"Nollywood is often portrayed by the popular press as an unruly industry, with mysteriously fast and cheap production and shadowy distribution networks. In the first overview of Nigeria's burgeoning video film industry, Jade ... L. Miller reveals that this portrayal is over-simplistic and often untrue. Investigating Nollywood's complete global production and distribution chain, Nollywood Central presents a full portrait of the Nollywood industry as both highly organised and strategically structured. In doing so, it interrogates the position and rise of new cultural industry hubs, demonstrating how a creative industry can emerge, be sustainable and circulate globally even though it exists outside of formal global networks and government-supported infrastructure." (Back cover) more

"Betty la Fea, the phenomenally popular Colombian telenovela, has been exported as both canned (e.g. either dubbed or unaltered) programming and format to approximately 70 countries, including the recent US prime-time hit Ugly Betty. Guided by an examination of the extended global success of this Co ... lombian production, this article explores the telenovela as a cultural product that is successful because of its appeal on both the local and global level, and as an economic product traversing a global industry. Popular telenovelas succeed as both canned programming and formats because they combine universally appealing stories (rags-to-riches) and style (melodrama) with localizable specifics with which viewers can easily identify. While telenovelas are localized products produced to first achieve domestic success, the cross-ownership structure of and multinational flows that mark the telenovela industry render any conception of telenovelas as South-to-North contra-flows of culture inherently problematic. Instead, this article argues that telenovelas can best be understood as localizable yet universally appealing cultural products traversing global networks of capitalist cultural concerns." (Abstract) more