LAGOS NEVER SPOILS: THE AESTHETICS, AFFECT, AND POLITICS OF THE CITY IN NIGERIAN SCREEN MEDIAByConnor O’Neill RyanStudies of cinema and urban modernity in Europe and America typically foreground movement, vision, and sensation as the categories of correlation between cinema and the city. Lagos Never Spoils: The Aesthetics, Affect, and Politics of the City in Nigerian Cinema, argues that in postcolonial African cities, often marked by physical disjuncture and material breakdown, urbanism itself is constituted to a greater degree by kinetic mediascapes. It contends that Nollywood does not simply reflect conditions of life in Lagos, but actively shapes the conditions for various urban subjectivities to emerge and transform. Urban crime films adopt melodramatic conventions to depict a city of extreme disparities, while comedies position the rural migrant as the object of metropolitan laughter, and sophisticated blockbusters acclimate viewers to “cool” lifestyle consumerism. Conversely, by bringing attention to the material circuits underlying the production of film and related media in Lagos, this study joins analysis of material culture with that of subjectivity and embodiment. This approach illuminates the various ways that Nollywood exists owing, in large part, to the urban milieu of Lagos and, conversely, that the city's image springs from the imagination of its popular cinema.Lagos Never Spoils sets itself within critical discussions of the importance of African art and culture at a time when the continent is viewed by outsiders as increasingly superfluous to contemporary notions of the global. Sarah Nuttall and Achille Mbembe's ambitious efforts to uncover the worldliness of contemporary African cities subtend my argument that Nollywood is one of many everyday practices through which Lagosians situate themselves within the world at large, and shape the image of the world from a popular, urban, and uniquely Nigerian vantage point. To this end, my research responds to recent critical studies of postcolonial cities, including Filip de Boeck's theorization of the visible and invisible realms of Kinshasa, Sasha Newell's study of performativity and street style in Abidjan, and Ravi Sundaram's notion of media urbanism in Delhi. This dissertation contributes by identifying the way film images, genres, and tropes shape the popular urban imaginary, and demand a recognition of the aesthetic, affective and political function of cinema in postcolonial African cities.
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