Nollywood and Popular Religion

Nigeria's film industry, popularly known as "Nollywood," established itself in the early 1990s at the same time that Pentecostalism, once a marginal religious denomination, became the nation's dominant form of Christianity. Today's Nollywood films emerge from a society steeped in a Pentecostal worldview and are a crucial nexus for producing and counter-producing popular culture in Nigeria, Africa, and beyond. Nollywood and Popular Religion investigates the role that film plays in the construction of everyday life and everyday religion in contemporary Nigeria. With analysis grounded in religious studies and cinema studies, author Chijioke Azuawusiefe contends that Nollywood and Nigerian Pentecostalism have formed a symbiotic relationship that blends the theological with the theatrical. By connecting to the overwhelming influence of Pentecostalism in contemporary southern Nigeria, films from Living in Bondage to The Billionaires: Money Stops Nonsense successfully produce the popular images of wealth, gender, and the supernatural that define Nigeria's contemporary culture. Focusing on melodrama as a key site where stories are produced from the social imaginary in order to reshape it, this volume draws out the vital connections between technologies of visualization, visual narratives, contests for social and religious power, and the daily tensions of life in Nigeria. Nollywood and Popular Religion reveals the ways that Nollywood produces and represents popular religion and how popular religion in turn reclaims, validates, and sustains Nollywood's core motifs of "women, wealth, and witchcraft."