In Indirect Subjects, Matthew H. Brown analyzes the content of the prolific Nigerian film industry's mostly direct-to-video movies alongside local practices of production and circulation to show how screen media play spatial roles in global power relations. Scrutinizing the deep structural and aesthetic relationship between Nollywood, as the industry is known, and Nigerian state television, Brown tracks how several Nollywood films, in ways similar to both state television programs and colonial cinema productions, invite local spectators to experience liberal capitalism not only as a form of exploitation but as a set of expectations about the future. This mode of address, which Brown refers to as “periliberalism,” sustains global power imbalances by locating viewers within liberalism but distancing them from its processes and benefits. Locating the wellspring of this hypocrisy in the British Empire's practice of indirect rule, Brown contends that culture industries like Nollywood can sustain capitalism by isolating ordinary African people, whose labor and consumption fuel it, from its exclusive privileges.
Acknowledgments vii
Introduction: Indirect Subjectivities and Periliberalism 1
Part I.
1. Subjects of Indirect Rule: Nigeria, Cinema, and Liberal Empire 33
2. Emergency of the State: Television, Pedagogical Imperatives, and The Village Headmaster 66
Part II.
3. "No Romance without Finance": Feminine Melodrama, Soap Opera, and the Male Breadwinner Ideal 99
4. Breadlosers: Masculine Melodrama, Money Magic, and the Moral Occult Economy 150
5. Specters of Sovereignty: Epic, Gothic, and the Ruins of a Past That Never Was 185
6. "What's Wrong with 419"?: Comedy, Corruption, and Conspiratorial Mirrors 221
Conclusion: Fantasies of Integration or Fantasies of Sovereignty 263
Notes 271
Filmography 285
Bibliography 289
Index 303
