TRAUMA AND THE SPECTACLE OF THE OTHER: CULTURAL MEMORY IN MAINFRAME'S SAWOROIDE

Abstract

The definitive category of the term 'Nollywood' may need no further extension. Scholars, both in Nigeria and abroad, have drawn issues, made allusions, problematised and provoked amazing dialectics on the proper definition of the subject. There is, however, a general consensus on scope: Nollywood is the term that refers to films, especially the home video format, made, produced and particularly peculiar to Nigeria. Furthermore, so much more has been written on Nollywood and its influence in the propagation and promotion of the African (specifically Nigerian) culture. If the dynamism of technology in its continual evolution were foreclosed, the issue of Nollywood and culture could have been termed an absolute cliché. This paper thus examines Nollywood and culture from a rather unconventional purview: how it transmits cultural memory, thereby eliciting some form of traumatic remembering and carthasis at the same time.