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9
result(s) for
"Lagos (Nigeria) Fiction."
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The carnivorous city
Rabato Sabato, aka, Soni Dike, is a criminal turned grandee, with a beautiful wife, an exclusive mansion on Victoria Island and a questionable fortune. Then one day he disappears. His Jag is found in a ditch, music blaring from the speakers. Soni's older brother, Abel Dike, a small-town teacher arrives to join the search for his sibling. Abel is rapidly sucked into the maelstrom of Lagos: he has to navigate the motley cast of common criminals, deal with the policemen intent on grabbing a piece of the pie, and grapple wth his growing desire for his brothers wife.
Book
African Science Fiction and the Planning Imagination
Abstract
This essay examines the recent rise in popularity of science fiction in Africa. I argue that this growth can be traced to key shifts within the logic of structural adjustment programs. Over the last twenty years, the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF) have begun to place a heightened emphasis on “poverty reduction strategies” (or PRSs). These PRSs have taken the two organizations’ longstanding commitment to free-market policies and adapted them to the rhetoric of social and economic justice by suggesting that “sustainable” welfare programs can only be constructed through the “long-term” benefits of well-planned “institutions.”
As I show, this vision of long-term development has encouraged a move toward fictional forms capable of speaking to elongated temporal scales. Using Nnedi Okorafor’s novel
Lagoon
as my primary example, I investigate how sci-fi narratives have struggled to represent social agency within the
longue durée
of institutional planning.
Journal Article
Olu & Greta
Two cousins--one in Lagos, Nigeria, and the other in Milan, Italy--have different lives, but they share a dream of meeting and being together.
Book
\THE PROBLEM OF LOCOMOTION\
This essay analyzes automobility in three postcolonial urban Nigerian novels: the fantasy of self-propulsion that subtends a colonial modernity materialized through the erection of urban infrastructure. Tracing the disjuncture between automobility and infrastructure—the “problem of locomotion” (Achebe)—reveals the inextricability of mobility, modernity, urbanism, and colonial violence even into Nigeria’s formally postcolonial period. By exploring how characters both invest in and move beyond inherited colonial narratives, these novels challenge top-down images of Lagos, instead depicting it as a city “otherwise fashioned” (Abani) from their characters’ perspectives on what it feels like to dwell and sell on the streets.
Journal Article
Re-Membering the Travelogue: Generic Intertextuality as a Memory Practice in Teju Cole’s Every Day is for the Thief
Genres are not simply carriers of meaning – they generate meaning themselves. By intertextually evoking the genre of the travelogue, Teju Cole’s
re-members a genre and its practices of not only portraying but also creating the Other. By ways of openly using but at the same time misusing the main characteristics of the imperialistic travelogue – such as the discourse of negation and visual practices –
highlights entanglements that destabilize any fixed boundary between the past and the present as well as between the colonizer and the colonized. Disappointing the reader’s expectations raised by the generic conventions, the generic intertextuality asks the reader to reconsider the wider memory context that the genre is placed in. Neither conforming to the traditional travelogue nor to the postcolonial travelogue,
questions these firm categorisations, positioning itself in the in-between and asking for a thinking beyond binary divisions and, most of all, a linking of the past and the present.
Journal Article
Entropy and Energy: Lagos as City of Words
In his 1971 study \"City of Words\", Tony Tanner employs the term \"entropy\" to characterize the vision of the city offered by American novelists of the second half of the twentieth century. The term applies equally to the accounts of Lagos given by novelists such as Ekwensi and Okara in the 1950s and '60s and, even more markedly, to the work of members of the \"third generation\" of Nigerian novelists writing in English. An examination of texts by Helon Habila, Akin Adesokan, and Maik Nwosu reveals, however, that Lagos is characterized by these--and other--novelists not only as a site of disorder and decay but as an environment in which creative energies are nurtured that are held to constitute a corrective and liberatory force.
Journal Article
