Description
Book SynopsisMatthew H. Brown explores the connections between Nigeria's booming film industry, state television, and colonial legacies that together involve spectators in global capitalism while denying them its privileges.
Trade Review“
Indirect Subjects is an ambitious work providing an overview of film in Nigeria from its earliest days, through the height of state television to the rise of Nollywood. It also offers a rethinking of this history by examining the political, economic, and aesthetic logics that tie this history together. This is an insightful work for both scholars and students analyzing iconic films and television series in a new way. Doing so, it offers a new understanding of political aesthetics in Nigeria.” -- Brian Larkin, author of * Signal and Noise: Media, Infrastructure, and Urban Culture in Nigeria *
“Matthew H. Brown's
Indirect Subjects applies acuity and sophistication to Nollywood in ways that push the terms of debate beyond anything currently conceived. This is at once theoretically nuanced and historically informed, attentive to the dynamics of the industry as well as to the specific subject matter of the movies. In a word, a real gift offering to a field already dotted with sparkling scholarly gems.” -- Ato Quayson, author of * Oxford Street, Accra: City Life and the Itineraries of Transnationalism *
"[Indirect Subjects] provides a valuable and generative contribution to African media studies. ... Brown’s access to rare archival materials allows him to offer what is, perhaps, the most sustained investigation of the links between state television and video films to date."
-- Connor Ryan * African Studies Review *
"[
Indirect Subjects] adeptly explores the conjunctures and ruptures in the modalities of addressing the audience through different times and spaces in screen media history. ... This book makes a rich contribution to studies of the political economy of culture broadly and, more specifically, to the study of screen media in Nigeria by exposing the rifts and shifts in the neoliberal matrix that undergird it." -- Rosemary Oyinlola Popoola * Canadian Journal of African Studies *
Table of ContentsAcknowledgments vii
Introduction: Indirect Subjectivities and Periliberalism 1
Part I.
1. Subjects of Indirect Rule: Nigeria, Cinema, and Liberal Empire 33
2. Emergency of the State: Television, Pedagogical Imperatives, and
The Village Headmaster 66
Part II.
3. "No Romance without Finance": Feminine Melodrama, Soap Opera, and the Male Breadwinner Ideal 99
4. Breadlosers: Masculine Melodrama, Money Magic, and the Moral Occult Economy 150
5. Specters of Sovereignty: Epic, Gothic, and the Ruins of a Past That Never Was 185
6. "What's Wrong with 419"?: Comedy, Corruption, and Conspiratorial Mirrors 221
Conclusion: Fantasies of Integration or Fantasies of Sovereignty 263
Notes 271
Filmography 285
Bibliography 289
Index 303
