In Praise of Ostentation: Social Class in Lagos and the Aesthetics of Nollywood's Ówàḿbẹ̀ Genres

Abstract

New Nollywood’s representation of the social life of Lagos is enacted through Ówàḿbẹ̀ as a cinematic strategy that underscores the contradictions inherent in the politics of pleasure and materialism. A performative display of wealth expressed through the social drama of partying, as well as wild and ostentatious social gatherings emerge to underline this politics of pleasure in the Bling Lagosians, Chief Daddy and The Wedding Party. While these films can be read as iterations of a Nigerian party culture that merely underpins the superficiality and pretensions of an elite class in the country, another interpretive approach is to encounter these films and their fixation on Ówàḿbẹ̀ as paradoxically bringing into existence the importance of kinship and family values, which are often antithetical to the exhibitionist showboating of Lagos party cultures. Demonstrating that ostentation with its associated aesthetics is often the backdrop against which the recovery and discovery of true family is realised, this article makes the argument that this re/discovery, rather than the simulacrum that is often entangled with Ówàḿbẹ̀, is a major means by which Nollywood contests the stereotypical trope of crises in Africa.