Taken together, the crucial argument Connor Ryan makes in Lagos Never Spoils is the idea that “Nollywood continually stirs up discourses on Lagos and thereby animates numerous ways of thinking and feeling about the [African] city.”[xxix] In making that argument, the book too never offers us one monolithic or fixed view of Lagos. Instead, what it shows us is a city constantly changing in both its architectural, economic, social, and creative dimensions due to both local and international influences associated with neoliberal and cultural globalization. What we come to know of Lagos, then, is not a postcolonial city in chronic stasis, but a particular social climate defined by, ruled, and apprehended by shifting cultural codes and assumptions. Connor Ryan’s analysis of Lagos in Nollywood cinema makes clear the assertion by the preeminent geographer and spatial theorist, Doreen Massey, that space is not only “socially constructed,” but also that “the social is spatially constructed too.”[xxx] Lagos Never Spoils elaborates on the former.
Endnotes
[i] See Roland Barthes, “Semiology and the Urban” in The City and the Sign: An Introduction to Urban Semiotics. Eds. M. Gottdiener and A. Lagopoulos. New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1986; Michel de Certeau. The Practice of Everyday Life. Berkeley; University of California Press, 1988; Jonathan Raban. The Soft City. London: Hamish Hamilton, 1974; George Simmel. “The Metropolis and Menta Life” in Ed. Ed. Philip Kasinitz. Metropolis: Centre and Symbol of Our Times. London: Macmillan, 1995; Henri Lefebvre. Writings on Cities. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1996; Friedrich Engels. The Condition of the Working Class in England in 1884. London: Allen and Unwin, 1892; Walter Benjamin. One Way Street. London: New Left Books, 1979.
[ii] See for example, Sarah Nuttall and Achille Mbembe (Eds.). Johannesburg: The Elusive City. Durham; Duke University Press, 2008; Rem Koolhaas. Lagos: How it Works. Lars Muller Publishers, 2010; Jane Guyer, LaRay Denzer, and Adugun Agbaje (Eds.). Money Struggles and City Life: Devaluation in Ibadan and Other Urban Centers in Southern Nigeria, 1986-1996. Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann, 2002; Filip de Boeck and Marie-Francoise Plissart. Kinshasa: Tales of the Invisible City. Ghent: Ludion, 2006; and Ato Quayson, Oxford Street, Accra: City Life and the Itineraries of Transnationalism. Durham: Duke University Press, 2014.
[iii] Barthes, Roland. “Semiology and the Urban.” The City and the Sign: An Introduction to Urban Semiotics. Eds. M Gottdiener and Alexandros Ph. Lagopoulos. New York: Columbia University Press, 1986. Pp. 96.
[iv]Pfaff, Francoise. “African Cities as Cinematic Text.” Ed. Francoise Pfaff. Focus on African Films. Bloomington: Indiana Univ Press, 2004.
[v] Lagos Never Spoils, Pp. 01.
[vi] Lagos Never Spoils, Pp. 02.
[vii] Lagos Never Soil, Pp 03.
[viii] Lagos Never Spoils, Pp. 04.
[ix] Nollywood scholars such as Obododimma Oha, “The Ambivalent City” (2001), Onookome Okome, “The Anxious City” (2002), Jonathan Haynes, “Nollywood in Lagos, Lagos in Nollywood” (2007), and Paul Ugor, Nollywood, Popular Culture and Marginalized Youth (2016) have all written about the aesthetic figuration of the city in Nollywood films.
[x] Lagos Never Spoil, Pp. 17.
[xi] Lagos Never Spoil, Pp. 05.
[xii] Lagos never Spoils, Pp. 31-2.
[xiii] Eunice Ngongkim. Anglophone Cameroon Poetry and the Environmental Matrix. Bern, Switzerland: Peter Lang, 2017. Pp. 26.
[xiv] Lagos Never Spoils, Pp. 87.
[xv] Lagos Never Spoils, Pp. 70.
[xvi] For more details regarding Raymond Williams’ idea of ‘structure of feeling,” see his book, The Long Revolution (1961).
[xvii] Lagos Never Spoils, Pp. 93-4.
[xviii] Nollywood Never Spoils, PP. 94.
[xix] Lagos Never Spoils, Pp. 117.
[xx] Paul Ugor. Nollywood: Popular Culture and Narratives of Marginalized Youth in Nigeria. Durham, NC: Carolina Academic Press, 2016.
[xxi] Lagos Never Spoils, Pp. 124.
[xxii] ibid
[xxiii] ibid
[xxiv] Lagos Never Spoils, Pp. 151.
[xxv] Lagos Never Spoils, Pp. 150
[xxvi] Lagos Never Spoils, Pp. 180-81.
[xxvii] See Osef Bayat. ‘‘Un-civil society: the politics of the ‘informal people’,’’ Third World Quarterly 18 (1): (1997). Pp. 53–72.
[xxviii] Lagos Never Spoils, Pp. 191-2
[xxix] Lagos Never Spoils, Pp. 204.
[xxx] Massey, Doreen. “Introduction: Geography Matters.” Geography Matters: A Reader. Ed. Doreen Massey and John Allen. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1984. Pp. 6.
