"Da África para o mundo": os dilemas da produção e da difusão dos cinemas africanos para audiências globais a partir da entrada da Netflix na Nigéria.

Abstract

This thesis aims to understand how Netflix's foray as an agent for the diffusion of audiovisual content triggers the African cinemas regarding the very idea of “films from Africa” for “global audiences” from its association with Nollywood – as Nigeria’s audiovisual industry is known. To do so, I follow Pierre Bourdieu’s (1996) theoretical-methodological guidelines and his notion of field as a social space where struggles are taken to obtain recognition and occupy dominant positions, to contextualize Nollywood and its main agents in dispute within the scope of production and diffusion of films in Nigeria. By placing Netflix as a new impact agent in this scenario, I identify its position in a field of power over New Nollywood and argue that the company builds a curatorship (LOTZ, 2017) of “African content” for global audiences from a collection of films (SOUTO, 2020) licensed as “originals”. Therefore, I analyze the core of Netflix as a multinational service (LOTZ, 2021) to understand how the portal undertakes a global project on local stories (MIGNOLO, 2020), ultimately exercising the coloniality of power (MALDONADO-TORRES, 2018; MIGNOLO, 2020; QUIJANO, 2000). Finally, I look at how these struggles are reflected in the narratives and styles of the first three Nigerian films licensed as originals by Netflix: Lionheart (by Genevieve Nnaji, 2018), Òlòtūré (by Kenneth Gyang, 2019) and Citation (by Kunle Afolayan, 2020), with special attention to the social positions occupied by the Nigerian agents involved in the production of these works and their relationship with Netflix as a new distribution agent. The analysis of the three films reveals the type of African narratives with which Netflix seeks to associate itself (classic narrative films, mostly spoken in English and with plots revolving around contemporary African women in vulnerable situations), indicating which is the company’s curatorial gesture on Africa, reiterating Western stereotypes about the continent and its place of power and control over images of Africa for global audiences. With the theoretical support of Achille Mbembe (2019), Felwine Sarr (2019) and Valentin-Yves Mudimbe (2019), I discuss the controversy surrounding the construction of images of Africa from Western approaches, which helps to clarify the coloniality that operates in the relations between Africa and Netflix. The research path reveals how the company’s global project on Nigerian cinema ended up bringing it closer to the logic of other African countries, whose dependence on European countries prevents the field of African cinemas from having autonomy. This homology reveals, therefore, that Netflix reinforces the relationship of economic power between the West and Africa, while at the same time removing New Nollywood from its place of autonomy and dissent.