Mediating Identity and Culture: Nigerian Videos and African Immigrants in the U.S.

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Author(s): Adedayo Ladigbolu Abah (Washington and Lee University, USA)
Copyright: 2011
Pages: 21
Source title: Cultural Identity and New Communication Technologies: Political, Ethnic and Ideological Implications
Source Author(s)/Editor(s): D. Ndirangu Wachanga (University of Wisconsin-Whitewater, USA)
DOI: 10.4018/978-1-60960-591-9.ch014

Keywords: Human Aspects of Technology / Information Science Reference / Social Sciences & Humanities

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Abstract

Using the media accessibility function from self-categorization theory, this study examines the role of the Nigerian video film in mediating the twin issues of culture and identity among African immigrants in the United States. Africans in diaspora constitute the majority of the transnational audience for Nigerian video films outside of Africa. Using a combined method of surveying and personal interviews, several African immigrants, their children, and friends living in the Dallas/Fort Worth area of Texas, USA were interviewed for their views on the role of the nascent Nigerian video industry in the way they sustain and straddle their multiple identities and culture in their society of settlement. Results indicate that most of the immigrants view the videos as affirmation of the values they grew up with and with which they still identify. This is in direct contradiction of professed cultural denigration they feel in their everyday professional lives in the United States. Most of the younger immigrants and first generation immigrants view these videos as a convenient way of accessing their Africanness as part of their multi-stranded identity and culture. Based on the expressed motivations for use and expressed outcome of use of the video-film, results indicate that the use of the video-film may have contributed to the accessibility of the African in diaspora label as a social category for this group of immigrants.

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Mediating Identity and Culture: Nigerian Videos and African Immigrants in the U.S.

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