Transnational Screen Worlds: Music Video in Africa, Beyond, and Back
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Published:April 2025
Music Video and the Transnationalism of Nigerian Screen Media: Watching Falz's “This Is Nigeria”
Building on the scholarship on Nollywood, this chapter shifts emphasis from earlier theorizations that the global influence of Nigerian cultural products derives from their dispersal through “informal” or “pirate” networks to international viewers of similar cultural heritage. It argues that music videos can travel through official routes, aided by music video television stations and internet-enabled platforms. These avenues provide a more democratized space for audiovisual texts from around the world to interact without the overt hierarchization that attends the curation of other media like film. Such conditions, along with the increasing popularity of Nigerian music, enable the Nigerian music video to court an audience that is not necessarily affinitive. The chapter offers as a case study the music video “This Is Nigeria,” a recontextualization of Childish Gambino’s “This Is America,” released in 2018 by the Nigerian rapper Falz.
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Rolling to “A-Free-Ka”: Seeing and Hearing the Transmedia Screen Worlds of Kahlil Joseph's “Cheeba”
Kahlil Joseph is a multi-award-winning filmmaker based in Los Angeles. He has collaborated with the likes of the musicians Beyoncé, Kendrick Lamar, FKA Twigs, Flying Lotus, and Sampha as well as large-scale organizations Kenzo, O2, and Vans. His music video “Cheeba” (2010)—one of director’s earliest projects—promotes the first single from the multi-instrumentalist Shafiq Husayn’s debut solo project En’ A-Free-Ka (2009). This chapter explores how the “Cheeba” video constructs complex formations of Africa (or “A-Free-Ka”) through transmedia screen worlds that oscillate between divergent media forms and disparate cultural affiliations. In turn, the chapter argues that the collaboration between Kahlil Joseph and Shafiq Husayn offers new opportunities for understanding how contemporary diasporic creatives interact with and navigate different cultures and settings, both including and beyond African contexts.