Cultural Pluralisms: Neo-Nollywood and Biyi Bandele’s Ẹlẹ́ṣin Ọba (2022)

Abstract

ABSTRACT In Biyi Bandele’s last feature, Ẹlẹ́ṣin Ọba (2022), adapted from Wole Soyinka’s Death and the King’s Horseman, Bandele registers an awareness for the multiple film cultures that have shaped filmmaking in Nigeria. Ẹlẹ́ṣin Ọba is structured as a homage to the legacies of Yorùbá traveling theatricalities, while retaining the visual codes of contemporary cinema, including in the ways it co-opts traits of Western and neo-Nollywood filmmaking. In this analysis of Ẹlẹ́ṣin Ọba, I map the visual awareness it establishes of the legacies of filmmaking in Nigeria, while also centering the film’s thematic registers of colonial politics, cultural abjection, and gendered representations as constitutive of the colonial world in which the story is situated. I frame Bandele’s pluralistic approach as a spirited engagement with the unstable category that colonization produces for the erstwhile colonized person. That is, it is not only the characters in Ẹlẹ́ṣin Ọba who are forced to interplay between Yorùbá and British intellectual and cultural practices; Bandele, too, is placed in this complex interrogation, as embedded in his stylistic approach.