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Indirect Subjects
Nollywood's Local Address
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Book Presentation:
In Indirect Subjects, Matthew H. Brown analyzes the content of the prolific Nigerian film industry's mostly direct-to-video movies alongside local practices of production and circulation to show how screen media play spatial roles in global power relations. Scrutinizing the deep structural and aesthetic relationship between Nollywood, as the industry is known, and Nigerian state television, Brown tracks how several Nollywood films, in ways similar to both state television programs and colonial cinema productions, invite local spectators to experience liberal capitalism not only as a form of exploitation but as a set of expectations about the future. This mode of address, which Brown refers to as “periliberalism,” sustains global power imbalances by locating viewers within liberalism but distancing them from its processes and benefits. Locating the wellspring of this hypocrisy in the British Empire's practice of indirect rule, Brown contends that culture industries like Nollywood can sustain capitalism by isolating ordinary African people, whose labor and consumption fuel it, from its exclusive privileges.
About the Author:
Matthew H. Brown is Assistant Professor of African Cultural Studies at the University of Wisconsin–Madison.
Press Reviews:
"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
"Matthew H. Brown’s Indirect Subjects is stellar in so many ways—its contribution to Nollywood studies, its compelling conceptual framework, its intervention into broader studies about neoliberalism and media studies, and the way it models the most rigorous of close readings of films. ... It is very much to Brown’s credit that he not only provides his readers with such a rigorous and in-depth analysis of the Nollywood film industry, but that he also invites us to think more broadly about the role of media in our globalized world and how we all, as indirect subjects, navigate the various obstacles to flourishing that we are faced with on a daily basis."
―Lindsey B. Green-Simms, Journal of the African Literature Association
See the publisher website: Duke University Press
> On a related topic:
Global Nollywood (2013)
The Transnational Dimensions of an African Video Film Industry
Dir. Matthias Krings and Onookome Okome
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