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ASR FORUM: WHAT'S NEW IN AFRICAN CINEMA?
In his 2010 book on early twenty-first century trends in African filmmaking, Manthia Diawara proposes a taxonomy for distinguishing strands in what he calls a "new wave of African cinema" (2010:97). The taxonomy draws on the geographic location of filmmakers, the politics of production, intended audiences, festivals and distribution, and perhaps most important, approaches to film language. In this article I would like to propose additional perspectives for making sense of shifts within contemporary African film, especially in a popular cinema that Diawara positions within and alongside the new wave of African cinema. These additional perspectives require us to approach new waves not only in terms of the formal properties of the resulting works, but also by attending to each new wave as a site for struggle and a moment of exposure of the divergent forces at work in the struggle. This approach provides some context for understanding the emergence of the branch of filmmaking in Nigeria called "New Nollywood," and the efforts being undertaken to differentiate it from what has now become "Old Nollywood."
Within Nollywood and other popular cinemas across Africa, there are, then, attempts at creating and demarcating new waves of filmmaking. In this article I consider the significance of indicators and actions signifying the creation of a particular kind of new wave in commercial and popular filmmaking, founded in this case on a quest for improved production values. Specifically, where the conditions informing production and reception of imaginative texts have not undergone substantial change, indicators pointing to a new wave or new direction often bring to light disagreements over how to account for the gaps between diverse ideological claims and everyday experience. In such circumstances, attempts to initiate a new style of popular storytelling do not so much culminate in a break with previous styles of storytelling as they create a new site for tension and strain over ideological claims and narrative coherence. The result is often an extended struggle to generate ideological and narrative congruence out of incongruent elements. And the new style of popular storytelling itself embodies a contesting and contested search for alternative modes of engagement where the conditions of production have proved more or less resistant to restructuring and change.