CFP: Special Issue of Black Camera on Nollywood as a New Archive of Africa’s Worldliness
The cinema journal Black Camera invites submissions for a special
issue, or a section of a future issue, that will investigate
Nollywood, the Nigerian commercial movie industry, as a new archive of Africa’s worldliness. Inspired by the work of Achille Mbembe, this issue seeks to understand Nollywood as an everyday practice “through which Africans manage to recognize and maintain with the world an unprecedented familiarity” (Mbembe 2002). Nollywood’s significance, then, involves not only its staggering productivity and commercial success, but also encompasses its implicit challenge to dominant narratives that represent Africa as absolutely other or as defined by an essential difference.
We invite papers that put Nollywood in contact with current debates in film theory and world cinema studies, or that place Nollywood beside other transnational film and media industries so as to highlight its singularity and make visible a more variegated and complicated cultural ecology of globalization. We also welcome contributions that seek to understand Nollywood within the context of recent structural, technological, and ideological transformations associated with globalization and late capitalism and that explore Nollywood as shaped by its multiple circuits of consumption and production and by the global processes it participates in. We are interested in papers that attend to the aesthetics, stylistics, and imaginaries of Nollywood movies, with particular focus on the global popular and other discourses as reimagined and remixed by Nollywood.
Possible essay topics include, but are not limited to, the following:
Nollywood as a minor transnational practice; Nollywood and regional media flows in West Africa; affiliations between Nollywood and Hollywood, Bollywood or other commercial industries; Nollywood and the African diaspora; the transnational flow of Nollywood aesthetics; the New Nollywood; Nollywood and the “Worlding” of Africa; the Afropolis and Nollywood; video technology and Nollywood; Nollywood and transnational screening circuits; Nollywood co-productions; Nollywood in South Africa; Nollywood in East Africa; cosmopolitan subjectivities and Nollywood; Nollywood and the governmentalities of neo-liberalism; the uneasy interaction of Nollywood and international film festivals.
In addition to essays, interviews and commentaries will be considered.
Essays should be 6,000-10,000 words, interviews 6,000 words, and commentaries 1,000-2,000 words.
Please submit completed essays, a 100-word abstract, a fifty-word
biography, and a CV by September 15th, 2012. Submissions should
conform to the most recent edition of the Chicago Manual of Style.
Please see the Black Camera website for journal-specific guidelines:
http://www.indiana.edu/~blackcam/call/#guidelines
Direct all questions, correspondence, and submissions to guest editor Carmela Garritano (University of St. Thomas) at
cjgarritano@stthomas.edu.
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