Olusegun Soetan
University of Wisconsin Madison
Olusegun Soetan is a film scholar and cultural studies theorist specializing in the Nigerian video-film industry, auteur cinema, and the intersections of gender, identity, and popular culture in African screen media. He holds a Ph.D. in African Languages and Literature from the University of Wisconsin–Madison, where his scholarly formation encompassed African cinema, indigenous knowledge systems, gender studies, and African literary and cultural traditions. His research applies critical frameworks drawn from postcolonial theory, feminist criticism, and cultural studies to interrogate questions of class, sexuality, and identity in African cinematic and literary production. His work has appeared in peer-reviewed journals and edited volumes. Beyond the academy, Soetan is a poet, novelist, and photographer whose creative practice engages the same cultural terrains that animate his scholarship. He also serves as a Licensed Financial Professional, bringing an interdisciplinary perspective to questions of economic agency and community empowerment within African and diaspora contexts.
Talk Information:
Nollywood in the Post-Sembène Period: Feminine Agency, Witchcraft, and the Supernatural
May 30, 2026 | 9:00 AM
This presentation examines the Nigerian video-film industry, globally known as Nollywood, as a site of ideologically complex cultural production within the broader landscape of contemporary African cinema. While the industry has been widely characterized by melodramatic excess and formulaic popular appeal, this presentation contends that such assessments obscure a substantive critical section within Nollywood's output that merits sustained scholarly engagement. Situating the industry within the intellectual legacy of Ousmane Sembène and the post-independence pan-African cinematic tradition, the article argues that select Nollywood productions constitute a rhetorical extension of that tradition: engaging discourses of feminine agency, gender oppression, cultural identity, and political economy through the representational motifs of witchcraft and the supernatural. Drawing on postcolonial feminist theory and close textual analysis, the presentation repositions Nollywood's occult imagination not as cultural pathology or narrative sensationalism, but as an encoded social critique—a mode through which the industry negotiates tensions between tradition and modernity, and between marginalization and resistance. In doing so, the presentation contributes to ongoing scholarly conversations on African screen media, gender representation, and the politics of popular culture in postcolonial Nigeria.