International Journal of Baudrillard Studies
ISSN: 1705-6411 Volume 11, Number 3 (September 2014)
Isiokwu – The Simulacra of the Simulacra: The Obscenity of Nollywood Films
Dr. Biko Agozino
(Department of Sociology, Virginia Tech University, Blacksburg, Virginia, USA).
In honor of the Nollywood artists and producers who have popularized
such common Igbo expressions as Chineke m eh! (Oh my God!), Igwee!
(Chief!), and Kedu (Hello) among their teeming audiences in Africa and
the Diaspora, I have followed the admirable style of Nwando Achebe
(2011) in her Nollywood-like narrative of a female king in colonial
Igboland, by using approximate Igbo translations in italics to start
each sub-heading in this papyrus. I will also consistently use the word
papyrus as a closer approximation of what ancient Africans had in mind
when they invented writing as a serious discourse that was seen as a
pharmakon or drug to be taken seriously lest the written drug is abused
and the patient dies of the side-effects, according to Derrida(1968),
quoting Socrates; unlike its European simulacrum that is mistaken for
the original and quite unlike just any ordinary piece of ‘paper’.
This papyrus argues that films in general are not just pieces of
communication but also attempts at simulation and that Nollywood
represents efforts to simulate a simulation, making it obscene to a
great extent. There is no attempt in this theoretical piece to review
the contents of Nollywood films for the illustration of this thesis as
is commonly the case in journalistic descriptions; rather the analysis
will go beyond the structures of film narratives to radicalize the
discourse by deconstructing the ideologies of deviance and social
control in the enabling political economy, the cultural consequences of
their propagation, the technological determinism of their
sustainability, and their methodological challenges to scholarship and
to the global film industry itself.
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