Nollywood Film Industry: Informal Film Practices and Their Cultural Formations

This dissertation further situates Nollywood practitioners informal understandings of their film industry within academic discourses around Nollywood conceptualizations. Local, grassroots knowledge and practices are essential in understanding the emergence, nature and perpetuation of Nollywood, and there exists no closer resource source to Nollywood than those who practice in the industry. In so doing, the role of informality as a local and indigenous system of practice becomes central to how Nollywood is understood among its practitioners, which is sometimes different from how scholars have looked at it. Largely employing ethnographic and discourse analysis methodologies, this dissertation brings these informal Nollywood knowledge forms in dialogue with theories in post-colonialism national cinema, vernacular modernism, media industry studies, and neorealist national cinema.