Contemporary African Screen Worlds addresses the diverse phenomena and questions emerging from the ongoing transformation of screen media across the African continent, while also contributing to broader shifts in African media scholarship toward broader focuses of analysis, interdisciplinary methodologies, and sustained attention to power and inequality. At the heart of the volume, the editors deploy the concept of “screen worlds” as an expansive analytical framework to “embrace, think through, and explore screens in their entirety” (1). Screens are not merely seen as material objects for displaying audiovisual narratives, but as sites where fictional storyworlds, media infrastructures, and lived social worlds become entangled through practices of production, circulation, spectatorship, and everyday meaning-making.
Although the chapters move across diverse geographical and social contexts, they share a concern with what Moradewun Adejunmobi describes as “how audiovisual stories are told and accessed using different media” (301). Several chapters examine the technological, industrial, and social changes reshaping African screen worlds, with case studies ranging from MTV Shuga Naija to Netflix’s disruptive role and the use of WhatsApp for distribution. Other contributions further expand the analysis by focusing on forms of labour and agency often marginal to scholarship, including Nollywood location managers, entrepreneurial film students, female directors and producers, and archival practitioners. Furthermore, the volume pays sustained attention to audiences and fandoms, treating them not as passive consumers but as active participants in screen worlds. Across these overlapping academic interventions, the volume shows how African screen worlds are made and lived through connections among changing media infrastructures, differently situated actors, creative labours and practices, diverse aspirations and constraints, and wider social relations.
As someone trained in anthropology, I find the volume’s “people-oriented approach” (4) especially compelling. Fieldwork, interviews, and focus groups give the collection much of its relational and affective force, allowing contributors to move beyond media texts and industries to examine people’s “physical and emotional relations” (2) with screens. This grounded methodology also creates important conceptual openings for African media studies. Alexander Bud’s chapter on Nollywood home scenes is exemplary in this regard. Through the metaphor of “treehouses,” Bud argues that Nollywood houses are not purely bounded infrastructures for filming, but active sites of connection and circulation through which fictional storyworlds and lived social worlds flow into one another. This observation is made possible by the sustained and wide-ranging fieldwork with various actors involved in the film production and real estate. Solomon Waliaula’s study of housemaids in Eldoret, Kenya, offers a similarly vivid account of how Nollywood films become meaningful within everyday life, as domestic workers engage with screen narratives to imagine, endure, and interpret their own social lives and status. However, this methodological and conceptual ambition is not realized evenly across the volume. Some chapters use textual analysis and limited case studies, deploying “screen worlds” more as a descriptive label than as a developed analytical framework.
This volume is particularly strong in foregrounding what Dovey calls “the gendered nature of diegetic and industrial screen worlds” and in “seeking out women-led, womanist screen worlds” (127). Across the chapters, gender is approached not as a single theme but as a set of intersecting questions about authorship, labour, representation, access, and spectatorship, examined through the experiences of differently situated women involved in African screen worlds. The chapters speak to one another productively, revealing both the possibilities opened by changing media infrastructures and the persistent inequalities that shape who can make films, circulate them, watch them, and be represented within them. Nedine Moonsamy’s chapter adds a productive tension by asking how the feminist African cinema is “compromised by the arrival of video film” (153) particularly through market logics and audience tastes. Yet this is also where I wished the volume had gone further. Although several contributors cautiously acknowledge the differences among women, the volume’s critical possibilities could have been strengthened by a more sustained interrogation of how gender intersects with class, race, institutional power, and unequal access to screen media.
Similarly, another tension in this volume is the uneven geography of African screen worlds. Nigeria and South Africa emerge not only as the continent’ s most developed screen industries, but also as major centers of academic inquiry whose media infrastructures, capital, platforms, and cultural influence often extend transnationally and even globally. This unevenness reflects deeper political, economic, and social asymmetries within the continent, a point addressed in Elastus Mambwe’s chapter. In this sense, as Alessandro Jedlowski suggests, the volume “complicates what a decolonial approach might be” (299) and invites further study of the changing roles of states, transnational companies, online streaming services, and the new power dynamics generated in the process.
In conclusion, Contemporary African Screen Worlds is a timely and inspiring collection that, as Jonathan Haynes suggests, is likely to shape future work in screen studies. Its value lies not only in expanding the range of African screen worlds brought into academic discussion, but also in inviting scholars to rethink how screen media might be studied through a people-centered and affective approach. Dovey’s suggestion that her chapter should be read in conjunction with her documentary points to a productive way of approaching the volume: it is best read alongside the audiovisual materials with which its chapters engage, from films to music videos and documentaries, reminding us that African screen worlds should be approached not only through scholarly texts, but also through the audiovisual materials, practices, and relations that constitute them.
