Call for Panelists !!!

The 9^th Annual Lagos Studies Association Conference

Conference Theme: Continuities and Discontinuities in African Studies

Date: June 17-21, 2025

Format: Hybrid (In Person, University of Lagos/Zoom)

Abstract Deadline: January 1, 2025.

Panel Organizers & Chair: Kolawole Olaiya, Anderson University, Anderson, South Carolina (Email: kolaiya@andersonuniversity.edu) and Adeshina Afolayan, University of Ibadan, Ibadan (Email: a.afolayan@ui.edu.ng)

Nollywood has been known for its prodigious cinematic energies that vigorously intervene in Nigeria’s postcolonial predicament. It does this by articulating the cinematic realism that brings the challenges and precarity of the Nigerian postcolony alive in their gloomy and gruesome dimensions. It also offers comic reliefs that turn these everyday predicaments into moments of hilarity that allow Nigerians to achieve some levels of levity through a collective conviviality and complicity. However, in recent times, a wave of cinematic ingenuity has directed the prodigious Nollywood energy to the historical epic and biopics. From Anikulapo, Jagunjagun, King of Thieves (Agesinkole), and Lisabi to Funmilayo Ransome Kuti, Ayinla, Amina and House of Gaa, Nollywood filmmakers are resurging around the values of the historical fiction.

Some of these films have generated serious discourses, especially on social media. For example, Anikulapo came in for some energetic criticism resulting from its supposed lack of historical verity in its cinematic re-presentation of the ancient Oyo cultural and political dynamics. What do historical epics and biopics tell us about cultural histories and their nuances? What roles do they play in the understanding of Nigeria’s political and sociocultural circumstances and predicaments? How do we relate historical fictions and films with historical dynamics? Can historical epics and biopics enunciate truths about the past? How do filmic worlds relate with ideas of the usable past? Can Nollywood and its filmmakers produce cinematic truths? What are these truths and what do they tell us about Nigeria’s current realities? These questions are the key issues that this panel hope to center in the study of Nollywood films.

We therefore invite anyone interested in this panel to submit a 150-word abstract to Kola Olaiya (kolaolaiya@andersonuniversity.edu) on or before November 15, 2024.

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