Developing an Original Theory of Postcolonial City Writing in African Literature

Postcolonial urban literature in Africa, particularly the city novel tradition of Lagos, Nairobi, Cairo, and Johannesburg, represents one of the most significant but theoretically underarticulated fields in African literary studies, and a systematic theoretical framework for understanding the postcolonial city as a literary phenomenon is needed. This study developed an original theoretical framework for postcolonial city writing in African literature, using Lagos, Nairobi, and Accra as the primary literary-urban laboratories. A multi-method theory-building methodology was employed, combining systematic review of postcolonial urban literary theory (57 publications), primary corpus analysis of 35 African city novels from Nigeria, Kenya, and Ghana, and structured consultation with 22 scholars in urban studies, postcolonial literature, and African cultural geography. The corpus analysis revealed that African postcolonial city writing is characterised by a distinctive set of formal and thematic features that existing urban literary theory, developed primarily from European and North American city literature, inadequately captures: the palimpsest city (layers of pre-colonial, colonial, and postcolonial urban history simultaneously present in the narrative city-space), the survival economy narrator (the protagonist whose relationship to the city is primarily one of physical and economic survival rather than flaneurie), communal urban space (public spaces as sites of communal identity formation rather than individual anonymity), and digital urban modernity (the smartphone and social media as the primary mediating technology of city experience in contemporary African urban fiction). The original Postcolonial African City Poetics provides a complete theoretical apparatus for each feature.