Student Type
Ph.D.
Document Type
Article
Publication Date
Winter 2015
Abstract
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.
Included in
Literature in English, Anglophone outside British Isles and North America Commons, Other American Studies Commons, Race, Ethnicity and Post-Colonial Studies Commons
Comments
This article was originally published in Modern Fiction Studies 61.4 (2015), available at DOI: 10.1353/mfs.2015.0047