Professor Innocent Ebere Uwah
Combe Trust Fellow, January - March 2024
Home Institution: University of Port Harcourt
Innocent Ebere Uwah is Professor of Film Studies at the University of Port Harcourt, Nigeria. He is a recipient of the 2010 Global Partners’ Award in Communications (USA) and a 2013 post-doctoral fellow of the All Africa House Fellowship, University of Cape Town, South Africa. He is an alumnus of Dublin City University, Ireland and the author of The Rhetoric of Culture in Nollywood (2019, Goldline & Jacobs). He has authored many peer-reviewed articles in reputable journals. His research interests lie on the interface between representations and cultures, Nollywood studies, cinema and ethics, intersections between theology and movie parables, identity construction and ‘religion’ communications.
Project title: Cinema, Ethics and Society: Poetics and Politics of Creativity in African Cinema
Depending on how film is fashioned, there are both positive and negative angles to the pleasure it gives in its narrative formula. Some may socialize the viewer whereas others can scandalize morals. Issues like this bring filmic constructions to public scrutiny, not so much as to interrogate the entertainment they give to those who consume them but in reviewing the ethical viewpoint they engender. The thrust of this paper therefore is to negotiate the place of ethics in creative arts, using African cinematic narratives as a case study. Even though a study like this has implications for Effects Theory, the effort here is not to valorize or essentialize it but to delineate the grounds for ethical consideration in arts generally but more specifically in African cinema as a public good. In order to do this, a select corpus of films will critically be analyzed to showcase how visuals and words have ethical implications for those who consume them through films. Doing this will help foreground reasons why censorship of cinematic productions is still a worthwhile venture and should be applied at both private and public levels to ensure quality of filmic contents for public consumption.