The globalization of cultural industries: Nollywood – the view from the South

UnrestrictedThis study interrogates the rise of new hubs and nodes in the global cultural industries through an in-depth examination of the Nigerian movie industry known as Nollywood. Informal and networked in nature, Nollywood is the second largest movie industry in the world in terms of titles produced per year, and the dominant popular movie producer of sub-Saharan Africa and the African diaspora. Through analysis of the rise, shape, governance, content, and global connections of this industry, this study investigates the shape of global cultural industry networks and the specific challenges and opportunities facing cultural industries growing in the global South, outside of the traditional core. The project is the result of extensive fieldwork done globally but mostly in Lagos, Nigeria, and involved 40 interviews with key actors and 22 observations.; The implications of the location of this industry are at the heart of this project: Nollywood is centered in Lagos, a rapidly growing African mega-city, and an exemplar of the non-spatially-bounded Fourth World, which is made up of that which exists in the gaps between connections to the dominant global order. From here, one can examine the ways in which cultural industry growth in the periphery differs substantially from such growth in the global North, where most research on creative industry development has been done. One can also examine implications of the global reach of this industry on debates regarding global flows of culture, as Nollywood movies, a product of the global South, are circulated globally through alternative informal networks.; The findings of this research suggest a view of global cultural industry networks as multi-polar, and rife with multi-directional flows, standing in the face of North-to-South conceptions of flows in global cultural industries. This research also suggests a new understanding of cultural industry growth in the periphery as being necessarily different from cultural industry growth in the global North. The growth of Nollywood, marked by informality and the strength of black and gray market networks, is an exemplar of the different shape of challenges and opportunities that confront creative industry growth in the urban global periphery.; As the globe is increasingly networked, and the Network Society increasingly becomes the organizing principle of people and industries globally, the emergence of networked informal cultural industries in the global periphery will likely increase, and informality, opacity, and unofficial alternative networks will become even more relevant. The future may be in the harnessing of networked creativity from emerging global hubs, and this project suggests the implications of this both in terms of new understandings of cultural industry growth, and in terms of new conceptualizations of the shape of cultural industry networks in the Network Society