Infrastructural posthumanism and the African city: ecology, media, and urban form in Nnedi Okorafor’s Lagoon (2014)

This article argues that Nnedi Okorafor’s Lagoon (2014) presents Lagos as a more-than-human urban space in which ecological, communicative, and social-material systems actively shape urban life and futurity. It develops the concept of infrastructural posthumanism to show that agency in the novel is distributed across human and nonhuman actors rather than located in autonomous human subjects. Framing on Brian Larkin’s account of infrastructure, N. Katherine Hayles’s model of distributed cognition, and Okorafor’s Africanfuturist framework, the article defines infrastructure as a material and relational system that organizes circulation, communication, and transformation. The analysis proceeds through three domains. Eco-infrastructure examines the lagoon waters and marine life as sites of petro-violence, multispecies response, and ecological change. Discursive infrastructure analyzes media and communication systems as forces that produce collective yet unstable publics. Social-material infrastructure studies roads, enclosures, and urban routes to show how mobility, inequality, and improvisation are structured by built form. The article concludes that Lagoon grounds posthuman thought in African urban conditions and locates futurity within Lagos’s own infrastructures.