Abstract
This article interrogates the dialectical tension between environmental determinism and human agency in four contemporary Lagos novels, namely Graceland (2004), Every Day Is for the Thief (2007/2014), Welcome to Lagos (2017), and Easy Motion Tourist (2016). Reading these texts at the confluence of postcolonial urban theory, African literary philosophy, and the ethics of development, the article argues that while the Lagos cityscape is represented as a structurally coercive environment marked by poverty, institutional dysfunction, spatial violence, and moral corrosion, the novels collectively resist deterministic closure by foregrounding what this article terms ethical praxis, that is, the capacity of socially situated, historically conditioned subjects to deliberate, choose, and act in morally meaningful ways within and against the constraints of their environment. Drawing on Henri Lefebvre’s spatial theory, AbdouMaliq Simone’s theorisation of African urban life, Achille Mbembe’s postcolonial critique, and the African moral philosophies of Kwasi Wiredu and Thaddeus Metz, the article demonstrates how these novelists construct Lagos not merely as a deterministic trap but as an ethical laboratory in which agency, solidarity, and moral survival are continuously negotiated. The article contributes to ongoing debates in African literary studies, urban humanities, and postcolonial ethics by proposing a critical vocabulary adequate to the moral complexity of postcolonial megacity fiction.
Authors:
Clement Oshogwe Mamudu
Department of English and Literary Studies
Igbinedion University, Okada, Nigeria
E-Mail: mamudu.clement@iuokada.edu.ng
ORCID ID: 0009-0006-2359-2194