Feliz Navidad, Nigerians: A Critical Reading with Laura Mulvey and bell hooks

 Feliz Navidad, Nigerians: A Critical Reading with Laura Mulvey and bell hooks

1. Gazing Through the Gaze: A Laura Mulvey Critique

Laura Mulvey's theory of the "male gaze," initiated in her now seminal 1975 essay Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema, comes down on the way that the visual media work to place spectators in a dominant position of power that turns characters women particularly into inactive objects of visual pleasure. Although her model was formulated in the context of film, it is highly relevant to the analysis of contemporary advertisements like Glo's "Feliz Navidad, Nigerians!" Christmas advertisement. By extending Mulvey's gaze from gender to overall spectacle, the advertisement reveals itself to be a performance constructed for consumption by the viewer.

The commercial is a lavish visual extravaganza: tap dancers dazzle in sync, celebrities appear briefly but iconically, and families are shown basking in happiness and festivity. The sequences are elaborately choreographed, well-lit, and affecting. But they are designed not to denote lived experience or character complexity, but to invoke a surface-level affective response. There is no dialogue, no personal narrative, and no unfolding character trajectory. The individuals are not subjects with agency but objects positioned for worship. This is consistent with Mulvey's concept of "to-be-looked-at-ness," where the subject is displayed for the pleasure of the onlooker.

The camera's gaze confirms this. It lingers on elegantly composed tableaux of joy, tradition, and celebration. But we are never asked into the inner life of these people. What are they thinking or feeling? What stories have brought them here? The ad does not ask us to consider these questions. It asks us rather to consume them as signs as smiling embodiments of a festive, commodified ideal of Nigerian life.

Also, the lack of conflict or real-world context in the advertisement robs it of narrative depth. In Mulvey's terminology, narrative agency the ability to act, to decide, and to change situations is key to fighting objectification. The individuals here are frozen in idealized contexts. Even the scenes meant to invoke heritage or nostalgia a grandmother in the village, children playing with sparklers are cleaned up and decontextualized. They are comforting symbols rather than representations of complex, living communities.

What is created is a stylized spectacle that distills a multifaceted culture into consumable fantasy. By placing Nigerians within a pre-existing narrative of joy and tradition, the advert reshapes real cultural practice into visual commodity. The effect is not one of exclusion alone, but of transformation: lived experience becomes product, tradition becomes backdrop, and identity becomes aesthetic.

In total, through a Mulveyan lens, "Feliz Navidad, Nigerians!" shows us how advertising can boil communal identity down to visual ornamentation. Even in attempting to pay respect to Nigerian culture, it does so by silencing complexity and maintaining appearances. The people in the ad are not active agents of their own fate but passive vehicles for the message of a brand. This is symptomatic of a broader trend in media: spectacle over substance, image over narrative, and visual pleasure over representational integrity.

2. Commodifying Culture: A bell hooks Critique 

bell hooks, a pioneering cultural theorist, doggedly critiqued the ways that capitalist media co-opt and depoliticize Black identity and Black resistance. In her works such as Black Looks and Eating the Other, hooks explains how popular culture has a way of transforming marginal identity into commodity, stripping it of its politics in the process. Applying her to the Glo advert "Feliz Navidad, Nigerians!" it's evident that the advert engages in an insidious but powerful act of cultural commodification.

On the surface, the advertisement appears to be a celebration of Nigerian unity and diversity. It features a range of characters from various ethnic and class backgrounds, rural and urban settings, and various generations. Cultural symbols—traditional dress, dance, food, village settings are highlighted. However, hooks warns us not to confuse representation with empowerment. Just because people of color are around does not mean that their realities are being acknowledged or respected. Representation is here being employed as an aesthetic choice rather than a political one.

This is hooks' "sentimental multiculturalism" a surface-level inclusion that avoids the ugly truths of structural inequality. Through its pastoral representations of tradition and family, the ad constructs a decontested image of Nigerian life palatable to mainstream audiences. The rural lands are nostalgic rather than economically determined by the hardships most rural Nigerians face. The joy portrayed is idealized, devoid of social and political tension.

Above all, the advert is not just selling Christmas spirit it's selling a telecoms brand. The message is straightforward: Glo gives you happiness, culture, and family. But in hooks' analysis, this is a classic example of capitalism commodifying identity. The affective potential of cultural heritage is used to establish an emotional identification with a product. Culture is not the topic the brand is. Nigerian identity is marginalized as a backdrop for consumerism.

Even more troubling is the way that the ad offers consumer choice as a substitute for collective empowerment. Rather than confessing to real barriers to connectivity, such as infrastructural inequality or digital exclusion, the ad suggests that fulfillment is just a phone plan away. This replaces critical engagement with systemic issues with a fantasy of consumer-based inclusion.

For bell hooks, such representation is not neutral or innocuous. It actively operates against the political potential of culture by making it apolitical, fun, and marketable. The ad builds community and heritage into sentimental commodities, negating their transformative potential.

In brief, the Glo advert is what hooks warned against: the aestheticization and depoliticization of Black culture for gain. Although it appears to celebrate Nigerian traditions, it does only insofar as they are convenient to the brand's capitalist enterprise. It invites us to feel good, not think. It presents culture as commodity to be consumed, not a lived experience to be honored or interrogated.

Under hooks' critical eye, "Feliz Navidad, Nigerians!" is a testament to the degree to which capitalist media can co-opt the language of community and diversity, turning even sites of pleasure into vehicles for brand loyalty and market expansion.