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WORK TITLE: African Appropriations
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NATIONALITY: German
http://www.socum.uni-mainz.de/personen/prof-dr-matthias-krings/?lang=en * http://uni-mainz.academia.edu/MatthiasKrings * http://blogs.lse.ac.uk/africaatlse/2015/11/13/book-review-african-appropriations-cultural-difference-mimesis-and-media-by-matthias-krings/ * http://www.iupress.indiana.edu/product_info.php?products_id=807517 * https://networks.h-net.org/node/7842/reviews/120066/marshall-krings-african-appropriations-cultural-difference-mimesis-and
RESEARCHER NOTES:
PERSONAL
Male.
EDUCATION:Johannes Gutenberg University of Mainz, M.A., 1998; Johann Wolfgang Goethe University of Frankfurt, Ph.D., 2002.
ADDRESS
CAREER
Professor and writer. Johann Wolfgang Goethe Frankfurt University, research associate, 1996-2002; Cologne University, research associate, 2003-05; Johannes Gutenberg University of Mainz, junior professor, 2005-11, professor 2011-.
WRITINGS
Published in periodicals, including Africa Today and Journal of African Cultural Studies.
SIDELIGHTS
Matthius Krings is a German professor and writer. He is a professor of anthropology and African popular culture at the Johannes Gutenberg University of Mainz. He has been teaching at the Johannes Gutenberg University since 2005, where he began as a junior professor. Krings was a research associate at Cologne University between 2003 and 2005 and at Johann Wolfgang Goethe Frankfurt University between 1996 and 2002.
Krings studied at the Johannes Gutenberg University of Mainz, where he received his M.A. in anthropology in 1998. He wrote his M.A. dissertation about the bori cult of spirit possession among the Hausa of Nigeria, which was based on a fourteen-month empirical study. Krings received his Ph.D. from the Johann Wolfgang Goethe University in Frankfurt in 2002. He wrote his Ph.D. dissertation about the natural resources in settlements of the Lake Chad area, with a focus on the community formation and the exploitation of those resources.
Krings’s research interests include popular culture in Africa with an emphasis on film and video, media ethnology, migration and diaspora research, anthropology of religion, anthropology of the body, West Africa (specifically Nigeria), and East Africa (specifically Tanzania). He has conducted field research in Africa. Krings is also interested in African cinema narrators and the remediation of foreign films.
Krings has written or edited several books, among them, Siedler am Tschadsee: Hausa-Migranten und die Aneignung lokaler Ressourcen im ländlichen Nigeria; Ethnologie im 21. Jahrhundert; Global Nollywood: The Transnational Dimensions of an African Video Film Industry; Medien, Erzählen, Gesellschaft: Transmediales Erzählen im Zeitalter der Medienkonvergenz; and African Appropriations: Cultural Difference, Mimesis, and Media.
Global Nollywood
Global Nollywood, which Krings coedited with Onookome Okome for the series “African Expressive Cultures,” takes a wide look at the purposes, directions, and responses to the film industry that arose out of Nigeria in the late 1990s. The book addresses the various production styles and approaches throughout Africa, the diversity in responses from different audiences around the world, as well as the needs that it serves of the many different audiences in Africa. The authors discuss the ways in which Nollywood films are interpreted and utilized and how this interpretation changes depending on the time and audience.
The book opens with an introduction to the historical and economical overview of Nollywood, in which the editors discuss the industry’s transnationalism. The first section of the book, “Mapping the Terrain,” takes a deeper look at the economics of Nollywood, specifically examining the impact of piracy on the industry. This section describes the ways in which Nollywood is received internationally by citing particular Nollywood films as well as specific audience studies.
The second section,”Transnational Nollywood,” looks at Jonathan Haynes’s and Sophie Samyn’s work on the international appropriation that has occurred within the industry. They specifically point to Nollywood films that were produced in Europe and the United States and study the ways in which these venues change or influence the industry.
“Nollywood and Its Audiences,” the third section, focuses on the audiences of Nollywood films. Audience responses from South Africa, Namibia, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Barbados, and Italy are examined. For South African youth, the films provide a source of nostalgic yearning for a traditional version of Africa, while for immigrants living in Europe, the films provide a means to stay in touch with the culture of their homeland.
The fourth and final section of the book, “Appropriations of Nollywood,” discusses the ways in which Nollywood films are edited to fit various audiences. Voice-overs are used to change the narration and plot of the film, while the Christian themes found in southern Nigerian films are edited and voiced-over to fit the Muslim audiences in northern Nigeria.
The book provides an in-depth look into the history and future of Nollywood, moving beyond clichés and generalizations about the industry. Ann Overbergh, in Research in African Literatures, commented that “the contributions examine several paths—theoretically, methodologically—that can be followed in order to expand Nollywood scholarship and help it evolve along with this fascinating and multifaceted industry.”
African Appropriations
African Appropriations surveys the ways in which African culture appropriates and adapts Western media to fit African society. Focusing on Nigeria and Tanzania, Krings explores these adaptations through the lenses of media anthropology and postcolonialism.
The book begins with two chapters that describe the history of African appropriations, concentrating on the history of spirit possession by European colonial spirits in West Africa and African Film, the 1960s photographic magazine. The book then goes on to examine examples of African film appropriations, including that of Titanic. The final sections of the book consider African cyber scammers’ relationships with African ways of interpreting Western culture as well as the positive representations of Osama bin Laden that have emerged following 9/11.
The themes of the book are presented through case studies that are connected yet function independently of one another. Krings explores themes such as the use of media interpretations as a way to borrow power and as a way to determine and define modernity within Africa. Jodie Marshall in H-Net: Humanities and Social Sciences Online described African Appropriations as “an engaging, readable, creative, and well-researched piece of scholarship.”
BIOCRIT
PERIODICALS
Africa, Saul Mahir, review of Global Nollywood: The Transnational Dimensions of an African Video Film Industry, 2015, p. 566.
Choice: Current Reviews for Academic Libraries, May, 2014, E.R. Baer, review of Global Nollywood, p. 1599; June, 2016, E.R. Baer, review of African Appropriations: Cultural Difference, Mimesis, and Media, p. 1509.
Research in African Literatures, summer, 2015, Ann Overbergh, review of Global Nollywood, p. 181.
ONLINE
Africa at LSE, http://blogs.lse.ac.uk (November 13, 2015), Harry Pettit, review of African Appropriations.
H-Net:Humanities and Social Sciences Online, https://networks.h-net.org (April, 2016), Jodie Marshall, review of African Appropriations.
Prof. Dr. Matthias Krings
Professur für Ethnologie und populäre Kultur Afrikas
Illustration
Thematische Schwerpunkte
Populäre Kultur, Medienethnologie, Religionsethnologie, Disability Studies
Regionale Schwerpunkte
Westafrika (insbesondere Nigeria), Ostafrika (insbesondere Tansania).
African Appropriations: Cultural Difference, Mimesis, and Media.
[Bildlink]
Matthias Krings: African Appropriations: Cultural Difference, Mimesis, and Media. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2015. ...
Ausstellung Always-on
[Bildlink]
Steffen Köhn und Matthias Krings: Always-on. Sehen und gesehen werden in einer vernetzten Welt. Ausstellung in der Schule des Sehens der JGU Mainz (11.12.2015 - 4.2.2016). ...
Bongo Media Worlds. Producing and Consuming Popular Culture in Dar es Salaam
[Bildlink]
Matthias Krings and Uta Reuster-Jahn (eds.): Bongo Media Worlds. Producing and Consuming Popular Culture in Dar es Salaam. Reihe: Mainzer Beiträge zur Afrikaforschung Band 34. Köln: Rüdiger Köppe Verlag, 2014. ...
Global Nollywood. The Transnational Dimensions of an African Video Film Industry.
[Bildlink]
Matthias Krings u. Onookome Okome (Hg.): Global Nollywood. The Transnational Dimensions of an African Video Film Industry. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2013.
...
Ethnologie im 21. Jahrhundert.
[Bildlink]
Thomas Bierschenk, Matthias Krings u. Carola Lentz (Hg.): Ethnologie im 21. Jahrhundert. Berlin: Reimer, 2013.
...
Medien - Erzählen - Gesellschaft. Transmediales Erzählen im Zeitalter der Medienkonvergenz.
[Bildlink]
Karl N. Renner, Dagmar v. Hoff u. Matthias Krings (Hg.): Medien - Erzählen - Gesellschaft. Transmediales Erzählen im Zeitalter der Medienkonvergenz. Berlin: DeGruyter, 2013.
...
Kontakt
Prof. Dr. Matthias Krings
Raum 00-678
Forum universitatis 6
55099 Mainz
Tel.: 06131-3926800
Fax: 06131-3923730
E-Mail
Sprechstunde im Sommersemester 2017
Dienstags, 16:30-18:00 Uhr (entfällt am 11.07.)
Prof. Dr. Matthias Krings
Anthropology and African Popular Culture
Illustration
Research interests
Popular Culture in Africa, Media Anthropology, Anthropology of Migration and Diaspora, Anthropology of Religion
Research areas
West Africa (in particular Nigeria), East Africa (in particular Tanzania)
African Appropriations: Cultural Difference, Mimesis, and Media.
[Bildlink]
Matthias Krings: African Appropriations: Cultural Difference, Mimesis, and Media. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2015. ...
Exhibition Always-on
[Bildlink]
Steffen Köhn and Matthias Krings: Always-on. Sehen und gesehen werden in einer vernetzten Welt. Ausstellung in der Schule des Sehens der JGU Mainz (11.12.2015 - 4.2.2016). ...
Bongo Media Worlds. Producing and Consuming Popular Culture in Dar es Salaam - to be translated
[Bildlink]
Matthias Krings and Uta Reuster-Jahn (eds.): Bongo Media Worlds. Producing and Consuming Popular Culture in Dar es Salaam. Reihe: Mainzer Beiträge zur Afrikaforschung Band 34. Köln: Rüdiger Köppe Verlag, 2014. ...
Global Nollywood. The Transnational Dimensions of an African Video Film Industry.
[Bildlink]
Matthias Krings u. Onookome Okome (Hg.): Global Nollywood. The Transnational Dimensions of an African Video Film Industry. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2013.
...
Ethnologie im 21. Jahrhundert.
[Bildlink]
Thomas Bierschenk, Matthias Krings u. Carola Lentz (Hg.): Ethnologie im 21. Jahrhundert. Berlin: Reimer, 2013.
...
Medien - Erzählen - Gesellschaft. Transmediales Erzählen im Zeitalter der Medienkonvergenz.
[Bildlink]
Karl N. Renner, Dagmar v. Hoff u. Matthias Krings (Hg.): Medien - Erzählen - Gesellschaft. Transmediales Erzählen im Zeitalter der Medienkonvergenz. Berlin: DeGruyter, 2013.
...
Contact
Prof. Dr. Matthias Krings
Room 00-678
Forum universitatis 6
55099 Mainz
Germany
Person
al
P
rofile
Matthias Krings is Professor of Anthropology and African Popular Culture at the
Johannes Gutenberg
University
Mainz. He has specialized in the study of African popular culture, particularly film and
video, the anthropology of migration and
diaspora, and the anthropology of religion. He is currently
studying the re
-
mediation of foreign films by African cinema narrators, and
head of a project on the
meaning of albinism in cross
-
cultural perspective. His latest book,
African Appropriations: Cu
ltural
Difference, Mimesis, and Media
was
published by Indiana University Press
in
2015
. He has done
extensive fieldwork in
Tanzania and
Nigeria.
His recent publications include
Bongo Media Worlds: Producing and Consuming Popular Culture in
Dar es Salaam
(
co
-
edited with Uta Reuster
-
Jahn, Köppe 2014),
Global Nollywood: The Transnational
Dimensions of an African Video Film Industry
(co
-
edited with Onookome Okome,
Indiana University
Press
2013) and
Ethnologie im 21. Jahrhundert
(co
-
edited with Thomas Bierschen
k and Carola Lentz,
Reimer 2013). Among his more recent articles are
“
Nollywood goes East. The localization of N
igerian
video films in Tanzania”
, in
Viewing African Cinema in the Twenty
-
First Century
, eds. Austen & Saul
(2010); “
A prequel to Nollywood: Sou
th African photo novels and their pan
-
Africa
n consumption in
the late 1960s”
,
Journal of African Cultural Studies
22,1 (2010); Together with Holger Kirscht he has
directed
Mother of the Waters
, Göttingen (2003), a documentary on migrant settlements at Lake
Chad.
Before coming to Mainz in 2005 Matthias Krings held assignments as part
-
time lecturer at University
of Cologne, as senior researcher at the Research School “Media and Cultural Communication”,
University of Cologne (2003
–
2005), and as junior research
er at the Special Research Program “West
-
African Savannah”, University of Frankfurt (1996
–
2002).
Matthias Krings received his MA in Anthropology from University of Mainz in 1996, and his PhD from
University of Frankfurt (Main) in 2002. He wrote his MA diss
ertation based on a 14 months empirical
study on the bori cult of spirit possession among the Hausa of Nigeria, and his PhD thesis on
community formation and the exploitation of natural resources in settlements of the Lake Chad area
Prof. Dr. Matthias Krings
SoCuM AG 1 / DFG FG 1939, AG 5
Anthropology and African Studies
Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz
Room 00-651
Forum universitatis 6
55099 Mainz
Tel: +49 6131 39-26800
Fax: +49 6131 39-23730
E-Mail: krings@uni-mainz.de
Website
SoCuM Project: Albinism; Forms of Cultural Categorization and their Social Consequences
(Subproject within the scope of DFG Research Group FG 1939 Un/doing Differences: Practices of Human Differentiation, established in 2013)
This project examines the historical and social contingent categorization of people with albinism. Because of their conspicuous phenotypes, people with albinism are treated as different from people with ‘normal’ pigment in many societies, in some cases to the extent that their classification as humans has been questioned. The goal of the project is to look at various historical and contemporary forms of classification, which can be observed in different fields (science, magic, popular culture), in order to understand them with regard to their cultural and social contexts. It seeks further to determine which consequences arise for people with albinism affected by specific differentiation practices. A subproject concentrates on the evaluation of academic and popular cultural primary and secondary sources, and a second applies as an ethnographic case study in Tanzania, where people with albinism have been persecuted for years on magical and religious grounds and are currently fighting for their ‘incarnation’.
Research Interests
Popular Culture in Africa, Media Ethnology, Migration and Diaspora Research, Anthropology of Religion, Anthropology of the Body, West Africa (Nigeria), East Africa (Tanzania)
Academic Background
Matthias Krings has been Professor of Anthropology and Popular Culture of Africa since 2011. He was Junior Professor at JGU Mainz from 2005 to 2011. He has also been a research associate at Cologne University (2003-2005) and Frankfurt University (1996-2002). He received his PhD from the Johann Wolfgang Goethe University in Frankfurt and his Master’s Degree in Ethnology from JGU Mainz in 1998.
Publications (Top 5)
2015
African Appropriations: Cultural Difference, Mimesis, and Media. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
2013
(with Onookome Okome, eds.:) Global Nollywood. The Transnational Dimensions of an African Video Film Industry. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
2013
(with Thomas Bierschenk and Carola Lentz, eds.:) Ethnologie im 21. Jahrhundert. Berlin: Reimer.
2009
Marke „Osama“. Über Kommunikation und Kommerz mit Bin-Laden-Bildern in Nigeria. In: Peripherie 113/29. P. 31–55.
2008
Conversion on Screen. A Glimpse at Popular Islamic Imaginations in Northern Nigeria. In: Africa Today 54/4. P. 44–68.
Krings, Matthias: African appropriations: cultural difference, mimesis, and media
E.R. Baer
53.10 (June 2016): p1509.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2016 American Library Association CHOICE
http://www.ala.org/acrl/choice/about
Krings, Matthias. African appropriations: cultural difference, mimesis, and media. Indiana, 2015. 311p bibl filmography Index afp ISBN 9780253016256 cloth, $80.00; ISBN 9780253016294 pbk, $30.00; ISBN 9780253016409 ebook, $29.99
53-4431
DT14
MARC
This is a book about "African ways of dealing with cultural difference [through] media." For the past two decades, Krings (anthropology and African popular culture, Johannes Gutenberg Univ., Germany) has painstakingly gathered examples of African appropriations of Western texts and films such as Titanic and the James Bond series. Krings has studied, on the ground, how Africans remediated such media into films, graphic novels, songs, music videos, dance, posters, pins, and other objects. He reads these intertextual borrowings through theories from both media anthropology and post-colonialism; his focus is popular culture in Nigeria and Tanzania. Among other topics Krings interrogates are spirit possession, the valorization of Osama bin Laden after 9/11, the appropriation of Bollywood films in Nollywood and the Kannywood films of northern Nigeria, and letters written by African cyber scammers. All of this material will be new and fascinating to Western readers. Krings says he is "interested in appropriations that display a certain deliberate play with difference and strive for a symbolic 'borrowing of power,' from that which has been appropriated." The text is jargon free, a pleasure to read, remarkably well researched, and enriched by 40 illustrations. Summing Up: *** Highly recommended. Upper-division undergraduates through faculty.--E. R. Baer, Gustavus Adolphus College
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Baer, E.R. "Krings, Matthias: African appropriations: cultural difference, mimesis, and media." CHOICE: Current Reviews for Academic Libraries, June 2016, p. 1509+. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA454942842&it=r&asid=44561ec970882826a9e5b285b4a67eea. Accessed 14 May 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A454942842
Global Nollywood: The Transnational Dimensions of an African video Film Industry
Ann Overbergh
46.2 (Summer 2015): p181.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2015 Indiana University Press
http://www.iupress.indiana.edu
Global Nollywood: The Transnational Dimensions of an African video Film Industry
EDS. MATTHIAS KRINGS AND ONOOKOME OKOME
Bloomington: Indiana UP, 2013. viii + 371 pp. ISBN 9780253009357 paper.
Nollywood scholarship in general has needed time to move beyond reiterating well-known facts about the industry and to pay more than lip service to its internal diversity, that of its viewership, and that of production circuits elsewhere inspired or influenced by it. In addition, it has grappled with the difficulties of qualitative and quantitative audience research, as well as the challenge of keeping pace with Nollywood's different and evolving faces, narrative concerns, and modes of reception worldwide, as the industry has grown into a resolutely transnational phenomenon.
It is this international character that Global Nollywood: The Transnational Dimensions of an African Video Film Industry takes as a starting point and as its main focus. The book compiles a range of pieces of high-quality academic work, dealing with Nollywood's transnational production, its uptake in different places in the world, and the various needs it serves of its many different audience groups in Africa and the diaspora. It also unveils a fascinating variety of the ways in which Nollywood cinema is viewed and interpreted, culturally remediated in new contexts, and its stories reproduced with a twist to cater to religious and cultural sensitivities.
Global Nollywood's first part is aimed at historically and economically contextualizing Nollywood's transnationalism (Jedlowski), as well as highlighting aspects of its films and industry dynamics determining its international mobility (Mistry and Ellapen). It then moves on to a series of studies of transnational Nollywood films, followed by audience studies in different places in the world, and finally Nollywood's cultural appropriation outside Lagos--whether in the form of remakes, live dubbing and commentary, or merely inspiration.
Jonathan Haynes, who already in 2007 had called for more refined and dedicated theory-building around Nigerian and Ghanaian popular cinema, picks up that glove in his chapter, "The Nollywood Diaspora: a Nigerian Video Genre," the first of five contributions on films dealing with international mobility that make up parts one and two of the collection, "Mapping the Terrain" and "Transnational Nollywood," respectively. Haynes theorizes and circumscribes diaspora Nollywood as a genre and his insights are applied by Sophie Samyn, who discusses a series of Nollywood films produced in Europe, and Claudia Hoffmann, who deals with Nollywood produced in the United States, with a focus on the representation of urbanity.
Five contributions in Global Nollywood address audiences outside Nigeria in section three, "Nollywood and Its Audiences." From upwardly mobile youth in Windhoek and Cape Town to viewers in Barbados and Kinshasa, Nollywood clearly "means" different things to different people. Southern African urban youth regard the films as a means to reconnect with a lost African past for which they feel nostalgia (Becker). As Jane Bryce shows, audience interest in Nollywood films in Barbados is linked to a popular imagination of a modern and transnational Pan-Africanness, in which people of dark complexions live in posh houses and modern surroundings and in which (transatlantic and transnational Pan-)Africa is part and parcel of today's global modernity.
Katrien Pype moves the discussion to Kinshasa, where viewers are drawn to and fascinated by Nollywood films as much as they are scared of and even repulsed by them. Pype provides careful and nuanced insight into the complexities surrounding Nollywood's appeal in Kinshasa and, in the process, does away with a number of common assumptions about its international distribution. Yet another set of social purposes served by Nollywood, those of Nigerian migrants in Turin, is described by Giovanna Santanera. According to Santanera, Nollywood films are used both as a form of corroboration of values and worldviews for recent immigrants and as a vehicle to stay up-to-date with the latest trends in Nigeria and to virtually "travel" there for those who have been in Europe longer.
The final section of the book, "Appropriations of Nollywood," includes essays by Abdalla Uba Adamu, Matthias Krings, and Claudia Bohme. Abdalla Uba Adamu explores remakes of Nollywood flicks by Kano-based directors, reshaping story elements to be more in line with Islamic values. Matthias Krings and Claudia Bohme conclude the text speaking from Tanzania. Krings traces the layers of meaning added by video narrators, which seem to be reviving audience interest in Nollywood films in a market in which Bongo, Swahili-language popular cinema, had all but decimated it. Finally, as Claudia Bohme shows with her study of the Tanzanian horror film Popobawa, popular African films produced outside Lagos borrow from Nollywood what they can use, but are much more than merely copies with a pinch of local spice.
All in all, the wealth of new and sometimes puzzling insights brought together in Global Nollywood show how much there still is to learn and research, far beyond the cliches about Nollywood that have been circulating for too long. More importantly still, the contributions examine several paths--theoretically, methodologically--that can be followed in order to expand Nollywood scholarship and help it evolve along with this fascinating and multifaceted industry.
WORKS CITED
Haynes, Jonathan. "What Is to Be Done? Film Studies and Nigerian and Ghanaian Videos." Ed. Ralph Austen and Saul Mahir. Viewing African Cinema in the Twenty-First Century. Art Films and the Nollywood Video Revolution. Athens: Ohio UP, 2010. 11-25. Print.
Ann Overbergh
University of Antwerp, Antwerp Centre for Evolutionary Demography (ACED). ACED is financed by a five-year start-up grant from the Odysseus program of the FWO, the Research Foundation of Flanders
ann.overbergh@gmail.com
Overbergh, Ann
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Overbergh, Ann. "Global Nollywood: The Transnational Dimensions of an African video Film Industry." Research in African Literatures, vol. 46, no. 2, 2015, p. 181+. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA413337842&it=r&asid=41bd56629fc3f015230f638203bfced5. Accessed 14 May 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A413337842
Global Nollywood: the transnational dimensions of an African video film industry
E.R. Baer
51.9 (May 2014): p1599.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2014 American Library Association CHOICE
http://www.ala.org/acrl/choice/about
Global Nollywood: the transnational dimensions of an African video film industry, ed. by Matthias Krings and Onookome Okome. Indiana, 2013. 371 p bibl indexes afp ISBN 9780253009234, $80.00; ISBN 9780253009357 pbk, $30.00; ISBN 9780253009425 e-book, $24.99
51-4919
PN1993
2012-51539 CIP
The Nollywood film industry, a Nigerian enterprise begun in the late 1990s, is right behind India's Bollywood in number of films produced annually. The present collection focuses on the diasporic aspects of Nollywood. After a very useful introduction, the essays appear in four sections: "Mapping the Terrain," which provides an overview and a focus on the economics of the large-scale piracy of Nollywood films; "Transnational Nollywood," about the genre of Nollywood films made in Europe and the US, which largely focus on immigration; "Nollywood and Its Audiences," which presents fascinating analyses of audiences in South Africa, Namibia, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Barbados, and Italy; and "Appropriations of Nollywood," including essays on the practice of video narration (more than a voice-over as the narrators include personal observations of the film) and on horror films (both in Tanzania), and on how the largely Christian films of southern Nigeria are recut and adapted for Muslim audiences in northern Nigeria. Along the way essays cover critical topics--e.g., African auteur films, postcolonial context of Nollywood--and analyze several well-known Nollywood films. Authors are geographically diverse, from Europe, the US, Canada, the West Indies, Nigeria, and South Africa. Inclusion of stills would have been a plus. Summing Up: Highly recommended. *** Lower-division undergraduates through faculty.--E. R. Baer, Gustavus Adolphus College
Baer, E.R.
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Baer, E.R. "Global Nollywood: the transnational dimensions of an African video film industry." CHOICE: Current Reviews for Academic Libraries, May 2014, p. 1599+. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA366728663&it=r&asid=0b00473b9a99d85c4cc476133a47b4c5. Accessed 14 May 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A366728663
Matthias Krings and Onookome Okome, editors, Global Nollywood: the transnational dimensions of an African video film industry
Mahir Saul
85.3 (Aug. 2015): p566.
DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/S0001972015000480
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2015 Cambridge University Press
http://www.internationalafricaninstitute.org/journal.html
MATTHIAS KRINGS and ONOOKOME OKOME, editors, Global Nollywood: the transnational dimensions of an African video film industry. Bloomington IN: Indiana University Press (pb $30-978 0 253 00935 7). 2013, 371 pp.
Southern Nigeria's video dramas started to be made in the early 1990s, gained phenomenal popularity, yielded profits to the businessmen who invested in them, and provided a hard-earned living for a few thousand others in the informal industry that produced the movies. They also brought forth an unsuspected thematic repertoire of narrative and visual components available for commentary and investigation. Dubbed 'Nollywood' in 2002 by the New York Times, the industry survived the transition from VHS to digital media, adopting the VCDs that had been pioneered in Asian markets instead of the more expensive DVDs. Nollywood's rise to triumph and decline took about fifteen years. In 2007, overproduction, receding consumer interest, and unrestrained market competition, which did not rule out pirating, had produced a total crisis. When in 2010 the effects of satellite television and unlicensed internet streaming sites had also become clear, professionals in the sector started to think that the end might not be far away. That is, by the time academics and journalists in the United States had discovered Nollywood and were celebrating it as the 'third largest movie industry of the world', Nigerian video drama had fallen into difficult straits. Nollywood operators persevered to find a solution. New talent was called in, professionalization accelerated, production values rose, and a new search was made to variegate and improve storylines. New Nollywood was bom. The success of Nollywood dramas in the Nigerian diaspora suggested the possibility of export earnings, even though the prevailing informal structures meant that copyright restrictions could not be enforced consistently.
This collection turns its attention to the Nigerian diaspora, and explores Nollywood dramas as popular culture outside Nigeria, as models for local production in Eastern, Central and Southern Africa, and as inspiration for an Afrocentrism from below in far-flung parts of the world. In a chapter overflowing with new findings, Alessandro Jedlowski chronicles the troubles of Old Nollywood and outlines the strategies producers put in place in the hope of breaking into export markets, which provides a good introduction to New Nollywood. J. Mistry and J. Ellapen show how South African Indian film production was influenced by Nigerian dramas. Heike Becker explores the reasons for the popularity of Nigerian videos among young professionals in Cape Town and Windhoek and finds that they resonate with Black Southern African notions of African identity. In an engaging essay, Jane Bryce comments on the lure of video movies in Barbados and notes that they make possible a revisioning of Africa, not as separate and past but as a participant in the global project of modernity.
Two chapters contribute to the understanding of video dramas and migration. Giovanna Santanera writes about migrants in Turin, Italy, and their responses to the movies from home. Katrien Pype focuses on the Pentecostal pastors in Kinshasa who make frequent trips to Lagos and use Nigerian videos for education. Reflecting circular religious migration between the two cities, this is a channel of influence that exists separately from the different reception of Nigerian videos by Congolese youth. Paul Ugor also mentions the Pentecostal connection with respect to the moralizing ending of Glamour Girls 2, which conjures the diaspora setting of college-educated Nigerian women who migrate to Italy for sex work.
A cluster of Nigerian videos made around the theme of diaspora and set in global locations is the topic of a comprehensive essay by Jonathan Haynes. He notes that these videos lack occult elements, which were much discussed in relation to earlier Nigerian creations. The production of Nigerian videos in diaspora locations --both by Nolly wood hands who take advantage of the financial and logistical support of Nigerian businessmen in those places and by producers or directors who live in those locations as migrants--is the topic of a chapter by Sophie Samyn. She presents five migrant filmmakers from the Netherlands, Germany and Belgium and notes the heavy didactic intent of their productions. Claudia Hoffmann takes the case of three Nollywood films shot in the US and set in migrant circles in New York. Onookome Okome offers a reading of the comedy Osuofia in London as native criticism of the postcolonial state, rather than as a deluded example of it, and continues his enthusiastic endorsement of the collective message of the videos.
Babson Ajibade reports on the interesting experience of showing Nigerian videos to Swiss audiences and experimenting with re-editing them to see if their reception can be improved, only to conclude that the differences in audience expectation are too profound and that the export potential of Nollywood dramas to non-African Euro-American audiences may not be as great as optimistically assumed by some producers. Abdalla Uba Adamu offers a commentary on the remake of a southern Nigerian video in Kano to reflect on the independent identity of the southern and northern Nigerian production centres, but also on the relationships and mutual influences between them. Claudia Bohme traces the influence of Nollywood imagery in the newly forged Tanzanian genre of horror video movies. Finally, Matthias Krings describes and reflects on the new profession of video narrator in Tanzania, who mediates the viewing and reception of southern Nigerian videos.
This is a wonderful collection, bringing together a bounty of new information, descriptions and ideas. If there is one regret, it is that some of the chapters are very short and leave the reader wanting more. But most other chapters make up for this, offering well-rounded ethnographies and thought-provoking analyses. Overall, the book brings together a set of highly original contributions that advance knowledge of Nigerian video production.
MAHIR SAUL
University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign
m-saul@illinois.edu
doi: 10.1017/S0001972015000480
Saul, Mahir
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Saul, Mahir. "Matthias Krings and Onookome Okome, editors, Global Nollywood: the transnational dimensions of an African video film industry." Africa, vol. 85, no. 3, 2015, p. 566+. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA427300531&it=r&asid=b77ca9e635d73bb40881ccaa57d645f3. Accessed 14 May 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A427300531
Matthias Krings and Uta Reuster-Jahn, editors, Bongo Media Worlds: producing and consuming popular culture in Dar es Salaam
Maria Suriano
86.2 (May 2016): p366.
DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/S0001972016000206
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2016 Cambridge University Press
http://www.internationalafricaninstitute.org/journal.html
MATTHIAS KRINGS and UTA REUSTER-JAHN, editors, Bongo Media Worlds: producing and consuming popular culture in Dar es Salaam. Mainzer Beitrage zur Afrikaforschung 34. Cologne: Rudiger Koppe Verlag (34.80 [euro]--978 3 89645 834 6). 2014, 286 pp.
Primarily based on 2009-10 fieldwork conducted in Dar es Salaam, this collection is the outcome of a project on negotiating culture through new media and popular genres in contemporary neoliberal Tanzania, 'bongo', by a team of staff and students at Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz. Most contributions include researchers' descriptions of their participation in the processes of media production.
The chapters examine several appropriations of global media flows as ways of bridging the cultural gap between the 'foreign' and the 'local'. A major argument of the book is 'the agency of local audiences vis-a-vis transnational media circulating in an already globalised world' (p. 182, emphasis added). Tanzanian spectators are not 'victims of an alleged cultural imperialism--be it American, Chinese or Nigerian', but they adapt 'something alien to the conditions of "home"' (p. 182). The rationale for this collection, as suggested above, lies in contesting discourses on US/foreign cultural imperialism ('the West' and 'the rest') that have been key debates in media studies. This approach, however, overlooks Tanzania's longstanding familiarity with global cultural flows.
An introduction contextualizing the case studies presented is somewhat anecdotal and undertheorized. It is followed by an inadequately referenced overview of some of the existing literature on bongo flava (foreign-derived Swahili music), and artists as entrepreneurs. The authors conclude that artists' entrepreneurial 'strategy is informed by social learning from early childhood' (p. 40), but do not mention patron-client relations. The next chapter focuses on artists' protests against an exploitative private radio station. Gabriel Hacke examines how artists use video clips to 'articulate their own vision of the Black Atlantic' (p. 80). While the engagement with Gilroy and African-American popular culture is interesting, it elides the many references to the Indian Ocean and Arab 'worlds' contained in the video clips. In a study of a satirical television programme featuring the comic group 'Orijino Komedi', the subsequent chapter illustrates the permeable boundaries between producers and consumers as well as ambivalent state-society relations. 'Mediating charisma in Tanzanian televangelism' invokes Stuart Hall's 'encoding' and 'decoding' model and Kurt Lewin's 1947 notion of 'gatekeepers' to explore audience reception and negotiations between Pentecostal leader Gertrude Rwakatare and the TV crew. A closer engagement with the literature on Pentecostalism and a gendered analysis of obstacles for female church leaders would have enriched the chapter.
Ratering's contribution on local responses to a Mexican telenovela mostly ascribes viewers' conversations while watching to their 'insufficient knowledge of English' (p. 155). This interpretation neglects the fact that such verbal exchanges have long been part of local visual practice. The chapter further argues that audiences recognize 'typical formal features' because of previous exposure to telenovelas (p. 156), and through reception analysis one can grasp audiences' attempts at making 'the world depicted in the telenovela more understandable to them' (p. 157). Such statements closely resemble early studies assuming spectators' passivity. Lastly, despite the popularity of US movies and series in Tanzania, Latin American (and Philippine) telenovelas are deemed more appealing 'because they serve as windows into [...] a "parallel modernity" that comes without Western political and ideological significance' (p. 159). Reference to works on the South-South connection is fascinating, but needs further evidence.
Matthias Krings focuses on live video narration, namely the addition of Swahili oral commentaries to foreign film screenings in video parlours. These performances are then recorded and marketed on DVDs. This practice results from 'a media reconfiguration born during the encounter between (non modern) oral practices and the appropriation of a cinematographic apparatus born out of a foreign culture (in this case Western modernity)' (p. 172). Yet probing the effects of the past on the present is not the most productive engagement with recent cultural forms. Stating that 'primary orality' and 'traditional storytelling' influence video narrations occludes the emergence of translocal cultural products uninformed by pre-existing 'traditional'/rural/oral practices. Moreover, the 1935-37 Bantu Educational Kinema Experiment failed to establish a 'contemplative-hermeneutical mode of spectatorship characterised by silent spectators' (p. 173). Archival and oral sources show that, far from being quiet, moviegoers consistently ignored and reinterpreted colonial educational efforts.
Rohrback's chapter on beauty contests aptly reflects on the disapproval--reminiscent of the ujamaa period--of pageants, which are seen as encouraging commodity culture and immoral behaviour. Her examination of Miss Tanzania 2007, won by a woman of Indian descent, compares verbal attacks against this allegedly non-Tanzanian citizen to the late 1960s Operation Vijana. This was a campaign by the TANU Youth League that included physical attacks against 'indecently' dressed and financially independent young African townswomen. The latter, together with Tanzanian Indians, are construed as minorities threatening the 'shared' imagination of the nation. Situating pageants within the context of nation building is intriguing but neglects the complex discourse of race about Tanzanians of Indian descent.
The contribution on contemporary Swahili cartoons assumes a Eurocentric readership (p. 237) and has some inaccuracies. The first 1956 (pre-independence) cartoon could not reflect 'the atmosphere of early postcolonial Dar es Salaam' (p. 238). Comics of the 1950s represent the stance of African urban elites towards their poorer or rural counterparts; they do not simply depict 'Africans in subordinate positions' (p. 238). Contemporary Swahili comics, Spath claims, target schooled individuals. This leads the author to ask if they 'can still be categorised as popular culture' (p. 250, footnote 15), thus conflating popular culture with commoners' culture.
Overall, the book contains a number of errors and oversights. But the major weakness of this interesting empirical collection is its failure to locate contributions firmly within debates on media texts in (and outside) Africa, on popular culture and on audiences/viewers/publics--seen as interchangeable and unproblematized categories. To be fair, most chapters draw on MA dissertations, yet these lacunae remain a drawback: while this collection presents some fascinating case studies, it is unclear who is the targeted readership and in what way the book advances scholarship on the production and reception of Tanzanian and African popular culture.
MARIA SURIANO
University of the Witwatersrand
Maria.Suriano@wits.ac.za
doi: 10.1017/S0001972016000206
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Suriano, Maria. "Matthias Krings and Uta Reuster-Jahn, editors, Bongo Media Worlds: producing and consuming popular culture in Dar es Salaam." Africa, vol. 86, no. 2, 2016, p. 366+. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA453286988&it=r&asid=2b890adb2582e5cd793f091e46a2841c. Accessed 14 May 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A453286988
Marshall on Krings, 'African Appropriations: Cultural Difference, Mimesis, and Media'
Author:
Matthias Krings
Reviewer:
Jodie Marshall
Matthias Krings. African Appropriations: Cultural Difference, Mimesis, and Media. African Expressive Cultures Series. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2015. 328 pp. $80.00 (cloth), ISBN 978-0-253-01625-6; $30.00 (paper), ISBN 978-0-253-01629-4.
Reviewed by Jodie Marshall (Michigan State University - African Studies Center)
Published on H-Material-Culture (April, 2016)
Commissioned by Marieke Hendriksen
In African Appropriations: Cultural Difference, Mimesis, and Media, Matthias Krings explores African uses of media to manage cultural difference, demonstrating that there is still more to be said on the topic of culture contact. Krings employs examples from African popular culture to describe African engagement with global media. The diverse cottage industry of African media from which Krings draws includes music, photo novels, cyberscams, videos, comic books, and even Osama bin Laden merchandise. While the title suggests a highly specialized theoretical text, the content of African Appropriations is an accessible account of media in the sociopolitical context of twentieth-century African popular culture.
African Appropriations is written as a series of case studies that both stand on their own and speak to each other, intertwining several common themes throughout the book. The major themes that Krings explores include the mediation and borrowing of power, the use of media to imagine different manifestations of modernity, and the exploration through media of the conflict between social expectation and individual desire. These case studies are drawn primarily from Nigeria and Tanzania, although there are a few nods to other parts of the continent.
Following the introduction, the book begins with two historical chapters. The first of these traces the history of spirit possession by European colonial spirits in West Africa from the 1920s to the present. The following chapter is about the 1960s magazine of photo novels, African Film. The middle section of the book consists of three chapters on film appropriations: recreations of Titanic (1997), Nigerian copies of Bollywood films, and Tanzanian copies of Nollywood films. The most provocative chapters of the book are arguably chapters 6 and 7. In these chapters, respectively, Krings contextualizes bin Laden merchandise in the sociopolitical landscape of northern Nigeria and uses e-mail and chat-room interviews to explore cyber scammers’ use of orientalist representations of Africa.
One of the most compelling pieces of argument is not solely about Africa but about the global processes of creative originality. Namely, in claiming African copies as key parts of a global network of media re/production, Krings de-sanctifies popular media from outside of Africa as the “original.” Rather than an outsider’s original being passively reproduced as faithful or unfaithful copies, both media are given equal weight as creative productions dynamically engaged with the interests and concerns of their creators and audiences. What emerges is an image of Africa as a piece of a larger tapestry of mimicry, mediation, and creation. Krings argues that African mimetic productions should be understood as particularly creative due to the cottage industry nature of African media culture.
Like any piece of scholarship, African Appropriations leaves its readers with some questions. Most pressing is the issue of geography. What aspects of the arguments are specific to Africa? Moreover, given that the majority of the case studies are drawn from Nigeria and Tanzania, a deeper reflection on what aspects of the argument are only specific to these locations as opposed to reflective of Africa as a whole is called for. However, this criticism could be made of virtually any scholarship that takes continental Africa as its boundary. Overall, African Appropriations is an engaging, readable, creative, and well-researched piece of scholarship. I would not hesitate to recommend it to anyone interested in African media, popular culture, or the nature of cultural contact and appropriation. Additionally, given Krings’s case study approach and engaging writing style, sections of this book could readily be assigned in an undergraduate classroom.
Printable Version: http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showpdf.php?id=45393
Citation: Jodie Marshall. Review of Krings, Matthias, African Appropriations: Cultural Difference, Mimesis, and Media. H-Material-Culture, H-Net Reviews. April, 2016.
URL: http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=45393
Book Review: African Appropriations: Cultural Difference, Mimesis, and Media by Matthias Krings
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LSE’s Harry Pettit reviews Matthias Krings’ latest book, African Appropriations: Cultural Difference, Mimesis and Media which engage those interested in understanding and theorising popular culture in Africa.
Matthias Krings has written extensively on the production and consumption of mediated popular culture in Africa, focusing especially on previous work on the Nigerian film industry. This latest book, which interrogates the plethora of ways in which African cultural producers engage with and inhabit global cultural forms and flows, expands on this existing work. It provides a timely response to continued tendencies of viewing such ‘consumption from below’ through the binaries of cultural imperialism and postcolonial resistance. Krings intricately counters this trend, which either denies agency to hapless Africans or searches rather romantically for signs of resistance to unequal relations of power, by working through different fields of engagement, from music to terrorism, rituals to cybercrime. He uncovers how and why these cultural forms come to be picked up, morphed, and utilised depending on the socio-economic, political, and cultural contexts in which they take place.
African appropriations
The book begins with a discussion of dominant approaches to popular cultural production and consumption in Africa. Krings establishes that the appropriations he explores in the book should be considered ‘mimetic interpretations’, as they aim to ‘borrow the qualities and the power’ of that which is being copied as well as construct and assume new signification. He then proceeds to illustrate this ‘hermeneutic process’ in various contexts in the chapters that follow. For example, Chapter 6 provides an analysis of the utilisation of heroic images of Osama Bin Laden in northern Nigeria in the aftermath of 9/11. In a context where Muslims were politically and culturally marginalised, and in which Islam was experiencing a revival, Bin Laden represented a figure of political resistance and religious piety which producers and consumers latched onto to express their political claims and forms of identification. During the course of the chapter Krings also briefly mentions the economic marginality of young men at the time, the international political economy of American/Western imperialism, as well as the need for cultural producers to simply make money as playing a part in the appropriation of these images.
The book does very well to uncover how such engagements with global culture both open up and inflect contact with alterity. They enable the inhabitation of ‘other possible lives’, binding and forming the relationship with difference. Krings demonstrates well how this relationship constantly brings forth the dangers of a loss of cultural integrity for its participants, and thus this is where lines of conflict can occur.
The problem that Krings has, in the Bin Laden chapter as well as many of the others, is the lack of primary data which is used to form his arguments. He uses mainly textual analysis of posters, films, song lyrics for example, and therefore the voice and intentionality of the producer and consumer of these cultural forms is largely absent – save for a few YouTube comments, or secondary interview data. As a result, the cultural forms are rendered as static objects in the analysis, their social life stripped away as it is the author only who interprets them, rather than their creators or their audience. The ways in which these cultural forms are used to engage with the world, express certain forms of identification or solidarity are left unclear as they are frozen in the text.
This lack of depth stands in contrast to some other anthropological work on African popular culture. Brad Weiss’ ethnographic account of barbershop owners’ in urban Tanzania illustrates how marginalised young men come to interpret and express their uncertain relationship with the wider world through the utilisation of hip hop music and heroic world figures of resistance – Bin Laden being one of them. Krings’ book possibly suffers from attempting to analyse wholly different phenomena in such a small space. Each example opens up extremely interesting appropriations of global cultural forms, appropriations that are structured by, and come to structure their relationship with both the ‘Globe’, as well as local socio-economic and cultural arrangements. However, as a reader you are left a little unsatisfied by the rather limited analysis of each.
Finally, although the author rightly attempts to move beyond the domination/resistance binary, he perhaps does this by not fully exploring relations of power. His analysis of power remains somewhat hidden. It is always there, either structuring the ways in which appropriations can take place, as well as indeed being ‘borrowed’ in order to further the claims of those doing the appropriating – as with the Bin Laden images. However it is never dealt with directly, as a regulating force, or as something which is re-formulated during the act of appropriation. Despite these limitations, I would recommend the fascinating accounts of translocal and transnational cultural engagements in the book to people interested in understanding and theorising popular culture in Africa.
Krings, M. 2015 African Appropriations: Cultural Difference, Mimesis, and Media. Bloomington & Indianapolis: Indiana University Press.