Kamahra Ewing: Nollywood in the Global South, Kartoniert / Broschiert

Klappentext

In Brazil, post--affirmative action policies address anti-Black racism by empowering the Black population---a sociopolitical space where Nigerian cultural productions thrive. Kamahra Ewing's Nollywood in the Global South offers a groundbreaking intervention into transnational media studies by shifting the analytical focus from traditional Anglophone contexts to the Lusophone diaspora. This book examines how Nigerian films circulate and how popular media becomes an urgent site where Blackness is interpreted, contested, and reimagined across distinct racial histories.

Drawing on interviews, focus groups, and reception studies among mostly Afro-Brazilian and Nigerian immigrant audiences, Ewing excavates hidden circuits of cultural exchange. Nollywood provides a sense of "Afro-escapism"---a form of psychic therapy that creates an all-Black, Nigerian-centered world. For both displaced Nigerians and Afro-Brazilians, these films offer a psychological reconnection to an African homeland from which they were either historically severed or are currently absent. Audiences deeply resonate with the Nigerian casts, Yoruba and Christian cosmologies, and African clothing, which serve as profound sites of identification for Afro-Brazilians sharing a parallel struggle for recognition.

Exploring Nollywood's cultural presence challenges Brazil's myth of "racial democracy." While Brazilian society has long propagated a false narrative of racial harmony, Nollywood offers a powerful counter-perspective, providing an authentic image of Africa undiluted by domestic ideologies of racial whitening (branqueamento). For the diaspora, Nollywood delivers a visual homeland culture packaged for the comfort of domestic and community spaces.