Old song, new melody: gender contestations in the appropriated comedy of Samobaba’s Yorùbá Bollywood

ABSTRACT

This paper examines issues of gender relations within the context of dominant patriarchy as represented in Samobaba’s Yorùbá Bollywood comedy skits. Seun Shamsudeen, popularly known as Samobaba, has produced several audio-visual skits, clipped from Indian films (also known as ‘Bollywood’), therefore generating intercultural dialogues for his skits. In these skits, dialogue in Yorùbá language is grafted on verbal and gestural communications in the Indian film pre-text. While the paper engages the gender question in five selected texts on his Instagram platform, its reading of the skits is undergirded by the framework of appropriation, especially in the recent sense of the theory advanced by Matthias Krings in African Appropriation: Cultural Differences, Mimesis and Media. The jocular elements of his comedy are made more visible through the appropriation aesthetics which in turn become instruments through which the subject of gender is brought to the fore. In the end, the paper submits that Samobaba’s Yorùbá Bollywood is a projection of digital imaginaries that deserve further scholarly attention. This is because, apart from its entertainment potentials, it provides another platform through which gender relations are interrogated and, in the process, patriarchy is contested and sometimes subverted.

KEYWORDS:

• Yorùbá Bollywood
• gender
• comedy
• skits
• new media

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No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Gbemisola Adeoti

Olajide Salawu is a PhD student at the Department of English and Film Studies, University of Alberta, Edmonton, Canada. His works have appeared in Muziki: Journal of Music Research in Africa, Third Text, Cambridge Journal of Postcolonial Literary Inquiry, and so on. He was a British Academy mentee. His research interests include: rurality, urbanity, mobility, folk music, Nigerian cultural digital articulations, African films and postcolonial studies.

Olajide Salawu

Gbemisola Adeoti (Ph D) is a Professor of Literature in the English Department of Obafemi Awolowo University, Ile Ife, Nigeria. His areas of teaching and research include Dramatic Literature, Poetry, Literary History/Theory and Popular Culture. He is the author of Naked Soles, Voices Offstage, Nigerian Home Video Films in Yoruba and recently, Politics and the Urban Experience in Postcolonial West African Literature. He is the Editor of Muse and Mimesis: Critical Perspectives on Ahmed Yerima’s Drama and One Muse, Many Masks: Reflections on Ahmed Yerima's Drama. Adeoti is a Member of Nigerian Academy of Letters and Fellow, Society of Nigerian Theatre Artists.