Mantras, Affirmations and Performance

A Feminist Reading of the Repurposing of Old Nollywood through Meme-fication

Authors

  • Abena Osei
  • Felicity Dogbatse

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.12794/journals.ujds.v4i1.403

Abstract

Social media has emerged as a powerful platform for creative expression. Through the use of captioned photos, short videos, and Graphic Interchange Formats (GIFs), popularly known as memes, individuals engage productively with Afrophone literature, including 20th and early 21st-century movies from the Nigerian film industry, Nollywood. In these memes, female antagonists or “bad girls” from Old Nollywood are reimagined and celebrated as iconic figures by a new generation. These scenes, repurposed for worldwide entertainment, now also serve as tools through which young Nigerian women assert feminist values by reinterpreting and recaptioning them.

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What do you meme? Mantras, Affirmations and Performance A Feminist Reading of the Repurposing of Old Nollywood through Meme-fication

Published

2026-04-10

How to Cite

Osei, A., & Dogbatse, F. (2026). Mantras, Affirmations and Performance: A Feminist Reading of the Repurposing of Old Nollywood through Meme-fication. Unbound: A Journal of Digital Scholarship, 4(1). https://doi.org/10.12794/journals.ujds.v4i1.403