanism that emerge in the most recent novels by Michelle Cliff: Free Enterprise (1993) and Into the Interior (2010). While Cliff’s earlier works are preoccupied with questions of national political consciousness, her later novels are concerned with probing the possibility of forming transnational affiliations, in particular for members of postcolonial diaspora. Cliff’s later work is traversed by a preoccupation with worldly consciousness and the internal conflicts that arise for the diasporic individual when local and global affiliations are at stake. The questions that this body of work explores are part of the ongoing inquiry into the specific nature of postcolonial cosmopolitanism. In Free Enterprise and Into the Interior , Cliff examines the affective conditions necessary for cosmopolitan affiliations not just to emerge but also to last. The figure that emerges in these novels is that of a reluctant cosmopolitan: that is, a subject who acknowledges the limitations of political commitment to a distant political cause that is based on the feeling of sympathy—commonly evoked in cosmopolitan thought—and its cognates: empathy, compassion, and pity. What Cliff suggestively posits, instead, is a form of political enthusiasm that is mediated in two ways: through aesthetic practice and through identification with an international history of resistance. Most notably, Into the Interior raises an important issue that extends beyond her work: namely, whether a particularly volatile affect such as enthusiasm can in fact be a basis for cosmopolitan political affiliations.

Abstract: What, and how, can “revolution” mean in the Global South in the decades after the end of the Cold War? Lusophone author Jose Eduardo Agualusa’s 2002 novel The Year that Zumbi Took Rio stages an imagined violent revolution in the marginalized, racialized communities of Rio de Janeiro through the collaboration of Angolan and Brazilian subjects multiply displaced by war, racism and other forms of social violence. The novel’s narrative frame revolves around retelling the story of the messianic figure of Zumbi dos Palmares, the seventeenth-century maroon king of the city of Palmares, located in the Brazilian hinterland, who leads the city’s final failed uprising against Portuguese and Dutch colonialists. In the Zumbi mythology, the Afro-Brazilian figure’s eventual return will initiate a new revolutionary cycle, vindicating the community’s fall. This article calls upon Boaventura de Sousa Santos’s notion of “epistemologies of the South,” a proposal to outline the possibilities of “intercultural translation”; such a project operates in the cracks of hierarchical boundaries that restrict the circulation of knowledge reinforced through organizing concepts such as nationalism, colonialism and racism. This essay, accordingly, traces the possibilities offered by both geographical and temporal displacement in Agualusa’s novel as offering a model for the ways in which these “epistemologies of the South” might map productive modes of South-South exchange.

Abstract: On the occasion of the Panama Canal’s centennial, this special issue aims to excavate the waterway’s multiple maps, and reconsider it as a reference and site for lived critical practices from a Global South perspective. The Panama Ca nal’s global infrastructure gives rise to a range of stories and interactions that transcend the locality of this referent for American skill and greatness. To adopt Denison Kitchel’s terms, we aim to discursively redirect what has long been regarded as a “cherished part” of American “national heritage, a symbol of unique national accomplishment,” and engage with the embodied “backwaters,” if you will, of the Canal (15). The building of this pathway and interoceanic communication transpired from the 1903 separation and organization of a new state, Panama, Central America’s narrowest and most southerly point. Greg Grandin concisely puts across that Theodore Roosevelt’s collaborative effort with J. P. Morgan “to shave the province of Panama off Colombia” steered “the new nation into an impor tant global transit route” that structured “America’s hemispheric might” (20).1 Panama’s emergence as a “youthful Republic,” to use census taker and policeman Harry A. Franck’s words (4), may have contributed, in Ana Elena Porras’s estimation, to a widely spread discourse in which said nation is imagined as an artificial state that has been “made in USA” (21; cf., Weeks and Gunson, 1991). 2

Abstract: In this essay, I examine Teco Benson’s 2002 film, Formidable Force , which was released three years after the transition from military dictatorship to democratic rule in Nigeria in 1999. Specifically, I focus on how the film critiques political leadership and its insistence on patriotic and morally-responsible citizenship, as well as citizen-law enforcement collaboration as imperatives for social change in Nigeria. In proposing this reading of the film, I seek to contribute to the meager but growing body of scholarship that analyzes the socio-political issues that Nollywood films raise.

Abstract: This paper examines the representations of disabilities and the disabled in the Nigerian film industry. It explores the contiguity between disability and sacrifice in Evil Agenda, Ti Oluwa Ni Ile , and Land of the Dwarfs , and interrogates some commonsensical assumptions about disability and the disabled in Nigeria and Africa. I argue that disability in Nigeria is a “socio-cultural and as well as a physical” problem and contend that its representations in Nollywood exploit and simultaneously beatify disabled actors. While Nollywood perpetuates some myths about disability and the disabled, it economically empowers disabled actors and increases their social status and privileges.

Abstract: This paper is about sociology of development. It discusses Nollywood (the Nigerian film industry) not as a springboard of an alternative popular culture in Africa but rather, as a model for African economic development. The paper argues that the growth of the Nollywood industry has been phenomenal, especially in Africa and that the social mechanics of this growth should serve as a template for the economic development of the continent. China’s recent economic success has often been associated with an indigenous development model described by some as the “Beijing Consensus.” In a similar way, a new (and an alternative) model of development for Africa should emerge from the Nollywood experience.

Abstract: The current trend in Nollywood Studies is to focus on the way video films are being made and consumed around the world, a focus that parallels the name “Nollywood,” which, as Jonathan Haynes and Alessandro Jedlowski point out, references the film industries of Hollywood and Bollywood (Haynes, “Nollywood” 106; Jedlowski, “Videos” 11). While such studies are important in understanding the global impact of Nigeria’s film industry, a focus on migration, diaspora, and transnationalism of largely English-language films often overshadows those being made in Nigerian languages. Ironically, according to 2011 National Film and Video Censor’s Board statistics, Nigerian-language films are currently about 75% of the productions being made in Nigeria (Bala, “2011” 18). While research is being done on Nigerian-language films, the theorizing about Nollywood most found often at international conferences and in international publications is most often of English-language productions. This is problematic for several reasons: 1) It ignores the majority of the films being made and consumed in Nigeria, as well as the local discourses surrounding them; 2) It overlooks the full history of the video film in Nigeria, as well as nuances and variations in the style and culture of Nigerian-language film industries; 3) It risks missing the way that Nigerian-language films are also crossing borders and appealing to transnational audiences. Such oversight creates gaping holes in the research used to theorize the video phenomenon in Nigeria. The first part of my article examines English-language hegemony in representations of Nollywood, and the second part demonstrates why the study of Nigerian-language films is important in theorizing Nollywood. While I touch on multiple Nigerian-language industries, the bulk of my examples and analysis come from the Hausa language industry which I have been studying since 2005.

Abstract: 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.