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.

Discourse-based approaches to studying organizations have grown in significance over the last 25 years. This accessible and insightful book exemplifies how to use a discursive approach to study organizations. By drawing on her own empirical research, Cynthia Hardy aligns key theoretical assumptions with a range of case studies to demonstrate the value and adaptability of a discursive approach.

This book introduces the emerging, but still little-known, phenomenon of Nollywood-inspired filmmaking by African migrants in Europe. Using the unique example of a performance ethnographic case study in Switzerland, it shows how members of the African diaspora represent themselves through audio-visual media and what influence the post-colonial images of the Nigerian video film industry have on their image production. Drawing on Jean Rouch’s Shared Anthropology and the methods of Performance Ethnography, this book provides an in-depth look at the complexity of migrants’ everyday lives and showcases Nollywood-inspired transnational filmmaking practices. In its refreshing and accessible writing style, it also illustrates the performance ethnographic research process, highlights the pitfalls and challenges of collaborative film projects, and critically engages with fundamental questions of social research in decolonial settings.

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.

Communication is changing rapidly around the world, particularly in Africa, where citizens are embracing digital technologies not only to improve not only interpersonal communication but also the state of their financial well-being. This book investigates these transformations in Nigeria’s booming communication industry. The book traces communications in Nigeria back to pre-colonial indigenous communications, through the development of telecommunication, broadcasting networks, the press, the Nigerian film industry (‘Nollywood’) and on to the digital era. At a time when Western voices still dominate the academic literature on communication in Africa, this book is noteworthy in drawing almost exclusively on the expertise of Nigerian-based authors, critiquing the discipline from their own lens and providing an important contribution to the decolonisation of communication studies. The authors provide a holistic analysis of the sector, encompassing print journalism, broadcast journalism, public relations, advertising, film, development communication, organisational communication and strategic communication. Analysis of the role of digital technologies is woven throughout the book, concluding with a final section theorising the future of communication studies in Nigeria in the light of the digital media revolution. Robust in its theoretical and methodological underpinnings, this book will be an important reference for researchers of media and communication studies, and those working on Africa specifically.

Linguistic, Literary, and Cultural Diversity in a Global Perspective is a captivating collection of research articles. This volume explores the intricate connections between language, culture, and identity across the globe. An agenda-setting introduction by the editors and essays by Liliana Sikorska and Shin-ichi Morimoto establish the scope and stakes of the book as a whole. Chapters by Eri Ohashi, Ruth Karachi Benson Oji, Liliane Hodieb, Zheng Yang, Zhifang Li, and Wanwarang Softic investigate cultural diversity in film. Chapters by Mai Hussein, Wang Chutong, and Darja Zorc Maver offer insights into the linguistic and literary creativity of diasporic and immigrant communities, and a new global context for German literature is developed in chapters by Ekaterina Riabykh, Muharrem Kaplan, and Tomás Espino Barrera. Appealing to scholars, researchers, and students, this interdisciplinary work sheds light on the complexities of our globalized world. Linguistic, Literary, and Cultural Diversity in a Global Perspective is a valuable addition to the field, offering fresh perspectives on language, culture, and identity.

This book eulogises a personality that has constructed a formidable scholarly and personal legacy that future generations of legal practitioners and socio-legal scholars in Africa should look to for guidance and inspiration. Divided into three parts, the book deals with a longstanding legal practice and scholarship on the role of international law and institutions. Additionally, the book discussed roles of an African scholar and practitioner to advance socio-economic and cultural rights across the continent, through contextualised, progressive adjudication and from a gendered perspective. Finally, the book examined the importance of early-childhood education and legal education alike, the role of the courts in redressing these concerns and the need for greater inclusion of Afro and queer-sensitive pedagogies and perspectives. Contributors to the book address the role of schools in redressing systemic marginalisation—including stigmatisation based on disability—and efforts to translate their rights as prescribed in national constitutions and international legal instruments. The methodology encompasses a TWAIL approach and the call to revisit orthodox approaches to legal scholarship.