VIDEOS IN MOTION - fasopo

types of documents (documentaries, festival programs, newspaper and academic articles), which allcan be related to the “metaculture” of Nollywood produced since the birth of the video industry.As Greg Urban underlines, metaculture is particularly significant “because it imparts anaccelerative force to culture. It aids culture in motion through space and time. It gives a boost to theculture that it is about, helping to propel it on its journey” (2001: 3). The discourse about a culturalobject, in fact, often precedes the object itself and opens for it new paths of circulation. But whiledoing this, it also defines the direction and the horizon that these paths will have to follow. For thisreason, metaculture has both accelerative and restraining effects on cultural objects’ motion: whileon the one hand it pushes the object toward new frontiers, on the other it creates the structures ofknowledge that will guide (and limit) the reception of the given cultural object within a newenvironment. 76Beside these effects, and in relation to them, Urban identifies another important way in whichcultural objects and the metacultural constructions about them interact. In fact, while on the onehand, metaculture internalizes and circulates some of the object’s attributes, on the other hand, italso penetrates and transforms the object itself. This tension is clearly addressed by some of thequestions that Urban asks in the introduction to his book:if something of the cultural object finds its way into the metacultural interpretation –that is, if the interpretation is not arbitrary relative to the object – does the metaculturalinterpretation find its way into the object? Might not the metacultural interpretationactually influence the cultural object and fashion it, at least in some measure, after itsown image? (2001: 37).According to this perspective, a given metaculture, even if sometimes imprecise and misleading,does portray a number of aspects of the object it refers to. It is not, then, an arbitrary representation,even if it is inevitably the result of processes of essentialization and generalization. At the same76 This second effect is the one on which many postcolonial and cultural studies critics have concentrated their attentionin recent times. As the work of scholars such as Edward Said (1979; 1994) and Valentin Mudimbe (1988; 1994) hasimportantly emphasized, the Western-generated discursive constructions about non-Western cultural productions haveoften played a central role in reproducing defined structures of power and knowledge. Even if I am sensible to this kindof criticism, however, it will occupy a rather marginal position in the economy of the next two chapters. As I haveemphasized in the introduction to this thesis, my interest is in fact more specifically oriented toward a definition of theway metaculture and discursive mobility interact with the industry’s transformations.90