UC Berkeley

It is May 29th, 2024, and a radio host just announced that Nigeria has a new national anthem. “Arise, O Compatriots,” that symbol of Nigeria’s transition to Military rule in the 1970s had been plucked out like the unwanted and bitter innards of a fish, wrapped in old newspapers so its waters would not leak out, shoved inside black cellophane, tied up, and then thrown out! In comes “Nigeria, We Hail Thee!” the new, the “tear rubber” anthem from 1960. Yes, Nigeria has a new national anthem and if it sounds familiar, it is because it is Nigeria’s old national anthem. According to President Bola Tinubu, who signed this new/old national anthem into order, this act of reducing, reusing, and recycling acts as a symbol of national unity. On September 17th of the same year, First Lady Remi Tinubu announced that Nigeria would adopt a national fabric, called “OneNigeria/UnityFabric.” In doing so, Nigerians could all be quite literally cut from the same cloth. Both events represent an attempt to instrumentalize aesthetic forms to quell anxieties surrounding the nation, its disjointedness, and its inability to take form in a state recognizable as such. These two examples, as this project suggests, would not be the first time Nigeria sought to employ the aesthetic to make the nation not only appear, but appear whole. However, rather than enter the longstanding discourse on aesthetic self-fashioning in post-independence Africa with another example of an artistic movement, “The Center Cannot Hold” examines the use of aesthetic forms to produce a dis-articulations of the aesthetic formation of the postcolonial Nigerian nation, which rather than the articulation of national identity, embodies the formlessness of the nation. In chapter 1 “Things Borrowed: Nigeria, Aesthetic Residues, and the non-time of 1959/1960” I explore how Demas Nwoko 1960 painting (Nigeria 1959) and Sydney Samuelson’s (Giant in the Sun,1959) work to unbind the relationship between time, nation, and independence. There, I put forth an understanding of Nigeria’s post-colonial temporality as non-time, where the time of Nigeria’s becoming is neither past nor present, and yet its future is anticipated by past and present. I argue that Nigeria’s post-independence temporality is one that is post-present, where rather than the immobility of the present, the time of post-independence engenders the inexistence of the present, where the “now,” is the simultaneous experience of past, present and future. In chapter 2, “Like Television Wey No Clear Human: Extramusical Interruptions and the Failure of Vision. I argue that Nigeria’s postcolonial vision of itself as a unified, self-determined state, is in crisis with auditory disruptions of vision present in the aesthetic forms which sustain its national identity. To explore this interruption of sight through sound, I turn to Ossie Davis’s Kongi’s Harvest (1970), specifically its use of sound to interrupt speech and image. In my analysis, I explore how elements of technical, environmental, and human disruptions to diegetic sound produce a sonic dissonance that clashes with the image and or speech of the becoming of the nation. In chapter 3, “Cinema and the Limitations of Order: Nollywood Video films and the Aesthetics of a Nation’s Unbecoming” I examine the intertextual disobedience in Nollywood’s Labista (Ifeanyi Onyeabor, 2004) an early video films that tensely slip between its formal elements that attempt to follow the techniques of the colonial film unit and a diegesis that rebels otherwise. I argue that this spillage of forms produces a disordering of the nation in which the inarticulation of a Nollywood aesthetic is at an impasse with the formation of a national cinema. Throughout the chapters that make up this project, I advance an understanding of the limitations of aesthetics to give form to the nation. Moreover, I question the status of aesthetics in Africa’s post-independence future and the demand for aesthetics to produce futurity to produce nation while proposing an understanding of decolonization without nation-making as its objective.