Introduction

Extraction represents one way of framing Nollywood’s place in the world. As such, it can be broken up into smaller frames based on the specific natural resources profitably mined and harvested in Nigeria and elsewhere. From tin to petroleum, those resources are powerful political, economic, and aesthetic objects. They are also useful interpretive devices and objects of discourse, as mobile as the films that represent and embody them. Like Nollywood’s, their genealogies are multiple, their past trajectories, whether in animist practice or violent conflict, vividly depicted in African films that attend to nature and the object world. African Media in an Age of Extraction proposes ways of “placing” Nollywood that attend to multiple scales—the local, the national, the regional, the continental, the planetary—as well as to natural environments and their continuous transformation by capital.