"Haynes describes the major Nigerian film genres and how they relate to Nigerian society—its values, desires, anxieties, and social tensions—as the country and its movies have developed together over the turbulent past two decades. As he shows, Nollywood is a form of popular culture; it produces ... a flood of stories, repeating the ones that mean the most to its broad audience. He interprets these generic stories and the cast of mythic figures within them: the long-suffering wives, the business tricksters, the Bible-wielding pastors, the kings in their traditional regalia, the glamorous young professionals, the emigrants stranded in New York or London, and all the rest." (Publisher description) more

"This reckoning of the academic work that has been published on Nigerian and Ghanaian video films does not include theses and dissertations, of which many have been written. I have included as many books on the subject as possible whatever their character, but in order to make the project manageable ... , when dealing with articles I have had to try to maintain various distinctions: between academic and other kinds of writing, between academic publication and web postings of lectures and conference proceedings, and between articles that have the films as a primary focus and those that merely mention them. I thank the friends and colleagues who have corrected some of my omissions, especially Carmen McCain, Sam Kafewo, Osakue Omoera and Matthias Krings, and beg forgiveness for the rest." (Abstract) more

"The main purpose of this review of the published academic literature on Nigerian and Ghanaian video films is to foster self-awareness in this new field of study. This literature has been produced on three continents and out of many academic disciplines; in consequence, scholars tend to make few ref ... erences to others working in the field, debates have been rare, and there has been a great deal of repetition. African Cinema studies, as it had already been constituted, has been slow to recognize and adapt to the video revolution, and film studies in African universities has suffered from the decline of those institutions. Anthropologists have done much of the groundbreaking work in describing the video phenomenon, though Nigerians from a variety of disciplines have also made valuable contributions. Theoretical analyses, cultural interpretations, reception studies, and detailed, extended readings of particular films are all on the agenda for the future." more