Music Video and the Transnationalism of Nigerian Screen Media: Watching Falz's “This Is Nigeria”
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Published:April 2025
Femi Eromosele, 2025. "Music Video and the Transnationalism of Nigerian Screen Media: Watching Falz's “This Is Nigeria”", Contemporary African Screen Worlds, Lindiwe Dovey, Añulika Agina, Michael W. Thomas
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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.