Infrastructures, A Lexical Note:

In dramatizing the ways fundamental norms of society have been abrogated, the aesthetics of outrage makes public stark, ethical conflicts at the heart of society at a time when the moral basis of society is in transition. Nigerian life, but, more that this, they dramatize it, distorting it and transforming it into spectacle, making it something to be bodily experienced and lived (186).

Southern Nigerian films take the grotesque away from the figure of the postcolonial dictator and place it back inside the family, making it more like melodrama (184). [. . .] They dramatize elites’ actions to create a form of ethical evidence that highlights key moral conflicts in society (184). [. . .] In dramatizing the ways fundamental norms of society have been abrogated, the aesthetics of outrage makes public stark, ethical conflicts at the heart of society at a time when the moral basis of society is in transition. Nigerian life, but, more that this, they dramatize it, distorting it and transforming it into spectacle, making it something to be bodily experienced and lived (186).

Precisely because it is organized around morality, melodrama offers a means with which to speak about tensions in African society that mimics the idioms of Pentacostalism, Islamism, and witchcraft. It does not ignore questions about the economy, it offers moral justifications for them and explores the changing basis of a society that allows economic insecurity to coexist with fantastic wealth (183)

In the last two decades the emergence of video technology has transformed all that for the for the Nigerian middle classes, making available a massive range of the world's media products to those who can afford them. Video culture has thoroughly altered the landscape of Nigerian media, but it is only within the past few years that Nigerians have begun to use technology to produce their own works (209).

In Northern Nigeria, the instability of everyday life has been sublimated into the quite different melodramatic arena of romantic love. Love is a profoundly individual emotion but unsettling, potentially excessive, overwhelming people's judgement and sometimes involving them in actions against their will. It is the sight of key tensions between individual desire and respect for a social order in which marriages are expected to be arranged, and where individual desire runs up against the ideal of obedience to parents and to the social order (195). [...] But in the case of love, at least in contemporary Northern Nigeria, these imaginative investments produce shifts in gender relations and practices of courtship and marriage. At their heart is real social change, manifest most starkly in the movement away from arranged marriages in urban areas and toward a far greater choice for youths in marriage partners, and a greater reluctance of parents to force their choices onto unwilling partners (208).

Cinema provides a visual experience difficult to reproduce on a video screen and a social space of interaction impossible to recreate in a domestic arena [...] Cinema in Nigeria is an event produced by the encounter of social subjects with specific architecture of film distribution and exhibition in Nigeria and the technological ordering of projector, screen, and seating that occurs there. While the standard structure of cinema in the United States and Europe creates a model that is sometimes explicitly copied (and at other times explicitly avoided), one cannot presume the universality of cinema and must instead interrogate this constant tension between standardization and local difference. Even the audiences attending cinema have a relationship to film as a visual medium and cinema as a social institution that emerges from a long training specific to colonial and post-colonial history of a Muslim society. The immaterial experience of cinema emerges from this encounter (167).