ABSTRACT
What is now sometimes considered as Old Nollywood in Nigerian film scholarship produced a culture of film posters that serve as important social transcripts of Lagos. Despite its growing digital transformations, the character of Lagos as a postcolonial megacity continues to be defined by a print culture articulated through different forms of visual signs and texts. Whether as an aspect of religious promotional culture offering “symbolic inscriptions of Pentecostal advertising” (Ukah 2008) or as public exhibitions of political advertisements carefully displayed as wall posters, print remains integral to an exhibitionist image of Lagos that is circulated in several other media domains. The same argument can be made of film posters in Lagos. As Jonathan Haynes (2007) has noted, Nollywood’s imagination constitutes the city’s images, making them public symbols that are intrinsic in a reciprocal sense as a part of that cityscape and its visual culture. The Lagos cityscape presents a built environment that shapes Nollywood films materially, through aspects of film paratexts such as posters. I will pursue this material relationship between posters (mostly but not limited to film) and urban Lagos, exploring the ways in which posters in Lagos constitute a print urbanism that indexes the quotidian politics of everyday urban life in the city.
