Modernity and Locality: Visual Spaces in an African Culture

Abstract

The article examines the social, historical and cultural origins that produced Nigerian home video as a visual aesthetic practice. While the article recognizes the different aesthetic goals of the producers, the article argues that the lived experiences of the people which video producers press into their works contain echoes, silences and arrest of the modern in peoples’ cultural lives. These echoes, silences and stagnation show the tentativeness, ambiguities and ambivalences, which often form the templates for entertainments in the videos. The article concludes that the selected videos show the rupture of the modern in the cultural lives of the people and the failure of the cultural and political elites in Nigeria to help carry it through in the society.