Indirect Subjects

“Indirect Subjects is an ambitious work providing an overview of film in Nigeria from its earliest days, through the height of state television to the rise of Nollywood. It also offers a rethinking of this history by examining the political, economic, and aesthetic logics that tie this history together. This is an insightful work for both scholars and students analyzing iconic films and television series in a new way. Doing so, it offers a new understanding of political aesthetics in Nigeria.” - Brian Larkin, author of Signal and Noise: Media, Infrastructure, and Urban Culture in Nigeria

“Matthew H. Brown's Indirect Subjects applies acuity and sophistication to Nollywood in ways that push the terms of debate beyond anything currently conceived. This is at once theoretically nuanced and historically informed, attentive to the dynamics of the industry as well as to the specific subject matter of the movies. In a word, a real gift offering to a field already dotted with sparkling scholarly gems.” - Ato Quayson, author of Oxford Street, Accra: City Life and the Itineraries of Transnationalism

"[Indirect Subjects] provides a valuable and generative contribution to African media studies. ...  Brown’s access to rare archival materials allows him to offer what is, perhaps, the most sustained investigation of the links between state television and video films to date."

"[Indirect Subjects] adeptly explores the conjunctures and ruptures in the modalities of addressing the audience through different times and spaces in screen media history. ... This book makes a rich contribution to studies of the political economy of culture broadly and, more specifically, to the study of screen media in Nigeria by exposing the rifts and shifts in the neoliberal matrix that undergird it." - Rosemary Oyinlola Popoola, Canadian Journal of African Studies

"Matthew H. Brown’s Indirect Subjects is stellar in so many ways—its contribution to Nollywood studies, its compelling conceptual framework, its intervention into broader studies about neoliberalism and media studies, and the way it models the most rigorous of close readings of films. ... It is very much to Brown’s credit that he not only provides his readers with such a rigorous and in-depth analysis of the Nollywood film industry, but that he also invites us to think more broadly about the role of media in our globalized world and how we all, as indirect subjects, navigate the various obstacles to flourishing that we are faced with on a daily basis."