Chapter 17 - Worlding Lagos in the Long Twentieth Century

Summary

Lagos has always been an exceptional site in the Nigerian, African and world imaginary. Both the colonial capital and present-day economic centre of Africa’s most populous nation, Lagos is itself a world. It is therefore no surprise that the city has become a key site through which the world literary imaginary has unfurled, with numerous depictions, projections and imaginative instantiations of the city functioning as a fulcrum around which the contours of world-formation (mondialisation) and contestation have emerged. This chapter explores this rich literary history, conceiving of Lagosian space as a limit case for the wider operations of world-formation in World Literature across the long twentieth century. The chapter is attuned to the articulations and registrations which obtain between the material evolution of the city and its literary image, as well as the larger economic, political and social fields which subtend a range of literary forms. As a mega-city amongst mega-cities, Lagos functions as a setting particularly apt to a wide and often-incongruous range of worldly projections and world formations which lend considerable nuance to the map of World Literature.