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Indirect Subjects Matthew H. Brown

Indirect Subjects By Matthew H. Brown

Indirect Subjects by Matthew H. Brown


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Summary

Matthew H. Brown explores the connections between Nigeria's booming film industry, state television, and colonial legacies that together involve spectators in global capitalism while denying them its privileges.

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Indirect Subjects Summary

Indirect Subjects: Nollywood's Local Address by Matthew H. Brown

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.

Indirect Subjects 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 *

About Matthew H. Brown

Matthew H. Brown is Assistant Professor of African Cultural Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments vii
Introduction: Indirect Subjectivities and Periliberalism 1
Part I.
1. Subjects of Indirect Rule: Nigeria, Cinema, and Liberal Empire 33
2. Emergency of the State: Television, Pedagogical Imperatives, and The Village Headmaster 66
Part II.
3. No Romance without Finance: Feminine Melodrama, Soap Opera, and the Male Breadwinner Ideal 99
4. Breadlosers: Masculine Melodrama, Money Magic, and the Moral Occult Economy 150
5. Specters of Sovereignty: Epic, Gothic, and the Ruins of a Past That Never Was 185
6. What's Wrong with 419?: Comedy, Corruption, and Conspiratorial Mirrors 221
Conclusion: Fantasies of Integration or Fantasies of Sovereignty 263
Notes 271
Filmography 285
Bibliography 289
Index 303

Additional information

CIN1478014199VG
9781478014195
1478014199
Indirect Subjects: Nollywood's Local Address by Matthew H. Brown
Used - Very Good
Paperback
Duke University Press
2021-11-05
328
N/A
Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary.
This is a used book - there is no escaping the fact it has been read by someone else and it will show signs of wear and previous use. Overall we expect it to be in very good condition, but if you are not entirely satisfied please get in touch with us

Customer Reviews - Indirect Subjects