This article examines the intersection of Nollywood cinema and Afro-Transatlantic religions, with particular attention to Orisha worship and digital mediation. It argues that Nollywood functions as both a heritage practice and a site of diasporic negotiation, transmitting and transforming Afro-diasporic religious knowledge through film and online platforms. By analysing contemporary Nigerian films, digital streaming, and social media engagement, the study demonstrates how Nollywood facilitates the re-enchantment of modern life, offering ethical, aesthetic, and spiritual reflection in a mediatised context. It also highlights the challenges of representation, authority, and ethics in digital circulation, particularly regarding sacred imagery and ritual accuracy. The paper situates Nollywood within broader debates in heritage studies, media studies, and Afro-Atlantic religious scholarship, arguing that transnational cinematic practices produce hybrid knowledge, collective memory, and participatory spiritual engagement. By foregrounding digital mediation, the study shows that Afro-Atlantic religions are not relics of the past but living, adaptive, and networked phenomena, capable of thriving across borders and platforms. The article contributes to understanding how media, heritage, and spirituality intersect in contemporary African and diasporic contexts, offering new insights into the circulation, adaptation, and ethical mediation of sacred knowledge in a globalised world. Methodologically, the article draws on a qualitative, interpretive analysis of selected Nollywood films produced between the late 1990s and the 2020s, combined with platform-based observation of audience discourse on YouTube and on social media platforms related to Netflix. Rather than claiming exhaustive coverage, the study adopts a case-oriented approach designed to illuminate broader dynamics of mediation and reception, as advocated in qualitative media and religion research.

Abstract This article examines the intersections of religion, migration, and identity formation within Brazilian transnational contexts, arguing that Brazilian religions abroad are best understood through the combined lenses of diaspora as practice, Lusospheric space, and butinage. Rather than relying on conventional nation-centered diaspora framings, the article conceptualizes diaspora as a performative and relational category, shaped by actors who mobilize diasporic narratives and networks in situated ways. Drawing on post- and decolonial theories, it critiques existing uses of the diaspora concept—particularly in scholarship that positions “Brazil” as a fixed analytical origin—and highlights how Lusophone linguistic, historical, and postcolonial ties structure transnational religious fields. To capture the fluidity of religious engagement across borders, the concept of butinage is introduced as a value-neutral metaphor for religious cross-pollination and selective movement between ritual repertoires, institutions, and media. Illustrative examples from existing studies of Pentecostal, Afro-Brazilian, and Spiritist traditions in Germany and other regions demonstrate how Brazilian religious actors compose hybrid forms of belonging and negotiate multi-sited identities within wider Lusospheric networks. The article concludes that this conceptual triad offers a more precise framework for analyzing the dynamic reconfiguration of religion, language, and mobility in Brazilian diasporic settings, with implications for broader debates on transnational religion, narrative transformation, and epistemic justice.

Abstract I draw together history and dramaturgy through the figure of Branca Dias Coronel (Koren) (c. 1505–1589). This article offers a phenomenological reading of O Santo Inquérito , the play by Dias Gomes (O Santo Inquérito, 1995, p 83), treating it as a symbolic field where forms of violence are reinscribed—religious persecution and sensory and typificational violence. The question guiding my inquiry is whether Branca’s posthumous persecution, staged as a sacrifice, might be read not merely as the product of inquisitorial repression but as a dramaturgical condensation of silencing practices that operate at the level of the body, gesture, and sign. I turn to Alfred Schutz in Symbol, Reality and Society ( Collected Papers I: The Problem of Social Reality , 1967, pp. 297–299), whose distinction of our different orders involved in the appresentational situation—namely, the apperceptual, appresentational, referential, and interpretational orders—provides a generative lexicon for describing the layers of embodied perception that unfold within the scene. A ritual and sensuous dimension of performance emerges, in which Branca’s body—motionless, aromatic, inflamed—figures as a living trace of a symbolic struggle for recognition and survival.