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This book is a seminal study that significantly expands the interdisciplinary discourse on African literature and cinema by exploring Africa's under-visited carnivalesque poetics of laughter. Focusing on modern African literature as well as contemporary African cinema, particularly the direct-to-video Nigerian film industry known as Nollywood, the book examines the often-neglected aesthetics of the African comic imagination. In modern African literature, which sometimes creatively traces a path back to African folklore, and in Nollywood - with its aesthetic relationship to Onitsha Market Literature - the pertinent styles range from comic simplicitas to comic magnitude with the facilitation of language, characterization, and plot by a poetics of laughter or lightness as an important aspect of style. The poetics at work is substantially carnivalesque, a comic preference or tendency that is attributable, in different contexts, to a purposeful comic sensibility or an unstructured but ingrained or virtual comic mode. In the best instances of this comic vision, the characteristic laughter or lightness can facilitate a revaluation or reappreciation of the world, either because of the aesthetic structure of signification or the consequent chain of signification. This referentiality or progressive signification is an important aspect of the poetics of laughter as the African comic imagination variously reflects, across genres, both the festival character of comedy and its pedagogical value. This book marks an important contribution to African literature, postcolonial literature, world literature, comic imagination, poetics, critical theory, and African cinema.

This article examines the Nigerian video-film industry from the perspective of the country's colonial past. It begins with the premise that the development of the video-film industry can be seen as part of a decolonisation process. It therefore seeks to establish what links, if any, exist between the present day video-film industry and colonial filmmaking. It posits that the growth and success attained in the industry reflect an overcoming of the strictures which, thanks largely to the legacy of colonialism, had held back the growth of African cinema.

[...]representations of African traditions are related adversely to change and the associative ideals of progress. [...]as has been pointed out by Tanure Ojaide-with examples from Things Fall Apart and Death and the King's Horseman-African cultural life contains intrinsic and complex mechanisms for regeneration and did not need gratuitous catalytic inoculations into its body politic.11 As Diana Akers Rhoads observes about Achebe's Things Fall Apart: What is remarkable about his Igbos is the degree to which they achieved the foundations of what most people seek today-democratic institutions, tolerance of other cultures, a balance of male and female principles, capacity to change for the better or to meet new circumstances, a means of redistributing wealth, viable system of morality, support for industriousness, an effective system of justice, striking and memorable poetry and art.12 Be that as it may, Terence Ranger's point about the realities of precolonial Africa adds an important dimension to this issue. Even though a transistor radio initiates Kuru's cultural and professional displacement in La Vie est Belle / Life is Rosy (dir. Mwezé Ngangura, 1987, Democratic Republic of the Congo), it also fosters his resolve to \"play electric music.\" [...]at the end of the film, he adopts western musical instruments but transforms his musical impulses in a unique, patently \"modern\" non-western expression. [...]in Sango Malo (dir. Bassek Ba Kobhio, 1990, Cameroon), the reformist crusader, Malo Malo Bernard, is a western trained schoolteacher who dons blue jeans and leather jackets, accouterments of western pop culture, but nonetheless espouses the educational equivalent of liberation theology. [...]the centrality to community life of Honba's shop attests to certain cultural modulations.

To my way of thinking, a thorough re-examination of scholarly strategies, one which conflates theoretical, discursive criticism with pragmatic, creative, intervention, is necessary if \"African\" cinema must outdo the present commercial mediocrity of Hollywood and make lasting contributions to world cinema and its filmic language in the same way that filmmakers from other cultures, such as China: Farewell, My Concubine (dir. Chen Kaige, 1993); Japan: Dreams (dir. Akira Kurosawa, 1990); New Zealand: Once Were Warriors (dir. Lee Tamahori, 1994); and Canada: Atanarjuat / The Fast Runner (dir. Zacharias Kunuk, 2000), have done from an unapologetically non-Western semiological perspective.2 In this article I want to examine some of the major \"intellectual\" problems faced by African cinema scholars, both on the continent and abroad, contextualize the enormity and complexity of any attempt to theorize African cinema, redefine the expression \"theory\" from an African semiological and epistemic perspective, and, most importantly, interrogate what the term \"to theorize\" means inside and outside the Western academy today. The African Scholar Versus the Western Academy One of the major reasons why the bulk of academic discourse on African, and, indeed, African diasporic cinematic practices, have remained largely \"untheorized,\"3 in a problematic sense of the word, despite a steady output of distinguished scholarship by Mbye Cham, Manthia Diawara, N. Frank Ukadike, Teshome Gabriel, Keyan Tomaselli, Clyde Taylor, among others,4 can perhaps be examined and understood in the following light: there is an absence of a coherent theoretical construct or infrastructure generated by African scholars within which African cinema can be studied, criticized, taught, or appreciated. By \"theoretical infrastructure\" I do not mean the superimposition or insertion of the cultural ideas and artistic philosophies of Foucault, Lyotard, Kristeva, Lacan, Derrida, and other European theorists on or into the study and analysis of African art-forms ranging from oral poetry through painting and sculpture, to the new wave of video filmmaking in the continent.5 I mean the establishment of a theorized vocabulary of experiencing and creating, of seeing and understanding, of appreciation and teaching, of exegesis and evaluation, that is \"African\" in origin and sensibility, yet captures within its operative dynamic the complex, hybridized, or syncretic nature of African political, historical, and cultural experience. By this I mean that, we, African and \"Africanist\" scholars, should go forth and discover the precise vernacular vocabularies and registers in which specific African cultures have couched their theories of performance, the aesthetic concepts surrounding their artistic processes, and the creative philosophies that shape the production of their art-forms and deploy these, as full-bodied African expressions, in our academic discourse, whether we are writing in English, French, Portuguese, German, or Belgian languages.7 The reasons why we are not doing this yet, why in fact we are still discussing extremely complex African art-forms like the cinema (which in its own unique way incorporates almost all of the other arts) in largely descriptive, historical, generalized, and sometimes vague \"globalized/postmodernist\" terms, must be clearly understood: [...]because this language, this body of concepts, has not been generated within our environment, we have no choice but to produce what is ultimately a derived discourse.9 African Cinema Versus Western Cinematic Theory/Discourse Perhaps in no other field of African arts is the theoretical dichotomy between practice and its discourse more pronounced as in cinema, a form whose primary instrument is technically European but whose African products are often hybridized narratives and semiological montages of our lived experiences both abroad and on the continent.

According to Haida artist and master carver Bill Reid, an artwork/film's \"real life\" is the process through which it becomes a work, but its \"afterlife\"3 is constructed during readings of and engagement with the work through shared participation in local and diasporic cultural manifestations. Established in 1983 to answer a call to action during the 1982 Niamey Congress, MICA opened its doors to FESPACO festivalgoers in 1989 to encourage exchanges between producers, directors, distributors, and TV-buyers and the diffusion of the richness and plurality of African cultures around the globe.4 It seems, however, that thirty years later, MICA \"does not yet organize English language screenings for international buyers, as is done in more established festivals\"5 Olivier Barlet makes a salient point here. Yet, perhaps it is FESPACO's \"openness and accessibility\" compared to other festivals, and the \"generosity of the filmmakers\" who take the time to meet industry professionals and scholars alike, that softens the edges of this frustrating situation.6 MICA, and the generosity of industry professionals exhibiting their films, videos, and television programs, made it possible for me as a scholar to research the circulation of ideas and aesthetics in global television in the 1990s. The final production deal included the two broadcasters and a private production company, Vidéocam, which provided camera, optics, and some post-production support.

The Nigerian film industry (Nollywood) has phenomenally exploded to the extent of affecting audiences and social institutions in various African countries. In Cameroon particularly, various indications suggest that the industry is positively received, despite the persistence of perceptible anti-Nigerian and nationalist feelings among sections of the country’s audiences and communities of cinema ideologues. Using empirical understandings, observations and secondary sources, this paper seeks to explore how the Nollywood phenomenon is manifested and received in the Cameroonian market. It precisely examines the various indexes of Nollywood presence in the country which can be seen in (i) the place Nollywood films have in television broadcast in the country, (ii) the extent to which Nollywood films affect local cinema production in Cameroon and (iii) Cameroonian audiences’ attitudes towards Nollywood films and actors.

The argument of this study is that Yorùbá people continue to keep alive and sustain their society’s oral folkloric tradition and verbal art despite the changes undergone by Yorùbá folktales that have passed into written form and other (new) media. Verbal arts educate, reflect and promote culture, as well as, their well-known capacity to instil moral decency in a young audience. This paper explores the adaptation of Yorùbá folkloric form in film. The audience memory is reawakened through the conservation and propagation of folktale into drama form in the film, Ijàpá and Àjàntálá. Ìjàpá (tortoise) is well known for its trickish behaviour and nature while Àjàntálá is also known for his vicious behaviour. Their character was worn into human beings (artiste) to teach society moral lessons. These Yorùbá movies Ìjàpá and Àjàntálá were adapted from Yorùbá folktales to examine issues and themes that are germane to contemporary society. Ìjàpá was produced in 2011 while Àjàntálá was produced in 2015. The theory of intertextuality which is the way books, songs, films are linked or associated to one another is adopted for the research.