Family Obligation: Gender, the Body, and the Semiotics of Sacrifice in New Nollywood Films

Survival narrative scholarship on Nollywood films has mostly analyzed the body as the site from which meaning emanates. Through Foucauldian and Bourdieusian theories of embodiment and physical capital that have been used to explain how urban poverty is etched into the bodies of the characters of the films in the Nollywood industry. In this article, however, a supplementary approach is proposed where the body does not act as the source of meanings but rather as its medium, or the surface upon which the meaning of family obligation becomes encoded, gendered, and priced. By employing a semiotic analysis of films that is based on the ideas developed by Christian Metz on cinematic codes, Roland Barthes on denotative and connotative meanings, and Stuart Hall on encoding and decoding, the article conducts a comparative analysis of three New Nollywood films as those analyzed in the companion piece: A Tribe Called Judah (2023), Gangs of Lagos (2023), and The Black Book (2023) with respect to camera angle, mise-en-scène, language, sound, and editing as encoders of gendered family obligations. Sacrifice, it turns out, is invariably gendered endurance and stigma for women, risk and violence for men yet invariably familial in its target. It is shown that the films’ formal structures systematically privilege the family over the individual body as the value which the hustle defends. Thematic analysis can only tell us so much: it is demonstrated by how semiotic analysis furnishes the formal proof of narrative meaning claimed by thematic analysis.