Post-imperial affinities and neoliberal convergences: discourses and practices of collaboration between the Nigerian and the Indian film industries

Abstract

Over the past three decades, South-South economic interactions have multiplied. Within this landscape, media industries have come to occupy a relevant position, at the crossroad between soft power and hard economic interests. Numerous studies analysed the South-South circulation of media products, but many aspects of the ongoing interactions remain under-researched. This article contributes to this emerging field of scholarship by analysing the discourses and practices of collaboration that have emerged between the Indian and the Nigerian film industries over the past few years. By analysing the experiences of a few southern Nigerian and Indian film professionals who attempted to develop transnational collaborations, this article investigates the ambiguities of the affinities existing between Nollywood and Bollywood and interrogates the prospects for the creation of effective interactions between them.

Desiring Bollywood: Re‐Staging Racism, Exploring Difference

“…Popular culture production, particularly in the age of social and new media, emerges as a key site where opportunities for collaborations, what Jason called “collabos,” surface in an increasingly globalized media industry (Rai 2009). However, as Jedlowski (2018) notes, this potential for collaboration hasn't been realized except in a few individual cases 11 . Jason's story is precisely one of those individual cases where the sort of hopeful desire of a parallel modernity linked to popular cultural circulations between postcolonial contexts are being realized, one movie role at a time.…”

“…Jason, however, unlike other African nationals I met in Delhi, also had an ambition to materialize collaborations between Indian and Nigerian film industries. His determined zeal reflects the kind of entrepreneurial spirit that Jedlowski (2018) argues is being promoted between India and Nigeria in the current moment, as new opportunities emerge in the wake of big trade deals and intensified economic ties between the two countries. Popular culture production, particularly in the age of social and new media, emerges as a key site where opportunities for collaborations, what Jason called “collabos,” surface in an increasingly globalized media industry (Rai 2009).…”

“…I use the three scenes, first, to broadly theorize the affordances and limits of what I call re‐staging , the performance‐based method we devised and deployed to produce much of the content that makes up Desiring Bollywood 5 . Second, I analyze these very same scenes to show how re‐staging offered participants involved in the project the opportunity, through embodied improvisation and collective witnessing, to reflexively explore their own understandings of racialized difference within the context of what Jedlowski (2018, 23) has called the “post‐imperial affinities and neo‐liberal convergences” between India and Nigeria (and Africa, more broadly), and the class‐stratified realities of Delhi.…”

“…1111While government bodies in India have promoted the idea of India–Africa partnerships in various industries, very little formal collaboration has taken place, to date. For exceptions, see Jedlowski's (2018) discussion of attempts at formal collaboration between Indian and Nigerian film industries.…”