Postcolonial Text 

About: Postcolonial Text is an academic journal. The journal publishes majorly in the area(s): Narrative & Identity (social science). It has an ISSN identifier of 1705-9100. Over the lifetime, 337 publications have been published receiving 1463 citations.

Nollywood: Spectatorship, Audience and the Sites of Consumption

Abstract: Nollywood on the Rise Nollywood, the cinematic phenomenon that was inaugurated in Lagos, has known an unprecedented measure of success in its homeland, Nigeria. It is beginning to make its mark outside this home turf. Since the year 2000, it has gone from one international Film Festival to the other, and the gain it has made in these years has been consistent. In 2002, this author was invited to the second edition of the Festival of African and Caribbean Film, which was held in Barbados. Tunde Kelani, the veteran camera man and producer, who is also one of the icons of Nollywood, was also invited to present one of his video films, Thunderbolt. Jane Bryce, one of the organizers of this Festival, was clearly excited to formally introduce Nollywood to the audience of the island nation of Barbados for the first time. Bryce’s introduction of Nollywood to this audience rephrased what is now “common talk” in the scholarship of the video film to date. It did so from a critical and serious manner, pointing not only to the uniqueness of this medium in the visual culture of Africa but also in the world cinematic expression as a whole. Bryce’s take on Nollywood as an art and industry shows how and why Nollywood compels attention from those outside its field of operation and cultural vision, not that the industry cares for any attention from the outside. In fact, one of the characteristics that marks Nollywood as an autonomous local cinematic expression is that it looks inward and not outward, and one can accurately argue that it does so in all aspects of the production and organization of its operation. Bryce also made the point about the difference between Nollywood and the Francophone cinema of French West Africa that was the touch-bearer of what was known as the African cinema before the emergence of Nollywood. Indeed, as Bryce notes, Nollywood does not “have the opportunities for training and production financing” of Francophone cinema and does not “go to the biennial Pan-African Film Festival (FESPACO) in Burkina Faso.” Yet, it is remarkable in very radical ways. As a result of this success, Nollywood has been able to circumvent the problems that African Francophone filmmakers whine about and has done so successfully in the last twenty years or so. It has moved the discourse of cinematic representation away from the blame game that is obvious and somewhat compellingly

Glocal Routes in British Asian Drama: Between Adaptation and Tradaptation

Abstract: In the context of British Asian theatre and the search for a diasporic theatre aesthetics the practice of adaptation has emerged as a recurring feature. Over the last decades, British Asian theatre has sought to create a language of the theatre that can reflect the cultural heritage of Asians in Britain; this search has taken different directions testified also by the plurality of voices that today make up British Asian theatre and has responded to the need to challenge the conceptual binary of British and Asian, aiming to affirm South Asian culture on the stage as an integral part of British culture. Adaptation also plays a role in highlighting the dialectic between local and the global particularly in those cases where regions of Britain such as the Northwest of England can be recreated on stage as South Asian British cultural spaces. After tracing Tara Arts’s pioneering journey from adaptation to tradaptation, we will examine two British Asian plays that are adaptations of English plays which belong to a tradition of playwriting located in the social and cultural life of the Northwest of England and which are given a new life or an afterlife in translations.

Nigerian Video Film as Minor Transnational Practice

Abstract: This paper responds to the fears expressed by some observers that globalization will result in a growing standardization of cultural production around the world with trends being dictated from the global North and with the disappearance of diverse forms of cultural production especially in the poorer regions of the world. Using Nigerian video film as an example of minor transnational cultural production, this paper makes the argument that a distinct form of cultural productivity can still emanate from the margins of the official global economy if certain conditions are met. These include the availability of an accessible and affordable technology of production and reproduction, a commercial basis for production and distribution, responsiveness to local publics, and the existence of regional markets disconnected to some extent from the official global economy, and controlled by small time investors whose main sphere of operation is outside the official global economy.

The Neo-Primitivist Turn: Critical Refletions on Alterity, Culture, and Modernity

Abstract: In recent years the concept of 'the primitive' has been the subject of strong criticism; it has been examined, unpacked, and shown to signify little more than a construction or projection necessary for establishing the modernity of the West. The term 'primitive' continues, however, to appear in contemporary critical and cultural discourse, begging the question: Why does primitivism keep reappearing even after it has been uncovered as a modern myth? In The Neo-primitivist Turn, Victor Li argues that this contentious term was never completely banished and that it has in fact reappeared under new theoretical guises. An idealized conception of 'the primitive,' he contends, has come to function as the ultimate sign of alterity. Li focuses on the works of theorists like Jean Baudrillard, Jean-Francois Lyotard, Marianna Torgovnick, Marshall Sahlins, and Jurgen Habermas in order to demonstrate that primitivism continues to be a powerful presence even in those works normally regarded as critical of the concept. Providing close readings of the ways in which the premodern or primitive is strategically deployed in contemporary critical writings, Li's interdisciplinary study is a timely and forceful intervention into current debates on the politics and ethics of otherness, the problems of cultural relativism, and the vicissitudes of modernity.

Postcolonial Haunting: Anxiety, Affect, and the Situated Encounter

Abstract: Postcolonial theory has relied, to a great extent, upon the idea of haunting in order to bring awareness of colonial history to the present while revising the conception of the contemporary nation and cultural relations Hauntings of the colonial frequently turn on what is undoubtedly a well-intended desire to relate to the Other, the silenced, and the hidden, but also reveal a more problematic inability to situate resistance, and mobilize memory for such purposes, in relation to ever-increasing transnational conditions that often deny or obfuscate forms of situated or positioned resistance In this article, I examine various seminal instances of the turn to the affective charge of haunting found in postcolonial studies These instances exemplify a concern with locating an affective dimension in the encounter with the colonial past Such an affective charge is treated as the nexus of a transformational hauntingThis focus on the production of affect and anxiety in postcolonial models of haunting, I will suggest, discloses a postcolonial anxiety about the possibility of mapping or situating resistance under conditions of transnational empire and globalized incarnations of imperialism