When the Nigerian video film industry became “Nollywood”: Naming, branding and the videos’ transnational mobility

While conducting my research on the Nigerian video industry over the past few years, I often had the impression to fi nd myself in front of an object of study that implicitly resisted defi nition. While, on the one hand, one could say that all research object challenges and resists the researcher’s attempt to classify and encapsulate it in theoretically coherent discourses, in the case of the Nigerian video industry I had the feeling that discursive practices were playing a particular role. Throughout my research I in fact observed a particular tension between the way the video industry was discussed and represented, both locally and internationally, and the way the industry itself was evolving and transforming over time. In this article, I analyze this dynamic by looking at the genealogy of the name “Nollywood” and by analyzing the role that this term has played in articulating the tension between discourses and practices within the industry’s context. My intention is to understand how the discourse about the video industry that developed around the use of the term “Nollywood” has progressively polarized diverging tendencies already existing within the industry and within the Nigerian public sphere. On one side, we can observe a tendency toward internationalization and globalization, which responded positively to the introduction of the word “Nollywood” and which participated in transforming it into a self-sufficient commercial brand. On the other, we can observe a tendency which points its attention toward the internal differentiation of the video industry and toward the specifi city of the Nigerian media environment. As I will argue in this article, these two opposite poles have created a specifi c fi eld of tension within which most “Nollywood” practitioners had to position (explicitly or implicitly) their work. These two opposite discursive constructions have thus importantly influenced the evolution of the video industry by providing both criticism of the status quo of the industry, and new models for future transformations.