Nollywood and Popular Religion
Productions of Prosperity, Gender, and the Supernatural in Nigerian Cinema

Chijioke Azuawusiefe (Author)

9780253076144

Hardback, published 7 July 2026

242 pages, 22 b&w photos
22.9 x 15.2 x 1.7 cm, 0.449 kg

"Nollywood and Popular Religion captures two of the three globalized modern Nigerian cultures: Nollywood, Afrobeats, and Pentecostalism. People tend treat the third one as a distinct category whereas Pentecostalism is very much imbricated in popular culture. This is a work that establishes the rise and prominence of both Nollywood and Nigerian Pentecostalism in specific ways, and it will no doubt be interesting to scholars of contemporary Nigerian culture, religion, religion and arts, Pentecostalism, and African cultural studies." - Abimbola Adelakun, author of Powerful Devices: The Politics and Praxis of Spiritual Warfare

Nigeria's film industry, popularly known as "Nollywood," established itself in the early 1990s at the same time that Pentecostalism, once a marginal religious denomination, became one of the nation's dominant forms of Christianity. Today's Nollywood films emerge from a society steeped in a Pentecostal worldview and are a crucial nexus for producing and counter-producing popular culture in Nigeria, Africa, and beyond.

Nollywood and Popular Religion investigates the role that film plays in the construction of everyday life and everyday religion in contemporary Nigeria. With analysis grounded in religious studies and cinema studies, author Chijioke Azuawusiefe contends that Nollywood and Nigerian Pentecostalism have formed a symbiotic relationship that blends the theological with the theatrical. By connecting to the overwhelming influence of Pentecostalism in contemporary southern Nigeria, films from Living in Bondage to The Billionaires: Money Stops Nonsense successfully produce the popular images of wealth, gender, and the supernatural that define Nigeria's contemporary culture. Focusing on melodrama as a key site where stories are produced from the social imaginary in order to reshape it, this volume draws out the vital connections between technologies of visualization, visual narratives, contests for social and religious power, and the daily tensions of life in Nigeria.

Nollywood and Popular Religion reveals the ways that Nollywood produces and represents popular religion and how popular religion in turn reclaims, validates, and sustains Nollywood's core motifs of "women, wealth, and witchcraft."

Acknowledgments
Introduction: Nollywood, Cinema, and Popular Religion
1. Nigerian Pentecostalism in Contemporary Culture
2. Religion and Media in Nigeria
3. Witchcraft and the Spectacle of the Supernatural: Mermaids, Witches, and Ghosts
4. Wealth and the Framing of "Occult Economies"
5. Women, Cinema, and Religion: Subversions of Gender Constructions
Epilogue: Nollywood Three Decades On
Notes
References
Filmography
Index