Special Issue of Black Camera on Nollywood as a New Archive of Africa’s Worldliness

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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.

Carmela Garritano
Department of English
University of St. Thomas
2115 Summit Avenue
St. Paul, MN 55105
651.962.5607
cjgarritano@stthomas.edu

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