African Video Movies and Global Desires. Carmela Garritano

about an African or national identity because they emerge from, are shaped by, and reshape “a mass-mediated imaginary that frequently transcends national space” (Appadurai 1996, 6).

      Despite the expressions of global membership they convey, African popular videos have gone unnoticed outside African area studies by critics and scholars of world cinema. Largely attuned to cinematic forms and flows predominant in the first world institutions of global cine-literacy—film festivals, art-house cinemas, classrooms, and libraries—the current configuration of global media and cinema studies has included scholarship on elite African cinema, but eclipsed minor and commercial cultural forms and circuits that never intersect with these institutions.10 Produced and disseminated through decentralized, private, and nonlegal circuits that variously have been called “minor” (Lionnet and Shi 2005), “unofficial” (Adejunmobi 2007), and “parallel” (Larkin 2004), African video movies move across local landscapes as well as through global cities (Sassen 2001) and media capitals (Curtin 2003), but travel along networks located under, around, and adjacent to major commercial and academic institutions and networks of exchange. They are among the multiplicity of unmapped media flows and forms that have emerged in the wake of the many changes linked to globalization: increased privatization, a proliferation of new, small media and electronic technologies, including video, satellite TV, and the internet, and the expansion of informal markets. Centered on this new African grassroots media form, and the uncharted media migrations and publics in West Africa and the African diaspora it has created, this study deepens our understanding of globalization and its cultural ecology. It pries open the closed circuit of the academic domain of cultural production by investigating a popular and commercial visual form that circulates within the space of the African everyday.

      My notion of the everyday evokes Ravi Sundaram’s description of the electronic everyday of Indian technoculture (1990).11 Sundaram describes the electronic everyday as “a space” wrought from vast inequalities of wealth “where practices of quotidian consumption, mobility, and struggle are articulated” (1990, 48). It is a space of nonlegality maintained in large part outside the reach of the state, where mobility and innovation are rewarded, and much as in the Ghanaian video industry, its agents exploit new technologies to improvise creative survival strategies and practices of piracy. The fragmented and dispersed networks of production and distribution of the everyday are organized by small entrepreneurs, or the petty-commodity sector. Part of the informal economy, “the actors in this space have simply ignored the state as the regulator of everyday life” (Sundaram 1999, 64), and they take little notice of the official conventions that govern the formal economy.

      In the Ghanaian video industry, the space of the everyday shares several important characteristics with Sundaram’s electronic everyday. Most obviously, its networks and processes operate in a zone of nonformality, which can frustrate the researcher’s attempts to gather numerical data and precise information. Transactions are conducted without documentation. If records are kept, they are often irregular and not reliable. Very little in the system is codified. Artists and crew negotiate their fees with producers, directly and privately; payments for equipment or services rendered are often made in an ad hoc manner. On the set of a movie, money is readily exchanged informally for favors, as small loans, as gifts, or to fulfill social expectations. Producers always seem to be waiting to receive their money from distributors, and the people involved in the making of a movie, at every level, always seem to be waiting for the producer to pay them an outstanding balance. The ubiquity of piracy, the expansion of opportunities for domestic viewing, and the fluidity of the multiple sites for consuming videos publicly confound attempts to figure out how many people actually see any one video movie. Neither the state nor independent producers could possibly regulate the public, informal sites of movies consumption, which include the video parlor, “tie-in spaces” (Ajibade 2007), and numerous, temporary “street corner” gatherings (Okome 2007b) that assemble unpredictably throughout the city. It is also nearly impossible to state with certainty how profitable a movie might have been. Haynes and Okome note, “All figures on sales and profits need to be treated with extreme caution, as they are frequently inflated for publicity purposes, or deflated in order to defraud partners” (2000, 69). And because money and favors are continually being exchanged, and because the financial life of one movie project runs right into the next production, producers themselves have a hard time knowing exactly how much profit they might have made from any one movie. It is perhaps for these reasons that the everyday tends to be an overlooked space, one largely absent in the critical discourse on global cinema, which, like the discourse on technological globalization, has tended to center on “elite domains of consumption and identity” (Sundaram 1999, 63) and, I would add, the artistic and politicized products that move through those domains. This book sketches the broad parameters and shifts of the everyday culture of Ghanaian video movies, while conceding that its fluidity and informality continually disrupt this aim.

      Adding to the many articles that examine, and often criticize, the representation of women in Nigerian and Ghanaian movies, this book attends to the enunciation of gender difference in the videos. In other words, it analyzes not only the ways women are portrayed but uncovers the gender norms and ideologies that the movies produce. Without question, video technology has expanded opportunities for women to work as producers of media in Nigeria (Haynes and Okome 2000; Okome 2007c) and in Ghana. As I note in chapter 4, no Ghanaian women had directed or produced a documentary or feature film before the advent of video movies. Yet, today in the Ghanaian industry, the number of men who hold positions as producers, directors, editors, screenwriters, and so on is far, far larger than the number of women in the same roles. That the products of a male-dominated media industry would be misogynistic or sexist is not inevitable, of course. It is true, however, that many Ghanaian movies do tend to recycle gender stereotypes with a long history in African popular culture and naturalize a similarly deep-rooted “ideology of patriarchy” (Okome 2007c, 166). Wisdom Agorde (2007), for example, has described an ethic of masculinity reiterated in Nollywood movies. Rooted in gender difference, this ethic defines manhood through violence, wealth, and ownership of women. Newell has identified the good-time girl and “the infinitely patient wife” as two common feminine character types in Ghanaian popular literature (2000, 37), and these characters appear frequently in videos, too. Agbese Aje-Ori (2010) has added the “mother-in-law” as another female stock character, and in this book, I describe the figure of the “monstrous woman.” A reimagining of the good-time girl, this frighteningly powerful woman unleashes evil on the men who misuse or abuse her. Highly symbolic, she dwells at the limits of morality; her punishments reinstate social norms violated by selfish men with enormous appetites for women, food, and money.

      Like Stephanie Newell (1997; 2000), I conceptualize African popular culture as a gender apparatus, a technology that produces and naturalizes particular gender ideologies. Gender is not incidental or supplemental to the worlds and identities imagined in the videos, but necessary to the articulation of these identities (Garritano 2000). The work of gender theorist Judith Butler undergirds the feminist readings included here. In her writing, Butler theorizes “the performative” function of gender norms, demonstrating that through repetition across multiple sites of culture, gender ideologies sanction and naturalize ways of being and of desiring. As Butler notes, “A performative” works “to produce that which it declares” (1993, 107). Crucially, then, cultural forms do not simply reflect dominant ideologies but are productive of those ideologies. They have the capacity to reiterate norms and to question or parody them. Women videomakers such as Veronica Quarshie and Shirley Frimpong-Manso have challenged gender stereotypes common in Ghanaian movies. Like the female writers Newell describes (2000), these women moviemakers speak from within dominant narratives of gender and open possibilities for the emergence of alternative ways of being men and women.

      Although mainly centered on Nollywood, the scholarship on African video does include some very promising book chapters and articles on Ghanaian video movies. Several of these studies, in their attempts to introduce readers to and generate interest in Ghanaian video, have tended to be either wide-ranging and overly general, or limited in scope, discussing common thematic or generic features of small selections of video texts. A notable exception to this preliminary scholarship on Ghanaian video is the groundbreaking work of anthropologist Birgit Meyer, whose series of articles have examined Ghanaian popular video as an articulation of Pentecostalism. For Meyer (2004), Ghanaian popular video,