Decolonizing African Cinema in the Age of Media Streaming: Conference in Honor of Onookome Okome

deadline for submissions: 
March 30, 2024
full name / name of organization: 
Stephen Ogheneruro Okpadah/ University of Warwick

CfP: Decolonizing African Cinema in the Age of Media Streaming: Conference in Honor of Onookome Okome

Date: May 22–24, 2024

Venue: University of Abuja, Nigeria

Abstract Deadline: March 30, 2024

Feedback: April 15, 2024

Registration: May 1 – 21, 2024

Keynote Speaker: Professor Sheila Petty, Faculty of Media, Art, and Performance,University of Regina, Regina, Canada

First Lead Paper Presenters: Dr. Peter Sylvanus Emaeyak, Department of Music, University of Nigeria, Nsukka.

Second Lead Paper Presenter: Dr Carmen McCain, School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London.

 

“New Nollywood” is now a significant part of the discursive items deployed in the field of Nollywood Studies. This term was coined and used for the first time at the “Nollywood in Africa, Africa in Nollywood” conference convened by Onookome Okome and Emevwo Biakolo on July 21-23, 2011. The conference took place at the School of Media and Communication, Pan-Atlantic University, Lagos, Nigeria. Many of the major scholars in the field of African cinema were at this conference, including Jonathan Haynes, Jane Bryce, and Frank N. Ukadike. This conference was just one in the series of conferences and workshops that Okome has been involved in since he convened the first workshop on Nollywood at the University of Bayreuth in 1999. Since 1999, he has been involved in many more workshops and conferences on the subject and has helped set up the Nollywood Studies Center at Pan-Atlantic University as well as the Nollywood and African Screen Studies Center at Kwara State University, Malete, Ilorin, Nigeria. These conferences and workshops produced serious intellectual interventions in the theory and practice of Nollywood films. Before the Bayreuth conference, there was just one major essay on Nollywood in an authoritative journal jointly published by Jonathan Haynes and Onookome Okome with the title “Evolving Popular Media: Video Film in Nigeria.” This work appeared in Research in African Literatures (29/3, 1997).

Since the Bayreuth workshop, a lot has happened in both the academy and industry, and the key figures who pioneered Nollywood in terms of film production and film criticism have maintained the course, preferring to deal with Nollywood on its own terms. Decolonial strategies have always been central to the production of and discourses around Nollywood. The pioneering efforts of Onookome Okome and Jonathan Haynes defined the character of what is now known as Old Nollywood and New Nollywood, with the latter being “a recent strategy by some Nigerian filmmakers to make films with higher budgets, to screen them in cinemas both in Nigeria and abroad, and to enter them in international film festivals” (53). They also defined the discursive trajectory that the discipline took in the years afterwards. The phrase “New Nollywood” is used to show the departure from the filmmaking practices of low budget films that were popular in the early days of the industry. Living in Bondage (1992-93) is a typical example of this category of Nollywood films. New Nollywood has since recalibrated film marketing strategies, viewing protocols, as well as the configuration of the audience of its products, moving away from the style of the low budget direct to CD and DVD films. New Nollywood filmmaking also created space for the international premiering of Nollywood films, taking advantage of content distribution on a global scale.  Advancements in cyberspace and digital culture helped in no small measure to propel the streaming of New Nollywood films across the globe. YouTube, Hulu, Disney+, and Netflix all broadened the transnational presence of Nigerian film.

Drawing on the work of Onookome Okome and Matthias Kring, Godwin Iretomiwa Simon foregrounds what he terms “formalized transnationalism” that is inherent to the circulatory mechanisms of this age of media streaming, which Nollywood keyed into barely twenty years after the industry released its first major film, Living in Bondage. Recent films such as Kunle Afolayan’s Anikulapo (2022) and Biyi Bandele’s Death and the King's Horseman (2022), an adaptation of Wole Soyinka’s play of the same title, have added a new dimension to filmmaking in Nollywood. Influenced by what Blake Morgan (2020) has called “The Netflix Effect,” Netflix has become a major determinant of what New Nollywood filmmakers produce and in the making of new audiences across the globe. These recent trends and developments have motivated important questions, and through this conference, we intend to answer some of the key ones like: what does this trend portend for the decolonization of African cinema in general and for Nollywood more specifically? How can Nollywood filmmakers stage “epistemic disobedience” (Mignolo 2013) while contending with the neo-coloniality of capitalist circulation and consumption in the age of media streaming? Is the concept of “global Nollywood,” for example, already feeding into the existing world-system in which peripherality is marked by cultural ambiguity? How are Nollywood filmmakers responding to the formalization/genericization of filmic narratives? How do they subvert this formalization/genericization in subtle or obvious ways? What are the conceptual frames or paradigms through which we can investigate cinema in the age of media- streaming? Can we understand the consumption practices of audiences through the frame of coloniality and decoloniality? What are the new formal elements being “naturalized” in Nollywood films today, and what are the implications for global circulation and reception? In what way(s) can the African scholar decolonize the African narrative in media-streaming platforms that operate with the logic of capitalist coloniality?

This conference will attend to these very important questions in the spirit of honoring Onookome Okome’s contributions to the field of Nollywood Studies. We, therefore, invite well-researched and insightful contributions from scholars who are interested in advancing studies on this popular African cinema. We are open to papers that are either theoretical in nature, analytical in nature, or even both. We are also interested in interdisciplinary approaches that might implicate literature, linguistics, music, eco-criticism, visual and applied arts, sociology, economics, minority studies, and other areas of the humanities or humanistic social sciences. Proposed papers can take up any theme or dimension of popular African cinema as long as they help us understand recent trends vis-à-vis the politics of global coloniality (as determined by film capitalism) and decoloniality. Accepted papers will not only be presented at the conference but will be provisionally accepted for a proposed book project.

Abstracts of not more than 300 words should be sent to: ookomeconference2024@gmail.com

For further information, please contact any of the organizers:

Oghenevwarho Ojakovo, California State University, Dominguez Hills, USA (oojakovo@campus.csudh.edu)

Stephen Ogheneruro Okpadah, University of Warwick, United Kingdom (stephen.okpadah@warwick.ac.uk)

Mathias Iroro Orhero, McGill University, Montreal, Canada (mathias.orhero@mcgill.ca); PT Faculty, Concordia University, Montreal, Canada.