“Reveals in fascinating detail the wild popularity, controversies, and complaints provoked by this film form . . . shap[ing] the media landscape of Africa.” —Brian Larkin, Barnard College Global Nollywood considers this first truly African cinema beyond its Nigerian origins. In fifteen lively essays, this volume traces the engagement of the Nigerian video film industry with the African continent and the rest of the world. Topics such as Nollywood as a theoretical construct, the development of a new, critical film language, and Nollywood’s transformation outside of Nigeria reveal the broader implications of this film form as it travels and develops. Highlighting controversies surrounding commodification, globalization, and the development of the film industry on a wider scale, Global Nollywood gives sustained attention to Nollywood as a uniquely African cultural production. “Offers original material with respect to the transnational presence of Nollywood.” ?Moradewun Adejunmobi, University of California, Davis “Unveils a fascinating variety of the ways in which Nollywood cinema is viewed and interpreted.” ?Research in African Literatures “Delightfully entertaining yet appropriately erudite. . . . A welcome addition to the fields of film, media, African, and cultural studies.” —Cinema Journal “Highly recommended.” ?Choice “[T]he cumulative effect of [these] studies is to provide invaluable information for those wishing to keep up with where African cinema is today.” ?Journal of African History “Global Nollywood represents the most up-to-date research on Nollywood as a transnational cultural practice and is a must-read for scholars and students of African screen media.” —African Studies Review “Ground-breaking. . . . It proves that, in spite of appearing to be a niche market, Nollywood . . . can no longer be excluded from the canon of African cinema in the field of film studies.” ?African Affairs

This volume brings together international scholars to engage in the question of how film has represented a figure that for many is simply labelled ‘prostitute’. The prostitute is one of the most enduring female figures. She has global historical resonance and stories, images and narratives surrounding her, and her experiences, circulate transnationally. As this book will explore, the broad term prostitute can cover a variety of experiences and representations that are both repressive and also have the potential to empower women and disrupt cultural expectations. The contributors aim to consider how frequently 19th-century narratives of female prostitution—hence the label ‘fallen women’—are still recycled in contemporary visual contexts, and to understand how widespread, and in what contexts, the destigmatization of female sex work is underway on screen.

With extraordinary transnational and transdisciplinary range, World Literature, Transnational Cinema, and Global Media comprehensively explores the genealogies, vocabularies, and concepts orienting the fields within literature, cinema, and media studies. Orchestrating a layered conversation between arts, disciplines, and media, Stam argues for their "mutual embeddedness" and their shared "in-between" territories. Rather than merely adding to the existing scholarship, the book builds a relational framework through the connectivities within literature, cinema, music, and media that opens up analysis to new categories and concepts, while crossing spatial, temporal, theoretical, disciplinary, and mediatic borders. The book also questions an array of hierarchies: literature over cinema; source novel over adaptation; feature film over documentary; erudite over vernacular culture; Western modernisms over "peripheral" modernisms; classical over popular music; written poetry over sung poetry, and so forth. The book is structured around the concept of the "commons," forming a strong thread which links various struggles against "enclosures" of all kinds, with emphasis on natural, indigenous, cultural, creative, digital, and the transdisciplinary commons. World Literature, Transnational Cinema, and Global Media is ideal to further the theoretical discussion for those undergraduate and graduate departments in cinema studies, media studies, arts and art history, communications, journalism, and new digital media programs at all levels.

Nollywood is often portrayed by the popular press as an unruly industry, with mysteriously fast and cheap production and shadowy distribution networks. In the first overview of Nigeria's burgeoning video film industry, Jade L. Miller reveals that this portrayal is over-simplistic and often untrue. Investigating Nollywood's complete global production and distribution chain, Nollywood Central presents a full portrait of the Nollywood industry as both highly organised and strategically structured. In doing so, it interrogates the position and rise of new cultural industry hubs, demonstrating how a creative industry can emerge, be sustainable and circulate globally even though it exists outside of formal global networks and government-supported infrastructure. Deepening understanding of this prolific industry while at the same time contributing to debates surrounding global flows of culture, this is a critical resource for students and scholars of Media and Communication Studies, Film Studies, Television Studies and African Studies.

Rethinking Genre in Contemporary Global Cinema offers a unique, wide-ranging exploration of the intersection between traditional modes of film production and new, transitional/transnational approaches to film genre and related discourses in a contemporary, global context. This volume’s content—the films, genres, and movements explored, as well as methodologies used in their analysis—is diverse and, crucially, up-to-date with contemporary film-making practice and theory. Significantly, the collection extends existing scholarly discourse on film genre beyond its historical bias towards a predominant focus on Hollywood cinema, on the one hand, and a tendency to treat “other” national cinemas in isolation and/or as distinct systems of production, on the other. In view of the ever-increasing globalisation and transnational mediation of film texts and screen media and culture worldwide, the book recognises the need for film genre studies and film genre criticism to cast a broader, indeed global, scope. The collection thus rethinks genre cinema as a transitional, cross-cultural, and increasingly transnational, global paradigm of film-making in diverse contexts.

This book gives a panoramic view of the rise and growth of Nollywood, Nigeria’s movie and home video entertainment industry, into the second largest and most prolific movie-producing industry in the world. It offers an analysis of Nollywood’s influence as a local and global cultural force. Scholars from Africa, the African Diaspora and beyond examine the factors that have shaped Nollywood’s unique story-telling, production, and distribution system. The volume shows how internal and external economic, social, cultural and technological changes intersect to define Nollywood’s film-making and entertainment ethos. It is grounded in sound theoretical perspectives that help readers understand the texts and subtexts of the industry’s emergence, transformation, and impact. The range of subjects covered span Nollywood’s historical roots in Nigeria pre-colonial traveling/community theatre to colonial era film-making, and its contemporary spin-offs and inspired cousins across Africa and in Europe. It illuminates the interface of artistic, business, cultural and technological innovation and creativity at the heart of Africa’s local and global pop culture explosion.

World Cinema: A Critical Introduction is a comprehensive yet accessible guide to film industries across the globe. From the 1980s onwards, new technologies and increased globalization have radically altered the landscape in which films are distributed and exhibited. Films are made from the large-scale industries of India, Hollywood, and Asia, to the small productions in Bhutan and Morocco. They are seen in multiplexes, palatial art cinemas in Cannes, traveling theatres in rural India, and on millions of hand-held mobile screens. Authors Deshpande and Mazaj have developed a method of charting this new world cinema that makes room for divergent perspectives, traditions, and positions, while also revealing their interconnectedness and relationships of meaning. In doing so, they bring together a broad range of issues and examples—theoretical concepts, viewing and production practices, film festivals, large industries such as Nollywood and Bollywood, and smaller and emerging film cultures—into a systemic yet flexible map of world cinema. The multi-layered approach of this book aims to do justice to the depth, dynamism, and complexity of the phenomenon of world cinema. For students looking to films outside of their immediate context, this book offers a blueprint that will enable them to transform a casual encounter with a film into a systematic inquiry into world cinema.