commbox Nigeria

"This special issue seeks to explore the common ground shared by practices of filmmaking and religious institutions located within postcolonial settings and increasingly linked in global infrastructures. The articles presented here converge in combining theoretical reflections about the interface of ... film and religion with specific examples or historical and ethnographic cases. Written by authors with backgrounds in film studies, religious studies, and anthropology, the contributions to this multidisciplinary issue are based on two common, more or less explicit, points of departure. One concerns the realization that the actual entanglement of religion and film highlights the limitations of a modernist view proclaiming the retreat of religion from the public sphere as an inevitable consequence of the processes of modernization and secularization. In our perspective, the interface of film and religion can more fruitfully be addressed from a postsecularist perspective, which seeks to overcome the unproductive, teleological, and normative understanding that religion should be confined to the private sphere. As the contributions to this issue show, in contexts as diverse as India, Ghana, Nigeria, Brazil, and postsocialist Poland, the accessibility of modern mass media in conjunction with the politics of neo-liberalism actually facilitate the proliferation of religion in the public sphere. This implies not only that religions may assume a strong public presence, but also that religion and entertainment are increasingly difficult to distinguish from each other. For example, as Maria José de Abreu shows, the Catholic Charismatic priest, pop-singer, and film actor Marcello Rossi embodies this convergence. Not only has film become a prime medium of religious expression, films also often address a religious audience which in turn is seen to authorize audiovisual representations of the transcendent or divine as truthful and authentic. Ravi Vasudevan argues here how Hindu devotional films represented their own religious spectators as a kind of selfauthenticating redefinition of the social with the divine. Whether this authorization actually occurs, as the articles by Birgit Meyer on Ghanaian pentecostally-oriented video-films and by Matthias Krings on Hausa videos in Northern Nigeria show, is a matter of an intense politics and aesthetics of persuasion that may or may not be successful. While in our era of globalizing media the condition of the possibility for religion to assume a public role appears to depend on the successful accommodation of filmic media, the incorporation of such media also threatens to transform religious practice into a form of mass entertainment. The fear of being made subject to superficial visual regimes, as the articles by Mattijs van de Port and Marleen de Witte highlight, may lead religious practitioners to be highly suspicious about the formats and styles that go along with audiovisual mass media. In addition to this postsecular stance, the articles presented in this special issue also share a commitment to moving beyond the assumption of an ontological difference between religion as a domain of the transcendent, on the one hand, and film as a domain of neutral technology, on the other. In this regard, we prefer the notion of mediation as a more open-ended, non-determinist solution for exploring the multiple relationships between religion and film. For example, once religion is understood as a practice of mediation, media appear not as alien to the realm of religion, but as an inalienable element on which any attempt to access and render present the transcendental ultimately depends. By using “mediation” we hope to shift our emphasis away from religion and film as abstract substantialized essences towards a non-dualist emphasis on the relational and contingent practices in which film and religion overlap and engage each other. Brent Plate, in his contribution to this issue, coins the term “religious cinematics” to stress explicitly this point where religion and film merge through the embodied practices of the human senses." (Guest Editors’ Preface, pages 150-151) more

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The Marketing of Rebellion: Insurgents, Media, and International Activism

Clifford Bob

Cambridge: Cambridge University Press (2005), xiv, 237 pp.

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The Pulse of Africa: How Africans View Their Lives, Their Countries, Their Continent, Their Future, the World

London: BBC World Service (2004), 22 pp.

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Focus on African Films

Francoise Pfaff (ed.)

Bloomington: Indiana University Press (2004), ix, 327 pp.

"Emphasizing post-independent films released since the 1950s and the burgeoning commercial film production of the last decade, Focus on African Films provides unique and pluralistic perspectives on filmmaking throughout Africa. As a whole, the collection highlights the distinct thematic, stylistic, ... more

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African Media Cultures: Transdisciplinary Perspectives = Cultures de médias en Afrique: Perspectives transdisciplinaires

Rose Marie Beck, Frank Wittmann (eds.)

Köln: Rüdiger Köppe Verlag (2004), 320 pp.

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Africa screams: Das Böse in Kino, Kunst und Kult

Tobias Wendl (ed.)

Wuppertal: Peter Hammer Verlag (2004), 288 pp.

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Issues in Professional and Union Rights of Women Journalists

Lanre Arogundade, Tunde Aremu (eds.)

Lagos: International Press Centre (IPC) (2004), 77 pp.

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Book Publishing in Nigeria

Chukwuemeka Ike

[no publisher] (2004), 4 pp.

"A short but succinct four page overview of the book publishing industry in Nigeria, which has been in steady decline since the 1980s: "At one stage, prospects for the book industry in Nigeria appeared rosy. The Federal Government established paper and pulp making industries, and an elaborate plan w ... more

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Who Owns the Media: Global Trends and Local Resistances

Pradip N. Thomas, Nain Zaharom (eds.)

Penang: Southbound (2004), 330 pp.

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Repressive State and Resurgent Media Under Nigeria's Military Dictatorship, 1988-98

Ayo Olukotun

Uppsala: Nordiska Afrikainstitutet (2004), 136 pp.

"This study documents a crucial dimension of the resistance of Nigerian civil society to a repressive and monumentally corrupt military state in the late 1980s and 1990s in Nigeria. Employing a neo-Gramscian theoretical framework, the study relates how a section of the media defied censorship laws, ... more