Between physical and digital: Neocolonial influences and postcolonial ambivalence in Nollywood set design

Abstract

This article examines how the transition from physical to digital set design in Nollywood operates as a site of neocolonial negotiation, wherein technological advancement simultaneously enables creative autonomy and reproduces structural dependency. While digital technologies have democratised production capabilities and facilitated visual sophistication previously unattainable in Nigerian cinema, they embed new forms of cultural and economic subordination to Western technological infrastructures and platform capital. Through analysis of production design practices across celluloid, video, and digital eras, this study demonstrates how set design functions as a material manifestation of postcolonial ambivalence, simultaneously resisting and reproducing Western cinematic paradigms. Drawing on Homi Bhabha's theories of hybridity and the Third Space, critically supplemented by political economy approaches, the research reveals that Nollywood's set design practices articulate a complex negotiation between indigenous aesthetic traditions and globally circulating digital technologies. The central argument contends that rather than representing straightforward liberation from colonial visual regimes, digital set design in Nollywood perpetuates neocolonial dependencies through funding conditionality, technological gatekeeping, and aesthetic standardisation imposed by streaming platforms and multinational corporations. This study contributes to scholarship on African cinema by foregrounding production design as a critical site for understanding how neocolonial relations are materially instantiated in contemporary film practice.