Genre as Ideological Impulse: Reflections on Big Data and African Cultural Production

Abstract

This article draws from “big-data” analysis of Netflix’s usage, which suggests that what spectators tend to like about films is inherently generic. Moreover, the process of liking serves as a metaphor, over and above the process of taking pleasure, for the ways in which spectators make texts meaningful rather than deriving meaning from them. The article then discusses some examples of African cultural production in order to focus attention on the category of analysis at stake in theorizing genre—a discussion that helps to distinguish genre’s thematic ontology from its material, formal, and stylistic features. Finally, at the intersection of spectator agency and theme, genre appears to be an “ideological impulse,” a way of relating to and encoding experience that begins with people and that they distribute over texts. This way of understanding genre, the article argues, may help scholars write more productively about the social nature of the concept.