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The modern global city has always held great fascination for urban geographers, city planners and managers, but also cultural producers such as novelists, filmmakers, fine artistes, other creative workers, and scholars across various disciplines in the humanities and the social sciences. This imaginative and scholarly captivation with the city is not only because the urban space is a site of the convergence of many political-economic and cultural forces. As a technologically built and intensely surveilled space, the postmodern global city is also imbued with enormous centripetal force, mostly because of the concentration of a plethora of economic and other opportunities. These features of urbanity account for the demographic explosion often associated with cities. It is the intense coalescence of political, economic, and cultural forces, combined with demographic explosion and ethnic diversity in the city, that has made it a recurrent site of scholarly and aesthetic contemplation. Intellectuals such as George Simmel, Friedrich Engels, Roland Bathes, Walter Benjamin, Michel De Certeau, Henri Lefebvre and Jonathan Raban, have all written on the different constitutions and remakings of Euro-American urban spaces such as Paris, London, Manchester, New York, Berlin, Vienna, and Chicago.[i]<\/sup><\/a> Africanist scholars have also theorized the unique social-spatial dimensions, identity politics, and power relations in African cities such as Johannesburg, Lagos, Ibadan, Accra, and Kinshasa.[ii]<\/sup><\/a> The impression given by these theorists of the global city, whether in the West or elsewhere, is that it is a physical site of rapid technological, architectural, and demographic transformation as well as a place of sociocultural exchange, thus making it an active discursive arena where, as Roland Barthes notes, \u201csubversive forces, forces of rupture, ludic forces act and meet.\u201d[iii]<\/sup><\/a> This idea of the city as a physical and socio-cultural site enveloped and shaped by varied energies, but also one constantly in the making, always being reconstituted by its inhabitants, is what Connor Ryan explores in his book, Lagos Never Spoils: Nollywood and Nigerian City Life<\/em> (2023).<\/p>\n He does so by focusing on the aesthetic figuration of Lagos, Africa\u2019s mega city, in Nollywood cinema, one of Africa\u2019s most popular modes of cultural expressions and social contemplation. Nollywood is the quintessential city genre. It was born in Lagos, Nigeria, and then spread like a contagion to other cities in Nigeria, across Africa, and the black diaspora. Like the filmmakers of Francophone Africa that Francoise Pfaff examines in her essay on cities in African cinema,[iv]<\/a> Nollywood filmmakers are also city dwellers themselves and most of their stories, like most African popular arts, are about city life and its various nightmares, contradictions, disruptions, potential opportunities, fleeting successes, and occasional extreme pleasures. Connor Ryan turns to Lagos and Nollywood as central discursive paradigms in his work for good reasons. Lagos city, as he notes, possesses \u201ca collection of shared reference points\u201d for most Nigerians and \u201cNollywood remains one thing that the twenty million people in Lagos hold in common.\u201d[v]<\/a> Lagos is not just the hub of cultural production in Nigeria, but also the entire continent, generating and defining the cultural codes that influence everyday life across the continent and beyond. In theorizing Lagos as a cinematic text, Ryan positions and approaches the city \u201cas a crossroads of cultural flows that provide the city\u2019s film industry with an array of commodities, tropes, sentiments, aesthetics, and concepts with which to apprehend historical shifts in city life.\u201d[vi]<\/a> Lagos Never Spoils<\/em> vociferously challenges and bypasses some of the canonical views on the African city, arguing that Eurocentric views on urban space and life have created a calcified vision of the city as a well fabricated spatio-temporal edifice and a set of recognizable social experiences that ignore and \u201cexclude the particularity of cities in the Global South and the place of screen media within them.\u201d[vii]<\/a><\/p>\n In inserting African cities in the global discourse of the politics of urban life or existence, especially the representational works that function to fashion the idea of the city in the national imagination, Ryan insists that beyond the realities and imageries of social disfunction, occasional infrastructural improvements and perennial decay, unrelenting misgovernance, and short-lived moments of prosperity and abundance, there is nothing certain or fixed about the city as such; that it is always in the making and holds something for almost everyone, whether at the fringes or the epicenter of the city\u2019s heartbeat. Lagos Never Spoils<\/em> thus suggests that screen media is an appropriate platform to look out for, gauge, and understand the vast and often invisible and quiet voices and energies that continually reconstitute and define African cities. Combining old-style British empiricism, rigorous and insightful textual analysis, and riveting North American high-power theoretical fireworks, the book argues that Lagos<\/em> is always being reconstituted by its inhabitants and that \u201cLagos never spoils because residents work continually to ensure the city sustains something for them and that Nollywood\u2014the industry and the body of films\u2014both embodies and represents this continual urban transformation.\u201d[viii]<\/a> The broader point the book makes, and with compelling evidence, is the view that amidst seeming political-economic chaos and social crises, lives are still being lived, personal ambitions are still being pursued and at times, fulfilled, and moral choices are still being made that serve to buttress the decency and goodness of humanity. Lagos Never Spoils<\/em> thus attests to how Nollywood, as a form of African popular expressivity, bears witness to these quotidian urban activities that are indicative of social and cultural transformations that transcend the physical spatial changes in urban spaces in Africa. <\/p>\n The book\u2019s argument of course draws and builds on previous scholarly work reflecting on the discourse of the city in Nollywood cinema, which has always pointed to the ways in which Lagos is both the nodal point of Nollywood production and a recurrent leitmotif in the industry\u2019s visual narratives.[ix]<\/a> But Lagos Never Spoils<\/em> deepens that analysis, where Lagos serves as the main heuristic device to capture and hypothesize the endless imaginative work and subtle but effective acts of individual and collective reconstitutions of the urban sphere in Africa. Unlike the previous Africanist scholarship on Nollywood and the city, Lagos Never Spoils<\/em> proposes fresh and different methods of reading Nollywood films as socially-loaded cultural texts \u201cinscribed by\u2014rather than merely reflecting\u2014conditions in Lagos and generates interpretations that push the formal analysis of Nollywood into new terrain.\u201d[x]<\/a> The book uses Lagos as a poignant metaphor to capture and direct readers to a wider pattern of cultural and social (re)negotiations unfolding in African cities. As a site of constant (re)modification, Ryan uses Lagos to suggest a malleable and reinventable social sphere. What Nollywood films show us about Lagos, he argues, is that like many other cities in Africa, it is \u201ca place where many things are possible and where Nigeria\u2019s tremendous capacity for creativity, ingenuity, and cultural accommodation is on full display.\u201d[xi]<\/a> In demonstrating the taut links between media aesthetics and urbanism in Africa that Nollywood depicts, Ryan offers us three conceptual tools to make sense of the plasticity, undecidability, resilience, and relentless creativity that define Lagos: ambivalence, entanglements, and enclosure. Chapter one focuses on the theme of ambivalence in two celluloid films released in the early 1980s; Moses Olaiya\u2019s Orun Mooru<\/em> (Heaven is Hot<\/em>, 1982) and Ade Folayan\u2019s Taxi Driver<\/em> (1983). Although one might challenge how these films come to represent what we associate with Nollywood, a genre that has always relied on video technology rather celluloid, he uses both texts to argue that \u201cthese films incorporate spectacular visuals<\/em> of the Lagos cityscape transformed by oil wealth into narratives<\/em> about work that never pays, money that flows from evil deeds, and forms of pleasure so exuberant they kill.\u201d He further notes that these \u201cfilms denounce the seductive power of oil wealth and society\u2019s integration with global fast capitalism while, at the same time, partaking in this seduction.\u201d[xii]<\/a> Set in the first decade following a flourishing and dizzying Petro-economy of the 1970s, both films use the boundless hustle and bustle, and the searing resplendence of a dazzling postcolonial architecture of Lagos to comment on a new social and moral architecture in Lagos at the very threshold of an emerging late-capitalist order marked by the abstraction of capital and wealth, and the moral quandary unbridled neoliberalism brought upon and promoted within Lagos as a postcolonial city. So, the crucial assertion Lagos Never Spoils<\/em> makes is that the city is not just the physical space, but the invisible premises, mindsets, ethos, mundane routines, and regimes of decisions that are made in that urban climate. A similar argument has been made in relation to other forms of expressivity in Africa. In her work examining the environmental matric in Cameroonian verge, Eunice Ngongkim, for example argues that in contemporary Anglophone Cameroon poetry, \u201cthe city or town, as the case may be, transcends the mere fact of geography or place to assume metaphorical or symbolic proportions. Its topography, sights and sounds are appropriated as valid metaphors of a poet\u2019s vision of society.\u201d[xiii]<\/a> Ryan is the first to make this argument in relation to the African city in Nollywood cinema, and perhaps postcolonial African cinema in general. <\/p>\n Chapter two focuses on two television series of the mid-1980, 1990s, and 2000s, Ken Saro Wiwa\u2019s Basi and Company<\/em> (Oct. 1986 to Oct. 1990) and Amaka Igwe\u2019s Fuji House of Commotion<\/em> (2001-2013), to further illustrate what Ran sees as the ambivalence of Lagos as an African city. With compelling textual evidence drawn from very savvy interpretations, Ryan uses these two TV series to assert that \u201curbanism is not, in its final instance, only an essentially spatial phenomenon.\u201d[xiv]<\/a> Moving away from the idea of the cinematic city to the notion of the television city, Ryan not only details the powerful influence of early Nigerian television drama influences on Nollywood aesthetics, especially the primacy and focalization of the interior space over the vast city streets and its sprawling urban architecture. Proffering the concept of the television city situation, Lagos Never Spoils<\/em> also demonstrates how this first wave of TV serials in Nigeria, all of which are diegetically situated in Lagos, \u201cproduce an urban imaginary without relying on a visually spectacular cinematic mode of rendering urban space and thereby challenge the commonplace notion that the city is out there, in the streets, where everyday life unfolds, not in here, in the parlors, sitting rooms, bedrooms, and barrooms where urbanism is experienced as a set of social relations and city \u2018situation.\u2019\u201d[xv]<\/a> It is the vast congeries of invisible urban social relations across ethnic, religious, gender, and even moral lines that he associates with the urban entanglements that Nollywood documents and testifies to. So, for Connor Ryan, Lagos, like most mega African cities, is not a physical place architecturally designed by city planners and managers, but a social climate, or what Raymond Williams called it, a \u201clived culture.\u201d[xvi]<\/a> <\/p>\n In many ways, Nollywood Never Spoils<\/em> is a brilliant scholarly elaboration of the politicization of culture in the African urban sphere. It expatiates on this argument in chapter three where Ryan focuses on how Nollywood films narrativize social relations defined by particular urban ethos. Focusing on films mostly produced and released in the 19990s such as Kenneth Nnebue\u2019s Died Wretched<\/em> (1998) Tade Ogidan\u2019s Owo Blow<\/em> (1996), narratives of what he calls \u201curban entanglements,\u201d a term Ryan uses to designate inescapable metropolitan social relations that inhere shared consequences. He argues that \u201cthis mode of representing Lagos illustrates that urban networks do not simply trace spatial connectivity but rather generate the combinational agency that, more than anything else, animates city life.\u201d[xvii]<\/a> What the book does with its dazzling analysis in this chapter is to push harder on the poignant argument that Nollywood films, especially in its early years in the 1980s and 90s, in visualizing and commenting on the African city, concentrated less on the physical space and more on social life or what I have termed the politicization of culture and ordinary life. This methodological approach to media interpretation is particularly fascinating because Ryan argues, it \u201coverturns the primacy of spatial thinking about cities and challenges the inclination in film studies to privilege visual representations of space over other elements of city life enregistered in other formal features of film.\u201d[xviii]<\/a> Radically pushing the boundaries of normative understandings of media interpretation of urban experience, Ryan asserts a counter methodological route that perceives and reads the mediation of African urbanism through a process of \u201csocial webbing rather than spatial mapping.\u201d[xix]<\/a> It is in the social relations forged by characters\/people living in African metropolitan spaces and their fallouts, whether genial or disastrous, that we come to understand the essential spirit and mood of the African city, not the spatial reorganizations engineered by city managers that unfold over time.<\/p>\n Nollywood has always been framed as an artisanal culture industry created by despondent urban youth seeking an opportunity to not only tell stories about everyday life, but to eke out a living in an extremely inhospitable social and economic postcolonial environment.[xx]<\/a> The evidence of its artisanal roots was (and continues to be) the poor quality of films that the industry produced in the first two decades of its founding. Since the 2010s, however, a new genre of Nollywood films has emerged. Better funded with substantial production budgets, directed by professional filmmakers, aesthetically sophisticated, and well-integrated into the international circuits of film distribution, this new genre of Nollywood is referred to as New Nollywood<\/em>. In chapter four, Connor Ryan brings his proposition about the sociality of contemporary African urbanism in media production to bear on selected New Nollywood films. But here, he asserts that rather than weaving urbanity into the narratives of the films and limiting the visuality of urban space to the interior space, New Nollywood films dare to move outdoors, thus lending \u201cfuller texture and density to screen representations of urban life\u2026\u201d[xxi]<\/a> The author asserts that this radical changes in portraying urban life in Africa, \u201chas encouraged the generation of new images of Lagos and new modes of envisioning the city.\u201d[xxii]<\/a> Drawing on patterns relating to the establishment and location new cinema theatres in plush neighborhoods, improved production \u201cvalues\u201d and the close reading of several films and TV series, that new vision of the African city is one imbued with characters integrated into an urban social milieu marked by what Carmela Garritano has described as \u201cassemblages of desires, bodies, objects, and intensities that presents spectators with pleasurable, affective encounters with new urban consumerism.\u201d[xxiii]<\/a><\/p>\n Chapter five of the book deepens this argument, drawing connections between urban romance and the cultivation of an urban mindset enveloped and nurtured by neoliberal practices associated with metropolitan life and work, individual growth, and wider social improvements of society. Focusing specially on romantic comedies, it argues that the genre \u201clargely rehearses the mantra of a neoliberal work ethic, namely, that self-fulfillment is found at work,\u201d[xxiv]<\/a> but also that \u201cthat work does not only produce goods and services; it also produces social subjects.\u201d[xxv]<\/a> Pivoting back to the theme of ambivalence in the book, but here, through complex processes of segmentation and enclosures, the project of self-making, or subjectivation, as Ryan theorizes it, although innately fuzzy and ambivalent, \u201cit leaves the individual with the agency to pursue a course unintended by power.\u201d[xxvi]<\/a> Here, one is reminded of the many ways in which popular economies like Nollywood, both through industry practices and visual representations, come to enunciate what Osef Bayart has termed \u201cthe quiet encroachment of the ordinary,\u201d i.e., how ordinary people invade and subvert normative social spaces and established cultural procedures of governmentality designed to exclude them from the pleasure and perks of formality, including neoliberal globalization.[xxvii]<\/a> What Lagos Never Spoils<\/em> demonstrates here, therefore, is a very unique mediation of the African city in New Nollywood films in which romance, character formation, neoliberalism, and the wider social transformation needed for collective survival and flourishing are all interconnected through different social, cultural and affective capillaries. What id suggests is that there is a strong link between Lagos, the films about the city, and Nigeria\u2019s video film industry popularly known as Nollywood. The book continues this line of argument in chapter six, but this time focuses on changes within the Nollywood industry itself, rather than just in the film narratives themselves. It identifies the unique aesthetic practices of particular new Nollywood director who produce what he calls \u2018\u2018dark films.\u2019 These crime thrillers, he notes, are not necessarily about \u201ccrime, insecurity, or a shadowy underground side of Lagos but instead portrays the \u2018old\u2019 objects of bad conscience, such as greed, corruption, violence, and betrayal, as the signs of a new cinematic style and sensibility.\u201d He notes further that in these films, \u201cLagos becomes the object of attraction rather than the embodiment of anxiety, and in this respect, New Nollywood\u2019s dark and gritty films represent examples of the socialization of alternative affective engagements with city life.\u201d[xxviii]<\/a> Through a series of new and improved aesthetic practices, the new Nollywood directors Ryan associates with dark films not only draw on the established cinema aesthetics associated with high-end cinephilia in European arts cinema and Hollywood films, but they also reinvent those industry codes and aesthetic practices, combined with a portrayal of both the squalid and sleek aspects of Lagos, to offer a new image of the city that allows these directors to distinguish themselves from the work of other artistes in a city and creative industry where creative saturation makes it difficult to stand out. Endnotes <\/strong><\/p>\n [i]<\/a> See Roland Barthes, \u201cSemiology and the Urban\u201d in The City and the Sign: An Introduction to Urban Semiotics<\/em>. Eds. M. Gottdiener and A. Lagopoulos. New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1986; Michel de Certeau. The Practice of Everyday Life<\/em>. Berkeley; University of California Press, 1988; Jonathan Raban. The Soft City<\/em>. London: Hamish Hamilton, 1974; George Simmel. \u201cThe Metropolis and Menta Life\u201d in Ed. Ed. Philip Kasinitz. Metropolis: Centre and Symbol of Our Times<\/em>. London: Macmillan, 1995; Henri Lefebvre. Writings on Cities<\/em>. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1996; Friedrich Engels. The Condition of the Working Class in England in 1884.<\/em> London: Allen and Unwin, 1892; Walter Benjamin. One Way Street<\/em>. London: New Left Books, 1979. <\/p>\n [ii]<\/a> See for example, Sarah Nuttall and Achille Mbembe (Eds.). Johannesburg: The Elusive City.<\/em> Durham; Duke University Press, 2008; Rem Koolhaas. Lagos: How it Works.<\/em> Lars Muller Publishers, 2010; Jane Guyer, LaRay Denzer, and Adugun Agbaje (Eds.). Money Struggles and City Life: Devaluation in Ibadan and Other Urban Centers in Southern Nigeria, 1986-1996.<\/em> Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann, 2002; Filip de Boeck and Marie-Francoise Plissart. Kinshasa: Tales of the Invisible City.<\/em> Ghent: Ludion, 2006; and Ato Quayson, Oxford Street, Accra: City Life and the Itineraries of Transnationalism.<\/em> Durham: Duke University Press, 2014. <\/p>\n [iii]<\/a> Barthes, Roland. \u201cSemiology and the Urban.\u201d The City and the Sign: An Introduction to Urban Semiotics<\/em>. Eds. M Gottdiener and Alexandros Ph. Lagopoulos. New York: Columbia University Press, 1986. Pp. 96.<\/p>\n [iv]<\/a>Pfaff, Francoise. \u201cAfrican Cities as Cinematic Text.\u201d Ed. Francoise Pfaff. Focus on African Films.<\/em> Bloomington: Indiana Univ Press, 2004. <\/p>\n [v]<\/a> Lagos Never Spoils<\/em>, Pp. 01.<\/p>\n [vi]<\/a> Lagos Never Spoils, Pp. 02.<\/p>\n [vii]<\/a> Lagos Never Soil, Pp 03.<\/p>\n [viii]<\/a> Lagos Never Spoils, Pp. 04.<\/p>\n [ix]<\/a> Nollywood scholars such as Obododimma Oha, \u201cThe Ambivalent City\u201d (2001), Onookome Okome, \u201cThe Anxious City\u201d (2002), Jonathan Haynes, \u201cNollywood in Lagos, Lagos in Nollywood\u201d (2007), and Paul Ugor, Nollywood, Popular Culture and Marginalized Youth<\/em> (2016) have all written about the aesthetic figuration of the city in Nollywood films.<\/p>\n [x]<\/a> Lagos Never Spoil, Pp. 17.<\/p>\n [xi]<\/a> Lagos Never Spoil, Pp. 05.<\/p>\n [xii]<\/a> Lagos never Spoils, Pp. 31-2.<\/p>\n [xiii]<\/a> Eunice Ngongkim. Anglophone Cameroon Poetry and the Environmental Matrix<\/em>. Bern, Switzerland: Peter Lang, 2017. Pp. 26.<\/p>\n [xiv]<\/a> Lagos Never Spoils, Pp. 87.<\/p>\n [xv]<\/a> Lagos Never Spoils, Pp. 70.<\/p>\n [xvi]<\/a> For more details regarding Raymond Williams\u2019 idea of \u2018structure of feeling,\u201d see his book, The Long Revolution<\/em> (1961). <\/p>\n [xvii]<\/a> Lagos Never Spoils, Pp. 93-4.<\/p>\n [xviii]<\/a> Nollywood Never Spoils, PP. 94.<\/p>\n [xix]<\/a> Lagos Never Spoils, Pp. 117.<\/p>\n [xx]<\/a> Paul Ugor. Nollywood: Popular Culture and Narratives of Marginalized Youth in Nigeria<\/em>. Durham, NC: Carolina Academic Press, 2016.<\/p>\n [xxi]<\/a> Lagos Never Spoils, Pp. 124.<\/p>\n [xxii]<\/a> ibid<\/p>\n [xxiii]<\/a> ibid<\/p>\n [xxiv]<\/a> Lagos Never Spoils, Pp. 151.<\/p>\n [xxv]<\/a> Lagos Never Spoils, Pp. 150<\/p>\n [xxvi]<\/a> Lagos Never Spoils, Pp. 180-81.<\/p>\n [xxvii]<\/a> See Osef Bayat. \u2018\u2018Un-civil society: the politics of the \u2018informal people\u2019,\u2019\u2019 Third World Quarterly<\/em> 18 (1): (1997). Pp. 53\u201372.<\/p>\n [xxviii]<\/a> Lagos Never Spoils, Pp. 191-2<\/p>\n
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\nTaken together, the crucial argument Connor Ryan makes in Lagos Never Spoils<\/em> is the idea that \u201cNollywood continually stirs up discourses on Lagos and thereby animates numerous ways of thinking and feeling about the [African] city.\u201d[xxix]<\/a> In making that argument, the book too never offers us one monolithic or fixed view of Lagos. Instead, what it shows us is a city constantly changing in both its architectural, economic, social, and creative dimensions due to both local and international influences associated with neoliberal and cultural globalization. What we come to know of Lagos, then, is not a postcolonial city in chronic stasis, but a particular social climate defined by, ruled, and apprehended by shifting cultural codes and assumptions. Connor Ryan\u2019s analysis of Lagos in Nollywood cinema makes clear the assertion by the preeminent geographer and spatial theorist, Doreen Massey, that space is not only \u201csocially constructed,\u201d but also that \u201cthe social is spatially constructed too.\u201d[xxx]<\/a> Lagos Never Spoils<\/em> elaborates on the former.<\/p>\n