LAGOS NEVER SPOILS: the AESTHETICS, AFFECT, and POLITICS of the CITY in NIGERIAN SCREEN MEDIA by Connor O'neill Ryan a DISSERT
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LAGOS NEVER SPOILS: THE AESTHETICS, AFFECT, AND POLITICS OF THE CITY IN NIGERIAN SCREEN MEDIA By Connor O’Neill Ryan A DISSERTATION Submitted to Michigan State University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of English – Doctor of Philosophy 2015 ABSTRACT LAGOS NEVER SPOILS: THE AESTHETICS, AFFECT, AND POLITICS OF THE CITY IN NIGERIAN SCREEN MEDIA By Connor O’Neill Ryan Studies of cinema and urban modernity in Europe and America typically foreground movement, vision, and sensation as the categories of correlation between cinema and the city. Lagos Never Spoils: The Aesthetics, Affect, and Politics of the City in Nigerian Cinema, argues that in postcolonial African cities, often marked by physical disjuncture and material breakdown, urbanism itself is constituted to a greater degree by kinetic mediascapes. It contends that Nollywood does not simply reflect conditions of life in Lagos, but actively shapes the conditions for various urban subjectivities to emerge and transform. Urban crime films adopt melodramatic conventions to depict a city of extreme disparities, while comedies position the rural migrant as the object of metropolitan laughter, and sophisticated blockbusters acclimate viewers to “cool” lifestyle consumerism. Conversely, by bringing attention to the material circuits underlying the production of film and related media in Lagos, this study joins analysis of material culture with that of subjectivity and embodiment. This approach illuminates the various ways that Nollywood exists owing, in large part, to the urban milieu of Lagos and, conversely, that the city's image springs from the imagination of its popular cinema. Lagos Never Spoils sets itself within critical discussions of the importance of African art and culture at a time when the continent is viewed by outsiders as increasingly superfluous to contemporary notions of the global. Sarah Nuttall and Achille Mbembe's ambitious efforts to uncover the worldliness of contemporary African cities subtend my argument that Nollywood is one of many everyday practices through which Lagosians situate themselves within the world at large, and shape the image of the world from a popular, urban, and uniquely Nigerian vantage point. To this end, my research responds to recent critical studies of postcolonial cities, including Filip de Boeck's theorization of the visible and invisible realms of Kinshasa, Sasha Newell's study of performativity and street style in Abidjan, and Ravi Sundaram's notion of media urbanism in Delhi. This dissertation contributes by identifying the way film images, genres, and tropes shape the popular urban imaginary, and demand a recognition of the aesthetic, affective and political function of cinema in postcolonial African cities. Copyright by CONNOR O’NEILL RYAN 2015 TABLE OF CONTENTS Introduction: Nigerian Screen Media: An Archive of the City of Lagos 1 The City as an Aesthetic Field 3 Nigerian Screen Media 6 Lagos: The Fringe or the New Frontier of Global Capitalism? 9 Structure of the Dissertation 14 Chapter 1: Oil Wealth and Urban Modernity in Early Nigerian Cinema 18 The State and Policital Cinema 22 The Spectacle of the State and the State-Sponsored Film Industry 27 The Idea of Nigerian Cinema 35 Space of Exhibition, Location of Culture 41 Oil Wealth and the Fantasy of Urban Modernity 54 Conclusion 77 Chapter 2: Crime Dramas, Urban Crisis, and Nollywood’s Melodramatic Imagination 80 Theorizing the Structural Adjustment of City Life 82 “City Life” and Nollywood’s Melodramatic Imagination 87 Interrogating the Notion of the Cinematic City 94 Early Nollywood Crime Dramas 99 Coming of Age in the Time of Urban Crisis in Owo Blow and Rattlesnake 113 Chapter 3: “You Don’t Know Lagos:” Comedy and the Performance of Urban Subjectivity 124 Remarks on Comedy 125 Performance in Urban Theory 128 Coming to the City 137 Tendentious Humor Surrounding “Big Girls” 150 Conclusion 158 Chapter 4: New Nollywood: The Rise of Nollywood’s Metropolitan New Style 160 Trends of Segmentation 163 Metropolitan Audiences and Multiplex Cinemas 170 Producing the New Image 179 “Advertised Modernity” 190 Conclusion 195 WORKS CITED 198 v Introduction: Nigerian Screen Media: An Archive of the City of Lagos This dissertation examines Nigeria's film industry against the backdrop of Lagos, the region’s largest metropolis, and interrogates the aesthetic, affective and political implications of globalization for Nigerian urbanism. Studies of cinema and urban modernity in Europe and America have typically examined the correlation of movement, vision and sensation. I argue that in postcolonial African cities, often marked by physical disjuncture and material breakdown, urbanism itself is experienced to a large degree through the city’s kinetic mediascapes. I contend that Nollywood, Nigeria’s commercial film industry, does not simply reflect conditions of life in Lagos, but actively shapes the conditions for various urban subjectivities to emerge and transform. Urban crime films adopt melodramatic conventions to depict a city of extreme disparities, while comedies position the rural migrant as the object of metropolitan laughter, and a new brand of sophisticated blockbusters accustom viewers to “cool” lifestyle consumerism. Nollywood’s power to shape urban life in Nigeria stems in part from its ability, unmatched by any other popular cultural form, to produce images of the city that, in turn, form the basis of an collective urban imaginary. It also stems from the industry’s physical presence within Lagos, its embeddedness within the city’s material circuits of cultural production and popular economic activity. By bringing attention to the material circuits underlying the production of film and related media in Lagos, my inquiry joins analysis of material culture with that of aesthetics and subjectivity. Lagos Never Spoils sets itself within critical discussions of the importance of African art and culture at a time when the continent is viewed by outsiders as increasingly extraneous to contemporary notions of the global. In international entertainment and news media Africa is 1 evoked as a sign of perennial and unmitigated poverty, crisis, and violence. This must be distinguished from Africa's historical role in Western discourse as a placeholder for alterity, cultural difference, and mysterious otherness. In a globalized world constructed by dominant, often Western, representations of worldliness, to be African no longer means being other, it is to be nothing, to not be at all (Mbembe 2001, p. 4). We might say that if the global social order is structured so that each part has its place, then many Africans, including a growing mass of urban poor, know what it means to live as the part with no part, those with no clear “place-in-the- world,” to borrow Ferguson’s phrase (2008). This ideological erasure of Africa is belied by the films and videos through which Africans actively set out "to write the world from Africa [and] to write Africa into the world, or as a fragment thereof" (Nuttall and Mbembe 2004, p. 348). This is especially true of popular Nigerian screen media, which attests to the embeddedness of African selves in the world while also re-envisioning the world from an African vantage point. Since the earliest studies of video film, critics have noted the mutual entanglement of Nollywood and Lagos. They reveal video films to be a historically urban development, one that arose from the social milieu of the city and reflects the city in their narratives and images (Adesokan 2004, Haynes 2007, Oha 2000, Okome 1997; 2003). Jonathan Haynes’s seminal essay “Nollywood in Lagos, Lagos in Nollywood Films” is most notable for the degree to which it illustrates, in both material and textual terms, how the city and the industry are mutually constitutive. The faces of iconic actors adorn film posters, billboards, public transportation, newspapers, and soft-sell magazines. The city's airwaves buzz with news of the latest movie premiers just as the city's cyberspaces—Twitter, Facebook, and especially Blackberry Messenger—offer fans intimate and instantaneous social interaction with other fans and some of their favorite Nollywood celebrities. Every neighborhood has a shop with an offering of 2 Nollywood movies. One finds these videos sold on almost every side street where the majority of daily commerce takes place. The movies play on TV screens in waiting rooms, fast food restaurants, bus stops and viewing parlors throughout Lagos. The business of financing, reproducing, packaging, and distributing video films has taken root in Idumota and Alaba markets, two of the city's main economic hubs. The offices of producers, postproduction facilities, and acting schools that crowd Surulere give the neighborhood the feel of being at the center of the film industry. It is not unusual to come across a crew shooting on location in Lekki, where ultramodern resident developments provide the mise-en-scene for narratives about the good life in the big city. In short, we must see Nollywood as historically and materially situated within the city of Lagos. Conversely speaking, video films conjure dimensions of urban life not immediately perceptible on the surface of things. We might say that Nollywood mediates the city in the sense that it produces a whole repertory of images, stories, styles and sentiments with which audiences can construct a collective imaginary of urban modernity. As Jonathan Haynes writes, "the films are a means for Nigerians to come to terms--visually, dramatically, emotionally, morally, socially, politically, and spiritually--with the city and everything it embodies" ("Nollywood in Lagos" 133). This urban imaginary exists at the intersection of the city's physical spaces, social relations and aesthetic dimensions. The City as an Aesthetic Field Many of the fundamental premises of this dissertation draw upon Sarah Nuttall and Achille Mbembe's important collection of essays on Johannesburg as the premier modern African metropolis. I note above that the study of Nollywood emphasizes the associations 3 between the popular and the everyday, following the consensus formed by Karin Barber, Stephanie Newell, Jonathan Haynes and Onookome Okome.