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Animating Genre in the Yorùbá Photoplay Series

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  06 July 2017

Olubukola A. Gbadegesin
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Abstract

In a continent remarkable for its receptivity to “creative potentiality,” a glimpse at its thriving universe of popular arts quickly reveals the limits of dogmatic, discipline-centered devotion to “genre” (Barber, 2000). And while the “open and incorporative” nature of West African popular production is certainly animated by the basic elements of genre, framing the concept as a finite product of ordered literary laws seems incongruous with practical and popular articulations on the continent. At the intersection of print and visual culture—another synthesis of genres—the Yorùbá Photoplay Series are borne from an array of literary and nonliterary sources, processes and contexts that resonated strongly with pseudo-literate, yet deeply engaged, co-creative audiences at the dawn of colonial independence.

Keywords

Art historyAfrican art historyphotoplaysYorùbá Photoplay SeriesYorùbá studiesNigeria studiesYorùbá popular theaterWest African Book Publishers (WABP)visual cultureprint culture
Type
Articles
Information
Cambridge Journal of Postcolonial Literary Inquiry , Volume 4 , Special Issue 2: Special Issue: African Genre , April 2017 , pp. 176 - 190
Copyright
© Cambridge University Press 2017 

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References

1 Bawarshi, Anis S. and Reiff, Mary Jo. Genre: An Introduction to History, Theory, Research, and Pedagogy. (West Lafayette, IN: Parlor Press, 2010), 24 Google Scholar.

2 Martina Allen, “Against ‘Hybridity’ in Genre Studies: Blending as an Alternative Approach to Generic Experimentation,” Trespassing Journal: An Online Journal of Trespassing Art, Science, and Philosophy 2 (Winter 2013). Web.

3 Bawarshi and Reiff, Genre, 16–20.

4 Duro, Paul, “Academic Theory 1550–1800,” A Companion to Art Theory, eds. Paul Smith and Carolyn Wilde (London: Wiley-Blackwell, 2002), 88–103 Google Scholar.

5 Duro, “Academic Theory 1550–1800,” 94.

6 Ibid., 94.

7 Ibid., 95.

8 White, Hayden V., “Anomalies of Genre: The Utility of Theory and History for the Study of Literary Genres,” New Literary History 34.3 (2003): 599 Google Scholar.

9 Barber, Karin, The Generation of Plays: Yorùbá Popular Life in Theater (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2000), 6 Google Scholar.

10 In appraising the potential market for locally produced and focused publications, WABP owner Richard Ian Gamble innovated the concept and saw the need for a versatile local editor at the helm of the venture. Interestingly, all of Ṣofọwọtẹ’s previous careers intersected with the various modes through which popular plays had been transmitted to its audiences. This became incredibly important to his ability to comprehend, mediate, and distill the key elements of popular theater in the photoplays (personal communication, April 15, 2013).

11 Nnodim, Rita, “Configuring Audiences in Yoruba Novels, Print and Media Poetry,” Research in African Literatures 37.3 (2006): 62–63 Google Scholar.

12 Barber, The Generation of Plays, 26–33. Language (as ethnic identifier) and education were two priorities of the growing ethno-nationalist movement in the predominantly Yorùbá region of southwest Nigeria.

13 Clark, Ẹbun, Hubert Ogunnde: The Making of Nigerian Theatre (New York: Oxford University Press, 1979), 4 Google Scholar.

14 Ẹbun Clark, Ogunnde, xi.

15 Krings, Matthias, “A Prequel to Nollywood: South African Photo Novels and Their Pan-African Consumption in the Late 1960s,” Journal of African Cultural Studies 22.1 (2010): 76 Google Scholar; Saint, Lily, “Not Western: Race, Reading, and the South African Photocomic,” Journal of Southern African Studies 36.4 (2010): 942 Google Scholar. Although Lily Saint echoes Krings’s widely accepted assumption about the postwar Italian origins of the photonovel, she also offers other theories about the multigeneric origins/nature of the format, ending with its obvious debt to the comic format. In fact, myriad generic labels have been attached to the format as it moved from region to region over the decades.

16 Krings, “A Prequel to Nollywood,” 76–77.

17 Saint, “Not Western,” 942–43. Interestingly, Saint predominantly uses “photocomics” to refer these formats. This choice of terminology, however, doubly emphasizes the visual elements of the format (“photo” and “comic”) without the same reference to its textual components. In this essay, l adopted the term photonovel, which equally implicates the linguistic and the visual elements of the format. I will elaborate further on this point in later discussions of the term photoplay.

18 Flemming, Tyler and Falola, Toyin, “Africa’s Media Empire: Drum’s Expansion to Nigeria,” History in Africa 32 (2005): 148–149 Google Scholar. Although it took some time for Drum magazine to become profitable in Nigeria and elsewhere, there was no doubt that the magazine was well received by these markets.

19 Saint, “Not Western,” 944. At least in its South African context, it seemed that “look-reads” offered a subversive yet accessible way for audiences to engage with and potentially reconcile their sociopolitical realities. Saint, for instance, contextualizes the production and consumption of the photonovel in apartheid-era South Africa while also examining how the popular subgenre of the American Western undermined the illusion of absolute racial segregation.

20 Karin Barber, The Generation of Plays, 7–9.

21 Ibid. (Emphasis added by author.)

22 Barber, Karin, Collins, John, and Ricard, Alain, “Three West African Popular Theatre Forms: A Social History,” West African Popular Theatre (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press; Oxford: James Currey, 1997): 2 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

23 Ibid., 2.

24 Jaji, Tsitsi Ella, Africa in Stereo: Modernism, Music, and Pan-African Solidarity (Oxford: Oxford University Press; 2014), 112.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

25 Ibid., 115.

26 Barber, The Generation of Plays, 11. (Emphasis added by author.)

27 Even though it provides insights into how WABP conceived of the serial, the subtitle is often abandoned in references to Magnet: The Nigerian Photoplay Magazine. Although Magnet was not a true “photoplay” (in that it was not derived from a theatrical/cinematic source), the descriptor was used to distinguish the WABP’s early publications from the generic (and often foreign) “photonovel.” Under production in 1967, Magnet: The Nigerian Photoplay Magazine was entirely written in English and prophetically anticipated the visual and narrative content of African Film a full year before the latter was published. In a probable marketing gambit, WABP attempted to sweep Magnet: The Nigerian Photoplay Magazine into the branding dragnet of “photoplay,” linking it with other, similar titles. As such, photoplays might be framed as a self-declared genre that vacillates between overlapping literary and commercial spheres. (Emphasis added by author.)

28 Saint, “Not Western,” 939 [fn 1]. Rick Miller, Photoplay Editions: A Collector’s Guide (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2002); though it is unknown whether WABP editors were aware of it, the term photoplay was first coined in the early Hollywood film industry and used from the 1910s through the 1940s to describe primarily literary novels that were adapted from popular films and sold to audience as aftermarket merchandise. Originating from different performative sources, the American and Yorùbá versions of the “photoplay” sought to expand these otherwise limited viewing performances to broader audiences.

29 First mentioned in Oba Koso (vol. 11), this term identifies the various expressive modes at work in the photoplays: iwe (or “book”), ere, and alaworan (or “book of watching a play”). This term identifies photoplays as a “book” through which one could experience a play, similarly to a live interaction, an inference full of cross-genre implications.

30 Roland Barthes, “From Work to Text,” Image, Music, Text, trans. Stephen Heath (New York: Hill and Wang, 1977), 155–64. The term iwe ere alaworan implies a production beyond the conventional notion of a literary work and more aligned with the methodological field that Barthes has identified as “texts.”

31 Even though the photographic panels were ordered in sequence, several appeared all together on a single page, ready to be simultaneously and instantly seen. In fact, this was one of the major ways that photoplays stood apart from other forms of narrative production at this time. They provided an immediacy of access that gave audiences more latitude in how they engaged with the narrative.

32 Barber, Karin, “Literacy, Improvisation and the Virtual Script in Yorùbá Popular Theatre,” African Drama and Performance, eds. John Conteh-Morgan and Tejumola Olaniyan (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2004), 185 Google Scholar. Barber has argued convincingly that popular theater audiences were “only to a limited extent a ‘reading public’ but were more comprehensively, a public informed by the idea of reading.” She continues: “orally generated dramas found written representation as photoplay stories in Atoka and sometimes as published plays intended to be read as literature rather than acted . . . Not many people read the newspapers and the strength of the theatre was that it offered an allotrope of written media. It was a genre that aspired to the prestige of the literate world without actually requiring the practitioners and readers to read and without sacrificing the flexibility and living immediacy of speech.” Much of this analysis limits literacy to a purely written concern that omits the other modal forms invoked in photoplays.

33 Barber, The Generation of Plays, 135.

34 Barber, “Introduction,” West African Popular Theatre, xiii.

35 Typically, this unwritten process gave troupes the latitude to rework the production at any point, based on the actors’ assessment or audience reception—thus implicating viewers as yet another editorial interval in the perpetual refining process.

36 As will be discussed later in this paper, audiences were part of the production process: they would write to the editor suggesting which plays the press should publish; advice letters and story reflections would also be published as part of the publication.

37 Barber, Generation of Plays, 311. Each photoplay opened with a brief written prologue that outlined the premise of the story in a third-person voice, addressed an external audience, and provided the context necessary to understand the ensuing narrative. For Ọmuti, this prologue was taken verbatim from the introduction of Amos Tutuọla’s “The Palmwine Drinkard” and translated into Yoruba: “Lankẹ ọmu sọ nipa ara rẹ bayi pe: Lati kekere ni mo ti jẹ ẹlẹmu wa! Lati ibẹrẹ ni emi ti mmu amu-takiti!” (“Lankẹ, the alcoholic, said about himself as follows: I have been a palm wine drinker since I was young. From the beginning, I have been drinking beyond my capacity”). In this further example of the incorporative nature of the photoplays, we see how the form is able to make distinguished material accessible to a “common” audience.

38 Unsurprisingly, the complexities of these cocreative processes are often caught up in the linguistic labyrinth of language and translation. To this point, the codicil to the author credits reads; “Lati owo Kola Ọgunmọla” (“From the hand of Kola Ọgunmọla”). This interesting turn of phrase suggests that the photoplay was literally penned by Ọgunmọla, when in fact he never put Ọmuti into fully scripted form. Rather, the use of “hand” subtly likens Ọgunmọla’s “mental blueprint” of the play with the more conventional written product of the literary author. In fact, the texts in all the photoplays were largely written by Ṣẹgun Ṣofọwọtẹ, the series editor who was absent from the author credits. Omitting the names of Ṣofọwọtẹ and the WABP was most likely a strategic decision whereby more primacy was given to names (such as Tutuọla and Ọgunmọla) that were more familiar and marketable to the reading audience of everyday people. This particularly savvy move reminds us that the ultimate objective was the marketing and commercial success of the photoplay, even at the risk of omitting those who were crucial to the process. Moreover, the increasingly overlapping relationship between literature and language was well represented in these examples from Ọmuti and even more so because “The Palmwine Drinkard” (which inspired it) was itself controversial for its use of “pidgin” English.

39 Nnodim, “Configuring Audiences in Yoruba Novels, Print and Media Poetry,” 62–63.