VIDEOS IN MOTION - fasopo

develop widely accessible stories, that resonate with audiences that have different culturalbackgrounds.The syntax of the Nigerian melodramatic imaginationAs many have emphasized (cf. Brooks 1976; Singer 2001), melodrama entertains a particularrelationship with the emergence of European modernity. In Peter Brooks's words, melodrama is a“peculiarly modern form” that can be located “within the context of the French Revolution and itsaftermath”, and thus in relation to the emergence of a precise epistemological moment whichmelodrama itself “illustrates and to which it contributes” (1976: 14). This epistemological momentis defined by the affirmation of Enlightenment philosophy, by the “final liquidation of thetraditional Sacred and its representative institutions (Church and Monarch)” and by “the shatteringof the myth of Christendom” (Brooks 1976: 15). Within this context melodrama is a narrative formthat explores and gives an expression to the “moral occult”, which is, in Brooks's terms, “thedomain of operative spiritual values which is both indicated within and masked by the surface ofreality” (1976: 5). This is not, as Brooks emphasizes, “a metaphysical system; it is rather therepository of the fragmentary and desacralized remnants of sacred myth” (ibid.).When we look at Nigerian videos, this interpretation of melodrama's deep structures of meaningneeds inevitably to be questioned. As Ravi Vasudevan has emphasized in relation to themelodramatic aspects of Indian cinema, “if we are to theorize the validity of the melodramatic modein the Indian case, it must be in such a way as to reformulate the terms of the modernity withinwhich melodrama emerges” (2010: 42). A similar argument can be advanced also in relation toNigerian videos. While it is undeniable that videos are deeply concerned with the ethical questionsarising from the sphere of what Brooks calls “the moral occult”, the reasons for this concern in myopinion diverge from those that inform eighteenth century French melodrama, and the narrativeforms that have been subsequently defined in relation to it. This profound difference makes theNigerian melodramatic imagination communicate a radically original structure of meaning, whichresonates particularly with pan-African audiences.As I have emphasized on multiple occasions throughout this dissertation, the birth of theNigerian video phenomenon is deeply related to the economic crisis that affected the country, andthe sub-Saharan African region more generally, throughout the 1980s. In many ways, this crisisgenerated amongst Nigerian population a widespread disillusion toward the promises of welfare,wealth and general social and economic development that the idea of post-colonial modernity156