The Concessions of Clarity and the Politics of Recognition
Thoughts on why the Academy Awards rejected a Nigerian film for its foreign film category because it had too much English.
By Tolu Daniel
March 31, 2026
The first time I believed I might be a writer was not when I began writing. That came later, and it came elsewhere. For years, the work had existed in a kind of private weather. Essays drafted and redrafted, short stories that mimicked the lives of the people around me, a practice sustained more by instinct than by confirmation. There were readers, of course. Workshops too. Friends, small circles, the occasional publication in an obscure literary magazine. But none of this quite settled into a feeling of legitimacy. The work felt real, but its reality did not yet hold. Then I moved to the United States. It is tempting to narrate what followed as clarity. To say that in the West, within the structure of graduate school, something aligned. That I found my voice, though the word “voice” already assumes something singular, something that can be located and possessed, which may be part of the problem. That the language sharpened, the arguments deepened, the work became, in some measurable sense, better. There is truth in this. Access matters. So does proximity to institutions that take writing seriously, that treat it not as indulgence but as labor. There is a discipline one acquires, a vocabulary, a sense of participation in an ongoing conversation. These are not negligible things. To name them is not to claim innocence; I am inside these structures now, and this essay is written from within them.
But the story does not end there. Because alongside this sense of arrival was a quieter realization. The legitimacy I began to feel was not only emerging from the work itself. It was being reflected back to me through a structure I had entered. The voice I thought I had found was, at least in part, a voice that could now be heard. This is not to say it was inauthentic. That would be too simple, and too dishonest. The work remained mine. The concerns, the textures, the urgencies did not suddenly become foreign. But something in the orientation shifted. The writing began to anticipate a different kind of reception. It leaned, subtly, toward a horizon that had not previously defined it. And once this is noticed, it becomes difficult to unsee. Because the same movement appears elsewhere, across forms, across practices. Not as imitation, not even as aspiration in its most obvious sense, but as a gradual adjustment to where recognition is most fully realized.
Consider, for a moment, a film. In 2019, Lionheart, directed by Genevieve Nnaji, was selected as Nigeria’s submission for the International Feature Film category at the Academy Awards. It was, in many ways, a landmark moment. A film produced within Nollywood, carried by one of its most recognizable figures, entered a global arena of recognition. Then it was disqualified. The reason, as stated by the Academy, was that the film contained too much English. The category required that the majority of dialogue be in a non-English language. Never mind that English is one of Nigeria’s official languages, a linguistic inheritance of colonial history that has since become embedded in everyday life. Never mind that the film’s use of English was not a concession to global audiences, but a reflection of its own social reality. The ruling stood.
The work remained mine. The concerns, the textures, the urgencies did not suddenly become foreign. But something in the orientation shifted. The writing began to anticipate a different kind of reception. It leaned, subtly, toward a horizon that had not previously defined it. And once this is noticed, it becomes difficult to unsee.
The pattern is not unique to film. Certain narratives travel more easily. Certain aesthetics are more readily absorbed into festival circuits that reward particular kinds of storytelling. The slow, observational film that gestures toward universality. The politically charged narrative that renders its context legible to an external audience. These are not the only films being made, but they are often the ones that circulate most visibly beyond their point of origin. What becomes difficult to track are the works that do not make this transition. The films that remain locally significant but globally peripheral. The sounds that dominate regional airwaves but do not enter international charts. The books that shape conversations within their immediate contexts but are not taken up elsewhere.
They do not disappear. But they exist in a different register of visibility, one that is rarely granted the same authority. Meanwhile, the existing structures continue to exert their pull. Other forms persist alongside this. Writing that is more locally embedded, that does not seek or achieve the same kind of translatability. But these forms are often positioned differently. As niche. As limited in scope. As valuable, perhaps, but not central. The distinction is subtle, but its effects accumulate. Over time, a hierarchy emerges. This hierarchy happened during the conversations that surrounded the awarding of the last Nigerian Prize for Literature. I wrote about it here. They are not always explicitly stated but widely understood. Work that circulates globally occupies the upper tier. Work that remains within its immediate context is placed below, regardless of its complexity or innovation. This is how judgment travels as a series of reinforced perceptions. What is seen, what is discussed, what is held up as exemplary. The repetition of these patterns produces a sense of inevitability. It begins to feel as though this is simply how things are. And it is within this atmosphere that the artist continues to make.
To return, briefly, to the earlier question of voice: What does it mean to find one’s voice in such a field? It may mean, in part, learning how to navigate these expectations. How to position the work so that it can move. How to retain certain elements while adjusting others. A negotiation that is ongoing, often invisible, but deeply consequential. But it may also mean something more difficult. To recognize that the voice one has found is not outside these structures, but entangled within them. That its clarity is, in some measure, a function of the space in which it is heard. And once this is understood, the question shifts. Not how to escape the system entirely. That may not be possible. But how to remain attentive to what is altered in the process of becoming legible within it. What is gained, certainly. But also, what is set aside.
It is not imposed in a single moment. It accumulates. Through stories, through precedents, through the circulation of certain works over others. Through the quiet authority of institutions that do not need to announce their power to exercise it. By the time one begins to make, the horizon is already there. This is why the language of discovery can be misleading. When I say that I found my voice, what I am also saying, perhaps without intending to, is that my voice became audible within a particular configuration of listening. That it entered a space where it could be recognized as voice, rather than as noise, or excess, or something not yet fully formed. But what if the earlier work, the one that did not yet feel legitimate, was not lacking in voice at all? What if it was speaking within a different set of conditions, ones that did not align as easily with the structures I would later enter? To ask this is not to romanticize obscurity. It is to question the terms under which clarity is granted. Because legitimacy, as it turns out, is not only a matter of quality. It is also a matter of alignment. And alignment, once achieved, can feel indistinguishable from arrival.
In 2019, Lionheart, directed by Genevieve Nnaji, was selected as Nigeria’s submission for the International Feature Film category at the Academy Awards. It was, in many ways, a landmark moment. A film produced within Nollywood, carried by one of its most recognizable figures, entered a global arena of recognition. Then it was disqualified.
It is possible to describe all this as structure. To map the flows of capital, the pathways of circulation, the asymmetries of attention. But structure alone does not quite explain the intimacy of the thing. The way it settles into practice, into instinct, into the smallest decisions a work makes about itself. For that, another language is needed. The late Antillean psychologist Frantz Fanon’s notion of overdetermination, how the subject is fixed in advance by a gaze that precedes him, is usually invoked to describe Blackness, but what matters here is how it reorganizes perception from within. The subject does not only encounter the gaze. He begins to anticipate it. To move in relation to it, even in its absence. The body adjusts, the voice modulates, the gesture becomes aware of its own visibility. Something similar unfolds across our cultural forms, though diffused, less easily located in a single figure. The writer does not sit down and think explicitly of a prize committee in London or New York. The musician is not always composing with a Grammy in mind. The filmmaker does not necessarily storyboard for a festival jury. And yet, the field within which these recognitions operate has already shaped what can be imagined as success.
Overdetermination, in this sense, is not only about identity. It is about form. The work arrives already read, or rather, already readable in certain ways. It carries within it the pressure to signify beyond itself, to stand in for a place, a history, a condition. This pressure does not always diminish the work. At times, it sharpens it. It produces a density, a layering of meaning that can be generative. But it also narrows the range of what can be done without consequence. To deviate too far from these expectations is to risk misrecognition. The work may still exist, still circulate locally, still matter deeply within its immediate context. But within the broader field, it becomes harder to place. Harder to name. And what cannot be easily named struggles to be sustained. This is how a culture decides what endures: not by announcing its criteria, but by quietly granting longevity to what is legible and allowing the rest to thin out at the margins.
This returns us to the question of the break. Because the break is precisely what resists this kind of management. It interrupts legibility. It introduces excess where clarity is expected. It holds on to forms of expression that do not resolve neatly into the categories through which value is assigned. Fred Moten’s attention to the break is not simply about sound, though it emerges there most forcefully. It is about a mode of being in form that refuses full capture. A way of making that is inseparable from a certain kind of disruption, a refusal to be entirely stabilized. In the context we are tracing, the break appears as both possibility and problem. Possibility, because it offers a way of thinking about art that does not begin from the demand for coherence. That allows for improvisation, for fracture, for the coexistence of pleasure and strain without the need to reconcile them. The circuits that confer recognition are not designed to accommodate too much instability. They require a certain degree of resolution, a form that can be named, categorized, circulated. The break, in its most forceful iterations, resists this. It exceeds the frame. And so, it is often moderated. Not eliminated entirely. That would be too obvious, too blunt. Instead, it is contained. Allowed to appear in controlled doses, as texture, as style, as a mark of authenticity that does not disrupt the overall coherence of the work.
But it also raises a question. What happens to those forms that refuse negotiation? That remains in the break, not as gesture, but as structure. That do not smooth themselves out, do not translate fully, do not align with the expectations that would make them widely legible. These works often exist, but in a different temporal register. They may not receive immediate recognition. They may not enter global circuits. But they persist, sometimes quietly, sometimes with intense local force.
What cannot be easily named struggles to be sustained. This is how a culture decides what endures: not by announcing its criteria, but by quietly granting longevity to what is legible and allowing the rest to thin out at the margins.
The danger is that, over time, they are read as incomplete. As not yet fully realized. As waiting for the kind of refinement that would allow them to be properly received. But what if there is no further refinement to be made. What if the work, in its refusal to align, is already doing what it intends to do. To take this possibility seriously would require a shift in how judgment is exercised. A willingness to encounter forms on their own terms, rather than measuring them against a pre-existing standard. And this is where the earlier question of relinquishment returns, but now with more precision. It is not only that recognition is sought elsewhere. It is that the authority to determine what counts as complete, as refined, as worthy of endurance, has been gradually relocated. Not entirely. Not irrevocably. But enough that the pull is felt across practices. The artist senses it. The critic reinforces it. The institution stabilizes it. And the prize, when it appears, gives it a name.
And yet, to accept the existing order without question is to allow its terms to harden further. So the question remains, but it must be asked differently. Not how to replace one system with another, but how to loosen the hold that any single system has on what can be recognized as art. This returns us, finally, to the matter of belief, but now from another angle. What would it mean to believe in a form that does not seek confirmation? Not in the sense of withdrawal, or a refusal of audience. But in the sense of allowing the work to establish its own conditions of completion, even when those conditions do not align with dominant expectations. This is where the break must be reconsidered, not as a stylistic feature, but as a way of staying with the work at the point where it resists stabilization. There is a risk here, and it should not be minimized.
It is not only that recognition is sought elsewhere. It is that the authority to determine what counts as complete, as refined, as worthy of endurance, has been gradually relocated. Not entirely. Not irrevocably. But enough that the pull is felt across practices.
The contemporary moment offers no simple answers. The networks are too entangled, the histories too layered. The artist who seeks visibility must still navigate the pathways that exist, however unevenly they are structured. But navigation need not mean surrender in total. It may instead involve a different kind of attention. A heightened awareness of what is being adjusted, what is being preserved, and what is being risked at each point of decision. An insistence, however partial, on retaining elements that do not immediately translate, that do not resolve into ease. This is not a program. It cannot be codified into a set of instructions. It is a practice, one that varies across forms, across contexts, across individual constraints. In music, it might mean allowing the rhythm to remain slightly off, resisting the full pull toward standardization. In film, it might mean holding on to a temporal logic that does not conform to dominant pacing, even at the cost of broader distribution. In writing, it might mean sustaining a density of language that does not yield entirely to clarity, that asks something more of its reader. These are small choices, but they are choices nonetheless, moments where the work insists on its own terms even when those terms are not the ones that would guarantee its widest reception.
These gestures will not dismantle the system. They are too small, too dispersed. But they can accumulate. They can create, over time, pockets of resistance, spaces where other criteria begin to take shape, however tentatively. They can remind us that what counts as art has never been fixed, that it is always subject to negotiation, even when that negotiation is unevenly structured. To remain there, even briefly, is to hold open a different possibility. Not outside the world as it is, but not entirely contained by it either. And it is from within this tension that another way of making, and of recognizing, might begin to emerge.
