ABSTRACT
In analysing Muslim Hausa film viewing and preferences for Hindi cinema, Brian Larkin (1977) coins the term ‘parallel modernities’ to refer to the co-existence in space and time of multiple economic, religious and cultural flows that are often subsumed within the term ‘modernity’. Larkin argues that his formulation resonates with the term ‘alternative modernities’ used by Arjun Appadurai (1991) but with a key difference. Appadurai links the emergence of alternative modernities with the increased deterritorialization of the globe and the movement of people, capital and political movements across cultural and national boundaries. I want to contribute to the debate by suggesting ‘concurrent modernities’ to explain the use of Hindi film motifs in northern Nigerian Muslim Hausa video films. In this, I argue that none of these conceptions of modernities – parallel and alternative – as applicable to the cinematic development of young urban Muslim Hausa filmmakers took into consideration the violent intrusion of small media technologies that helped to create media identities – rather than social identities divorced from the religious, political and economic transnational flows both Larkin and Appadurai alluded to. These small technologies, in fact, enable transnational communities to use filmic templates ‘in their own image’, exploring similar contexts as those being copied. I explore this concurrent modernity by examining how a Hollywood film, Dead Poets Society (1989, dir. Peter Weir) was reworked in two different countries; first as Mohabbatein (2000, dir. Aditya Chopra) in India, and then as a Muslim Hausa, northern Nigerian video film So . . . (2001, dir. Hafizu Bello). Both Indian and Nigerian titles of the remake mean the same thing: love. In my analysis I want to look at the appropriation styles used and how the Muslim Hausa filmmaker attempted to domesticate Indian social reality as Hausa social identity. Peter Levine argues that ‘we often think of democracy as a political system in which the people are ultimately in control of their government’s budget, important laws, and relations with foreign nations’ (2007: 34). However, it is at least as important for a people to control its own identity and self-image. In order to be selfgoverning, a community or a nation must be able to illustrate and memorialize its
values and present its identity to outsiders and future generations of its own people through works of art and literature, rituals and traditions, forms of entertainment, public spaces and prominent buildings. Small media technologies have provided Nigerian filmmakers with an opportunity to create what I see as ‘industries of representation’ in which each region of the country demonstrates its democratic right to represent its society in its own way. For instance, the southern Nigerian film industry, Nollywood (Onishi 2002), is characterized by the notion of statehood in which plotlines of corruption, crime and governance are interspersed with African ritual beliefs. The northern Nigerian video film industry, Kanywood, is on the other hand characterized by romantic themes of relationships between boys and girls (and occasionally, married couples) in which conflicts are identified and resolved. This focus on the private sphere in Kanywood films, reflecting itself a deeper social focus on gender relationships, is reflected in Hindi films that the most successful Hausa filmmakers directly copy. It is for this reason that I provided ‘concurrent modernity’ as an alternative to Larkin’s ‘parallel modernity’ because both Hindi and Muslim Hausa societies share an antecedent concurrent common interface of the role of Islam and traditional conservative values in mediating social relationships. Nigerian media policies became liberalized only in 1992 during one of the episodic periods of military dictatorship (Onwumechili 2007). The liberalization came about because of ‘international lenders’ pressure and the government’s inability to control access to international satellite signals’ (Onwumechili 2007: 128). Eventually, the government issued the National Broadcasting Commission (NBC) Decree No. 38 in 1992 to liberalize the broadcast market. This liberalization led to high expectations about the use of media in at least a liberal, if not democratic, Nigerian society. These expectations included diversity of the media, availability of new media technologies, enhanced customer service and others. This accelerated the development of the Hausa video film industry which started with a video film titled Turmin Danya in 1990. When in 1999 Nigeria became democratic again, the Hausa video film had developed into a viable industry. The Hausa youth who developed the industry used it as a marker of identity – for their video films were more focused on the self, in contrast with the southern Nigerian video film industry that focuses more on the nation. Democracy therefore provides an element of control. Thus the argument for the continuing role of national identity in cementing a sense of common citizenship is that ‘it provides the political cohesion necessary for a democratic community’ (Schwarzmantel 2003: 86). Within this context, popular culture therefore becomes a forum for the negotiation of race, gender, nation and other identities, and for struggles for power within a society (Dolby 2006). In this chapter I specifically look at the transcultural intertextuality of the three films, not only within the notions of identity, but also within the larger context of media liberalization in Nigeria brought about by democratic opportunities for choices of what to adapt or appropriate. In this transcultural intertextuality, the same message goes through different cultural climates and negotiates its acceptance. There are two processes involved in this: vertical intertextuality, which
looks at textual migrations of the message from the West to the East to Africa; and horizontal intertextuality, which looks at the migration of text from the East to Africa. As Brian Larkin (2003: 172) notes,
Indian film offers Hausa viewers a way of being modern that does not necessarily mean being Western . . . For Nigerian Hausa, Indian film offers a space that is alter to the West against which a cultural politics (but not necessarily a political one) can be waged. The popularity of Indian film with Hausa audiences is so great that, in the north of Nigeria at least where Hausa are based, they are used by both Hausa and their others as means of defining identity and locating the temporal and political nature of that identity.
