Project

Moving in/through worlds: Lagos, Music Video and Nigerian Screen Culture

Program

African Humanities Program Postdoctoral Fellowships

Department

Centre for the Advancement of Scholarship

Abstract

This project investigates the place of music video in Nigerian popular culture, with emphasis on the idea of “borderlessness”. In content, form, process of production and modes of dissemination, music video is constituted as a converging point of movements. This quality enables it to occupy a unique position in the ecology of screen media in Nigeria. Using Lagos as a case in point, the research examines how music videos express life in the city and enable a tracking of its cultural flows with other spaces, national and international. It proposes a decentring of Nollywood as the sole or default lens to view audio-visual production in Nigeria.