Browsing by Author "Udo, Nsima Stanislaus"

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    The politics of aesthetics and performance: Visuality and the remaking of culture in the Calabar Festival and Carnival, 2004 -2019
    (University of the Western Cape, 2024) Udo, Nsima Stanislaus; Witz, Leslie
    The Calabar Festival and Carnival was inaugurated in 2004. Aspects of Calabar cultural festivals had been appropriated into Caribbean carnivals and were performed from around the second half of the 18th century, particularly in the Trinidadian carnival. In 2004, it returned to Africa and was remade at a time of political-economic change that demanded diversification and the creation of a tourist economy. The Calabar Festival and Carnival has become an arena for sociocultural and political discourse, as well as an object of multifocal photographic practice. Since 2004 when it was first re-introduced, Calabar Festival has been generally hyped by both the media and scholarship as Africa’s leading street party framed in carnival form, but also eulogized as a cultural and tourism fiscal project that has contributed tremendously to the economic and political development of Calabar, Cross River specifically, and Nigeria in general. This study takes a leap away from these romanticized eulogies to critically evaluate some socio-political, visual and affective elements that make up the operationality and performativity of the festival. I draw from the concept of dilapidation and dissonance to assert that the festival started in 2004 with some elements of promising economic, tourism and cultural objectives. But the state government and its political and economic agencies who instituted and oversee the carnival festival have progressively pushed the event into the realm of a dilapidated cultural project, with reverberating resonances of gloom that have affected both residents and participants, as well as other elements of the society.
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    Visualizing the body: Photographic clues and the cultural fluidity of Mbopo institution, 1914-2014
    (University of the Western Cape, 2018) Udo, Nsima Stanislaus; Hayes, Patricia
    The mbopo institution, popularly known as the �fattening room� is a cultural rite of passage for young virgins, who are being prepared for marriage among the Ibibio/Efik people of southern Nigeria. It is a complex cultural institution which marked the change of status from girlhood to nubile womanhood in Ibibio/Efik culture. This study examines the practice of mbopo ritual among the Ibibio/Efik people across the previous century. Through an engaged and detailed visual analysis, the study argues that in the first decade of the 20th century, the mbopo ritual had a degree of vibrancy with an attached sense of secrecy and spiritual mystery. But between 1920 and the present, this vibrancy and spiritual undertone has been subtly but progressively compromised. A buildup of tension on the ritual by modern forces, not only of the outside missionaries, but also indigenous converts set in motion a process that would eventually transform the ritual from a framework of an actual cultural practice into the realms of �cultural reinvention� and re-rendering. Feminist critiques of the 1980s and the 1990s led to the popular awareness of the damaging impact of clitoridectomy, just one core aspect of the ritual. As a direct result, clitoridectomy was outlawed across the country, leaving mbopo to be seen as a morally suspect practice. In recent year, the once vibrant, secret and spiritually grounded rite of seclusion for nubile women has been reimagined and reinvented through the public display in art, painting, cultural dance troupe, music and television shows.