Oppositional gaze or revenge? A critical ideological analysis of foreignness and foreign identities in Nollywood feature films

Abstract

The media, including popular media such as music and films, often generate conversations about different spectrums of society. Due to an overabundance of imagery and sounds from the media, including television, film, advertising, social media and the internet, audiences are constantly bombarded with stereotypes and ideologies about other races and identities. As an exponentially growing popular culture industry, Nollywood – the Nigerian movie industry – positions itself as a source of knowledge and popular discourse about issues emanating from the continent and other places. With this growth, Nollywood seems to have been given a spot in the political circle of identity politics, giving it the power to represent the ‘Others’. This study interrogates the theme of identity construction in African films by focusing on the ways in which some select Nollywood films of the early and late 2000s and early 2010s frame and construct foreign races and foreign societies, using critical ideological analysis and the framework of critical race theory. Representations and portrayals of difference in the analysed movies could be serving some ‘revenge’ of sorts, transgressing age-long representations of Black people in Blaxploitation films. The multiplex representations as seen in the analyses serve the primary purpose of such stereotypes: to reproduce and to reaffirm prejudices that over time become naturalized and normalized. The study thematically specifies the significant use of labels, stereotypes and certain orthodoxies that aim to frame and characterize foreign societies in popular Nigerian films and suggests some broader implications of the findings.