Thesis Defence: Knowing One’s Place: Orientation, Participation, and Lagos Novels
April 16 at 10:00 am - 2:00 pm
Olusegun Atolagbe, supervised by Dr. Sakiru Adebayo, will defend their thesis titled “Knowing One’s Place: Orientation, Participation, and Lagos Novels” in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts in English.
An abstract for Olusegun Atolagbe’s thesis is included below.
Defences are open to all members of the campus community as well as the general public. Registration is not required for in-person defences.
Abstract
This MA thesis in English engages anew with the narration of public spaces and everyday life in recent postcolonial African city literature. Offering readings of two contemporary Lagos novels — Teju Cole’s Every Day is for the Thief (2007) and Chibundu Onuzo’s Welcome to Lagos (2017) — each analysis chapter focuses on affective states, orientation and participation, to rethink how “knowing one’s place” privileges the insights gained from documenting physical environments. These novels demonstrate how material space serves as a reference point for translating global experiences into local contexts and, conversely, local realities into global frameworks.
Over the last four decades, scholarship around worlding and narrating literary Lagos often positions the city within the framework of the “Failed City Index,” with representations such as a “spatial enigma,” a “ruined geography,” and a place that “resists definition” and “defies the norms of the modern city.” In contrast, this thesis adopts an optimistic reading, focusing on a novel and an autofiction that portray Lagos as a “platform of mediation.” It examines how public chronotopes—streets, museums, markets, posters, billboards, and transport networks—provide new ways to think about the city. This perspective is termed orientation. Furthermore, I argue that some “failed” infrastructures, unhomely sites, along with the city itself, can forge cosmopolitan solidarity, facilitating the co-mingling and emplacement of strangers while contributing meaningfully to the city’s development, which I term participation.
This thesis takes an interdisciplinary approach and reads place as mimetic by engaging with ideas from cultural geography and environmental humanities. This enables productive ways of thinking about cities following the spatial turn in literary and cultural studies and contributes to discussions on urban resilience and community participation in Lagos scholarship.
In turn, my thesis will potentially impact and encourage scholars to view orientation and participation as key conduits of engagement for positioning interdisciplinary conversations and advancing urban thought within the context of literary Lagos scholarship.
