The phenomenon of Nollywood has given rise to a growing body of critical works, much of it in response to Jonathan Haynes's early call for new critical approaches. In addition to their local appeal, the video film industries, especially Nigeria's, have sought to distribute their films abroad. Nollywood distributors and filmmakers are seeking international audiences, thus positioning the films as ‘transnational’. Tracking the ‘transnational’ aspect of Nollywood films has led to the study of the industry in historical, economic, and social perspective. When content analysis is found (again Haynes's focus on genre studies has prevailed), it is often seen in terms of the social immediacy of the targeted audience.

Global Nollywood focuses on dimensions of the above issues, often with considerable success, at times not. Matthias Krings and Onookome Okome lay out the challenge in their introduction by focusing on the pan-African status of the films and on the need for popular culture criticism. Their emphasis falls on the audience and its desire to participate in modernity. They account for Nollywood's popularity by stressing its ‘Africanity’, which its audiences find relevant, and they stress its vernacular modernity, what Jean and John Comaroff have dubbed ‘Afromodernity’. Nollywood's industry is continually positioned historically as fostering a popular cinema in contrast to auteurist African cinema. Their genres are grounded in experiences and aspirations familiar to the Nigerian audiences, in contrast to mainstream Hollywood films. Yet, it is no longer strictly oppositional to that dominant cinema, but rather functions without needing to respond to negative Western stereotypes of Africans.

In the section titled ‘Mapping out the Terrain’, Allessandro Jedlowski does an excellent job of tracking the formation of the video industry – its boom, the economic stress that came recently with overproduction and piracy, its strategies for maintaining future production (especially by the creation of new theatres for exhibition), and the need to deal with Africa Magic and other TV channels devoted to showing Nollywood films. Most interestingly, he tracks how a pirated DVD, purchased in Naples, made its way throughout European and African circuits, transformed from an original to a ‘copy of a copy of a copy’. At each point of its copying it was rebranded or partially changed in language or presentation so as to attract new audiences. As the need to avoid piracy has grown, so has the pressure to build cinema halls where more expensive productions might recoup their costs. Thus the impetus for ‘New Nollywood’ films is explored, along with the desire to exhibit in theaters in London or elsewhere.

The ‘transnational’ challenge – exhibiting and selling DVDs abroad, making films that speak to the experiences of diaspora Africans – has itself generated a subgenre of Nollywood films, examined in the section termed ‘Transnational Nollywood’. There in ‘The Nollywood Diaspora: A Nigerian Video Genre’, Jonathan Haynes sets out to detail the themes that mark this new subgenre. Haynes examines a few films, but also creates a chart of themes to determine which aspects of the diaspora experience are represented in the films. His work is exemplary, and is cited by other authors in the collection as they explore such specific topics as sexual trafficking of women and the creation of Nollywood films in Belgium and the Netherlands. Okome analyzes the strategies of Osuofia in London, demonstrating how its parodic approach depends not only on local gnosis, but is able to utilize that local point of view to reverse the power of the demeaning European view of the African country bumpkin that privileges the perspective of the colonized. The figure of parody becomes the agent in this reversal, thus demonstrating the importance of prioritizing the popular culture approach over classic forms of film analysis that would miss the strengths of the ‘crazy comedy’ in representing postcolonial difference.

The last two sections of the volume stress the transnational dimension by focusing on foreign audiences, from South Africa to Barbados to Italy and elsewhere, and on the creation of new video industries, inspired by Nollywood, in Tanzania and in northern Nigeria. Noteworthy essays include Katrien Pype's study of the role of Congolese Pentacostalism in the fantastic reception of Nollywood films and Nigerianness in Kinshasa. Jane Bryce describes how Barbadian and Nigerian popular culture and society share similar values and styles, accounting for the fascinating reception of Nollywood in the island diaspora community that sees itself reflected in the depictions of Nigerian religion whose occult practices resemble the island's Obeah. Most striking is the sense that the excesses of Nollywood, the melodrama, Pentacostalism, and displays of wealth are all received as unmediated expressions of real life in Africa, in contrast to the viewers' dismissal of Hollywood images as unrealistic.

Many essays highlight how audiences living outside of Nigeria respond to the films as providing a vista onto the way things are ‘back home’ or in the village, as true representations of real life. The irony, then, is that when popular critical approaches are employed, audience perspectives are recorded that would be considered naïve by academic or scholarly critics. Okome deliberately navigates these troubled waters, attempting to validate critical approaches that do not dismiss the popular. The essays in this volume do not always succeed in accomplishing that, and may be justly critiqued as theoretically limited, but the cumulative effect of the studies is to provide invaluable information for those wishing to keep up with where African cinema is today.