Nollywood was not born in a studio system, but in the streets, markets and informal networks of Nigerian cities. As cinemas disappeared during the country’s economic crisis, filmmakers and distributors turned cheap video cassettes into a new cultural infrastructure, with places like Surulere, Idumota, Alaba and Onitsha becoming engines of production and circulation. Wale Oloworekende looks at Nollywood through the places that made it possible, tracing how a deeply local ecosystem transformed everyday Nigerian stories into a shared African language and, eventually, one of the continent’s most powerful cultural exports.

On Bogotá’s Primera de Mayo, nightlife became the engine of a musical revolution. Through the story of Putivuelta and the DJs who reshaped the scene, Felipe Maia revisits the avenue where guaracha found its defining sound and political edge. Far from the clichés of club culture, the genre appears here as a radically local practice, where queer communities, migrant influences and working-class nightlife forged one of Latin America’s most influential electronic scenes.

Literary readings have become one of London’s most unexpected forms of nightlife. But why would anyone spend a Friday night in a packed nightclub listening to strangers read from their novels? Starting from this question, Will Kaye offers a witty portrait of London’s literary scene, where aspiring writers, artists and creative hopefuls gather in clubs, bars and churches to listen to strangers read aloud. Beneath the absurdity of drunken audiences, endless networking and the occasional terrible performance by cultural micro-celebrities, the story examines an unlikely phenomenon in which literature becomes a vehicle for gathering, self-fashioning and participation in a city increasingly hungry for offline forms of cultural life.