Cannibalistic and Pornographic Images of Lagos City in Toni Kan’s The Carnivorous City

Abstract

The city is a spatial phenomenon that conditions the production of African city literature and reveals African urban life, experience, relations and problems in the aftermath of colonialism. Sociopolitical, economic and cultural issues have been of more interest to extrinsic critics of African city fiction than exploring the aesthetics that make city a universal subject in African literature. Studies on The Carnivorous City are qualitative towards the novelist’s penchant for city-life, acculturation, human struggle, greed, love, corruption and other post-independent issues in Africa, yet, Kan’s city fiction, like every literary text, has its form. This study, therefore, attempts to fill this gap by interrogating city as form in The Carnivorous City.The study examines the novel as an autonomous work of art and it adopts New Criticism, with a particular reference to “closing reading” and “reconciliation of the opposites” as analytic principles.The study describes the city as the subject of African city literature and portrays its pornographic and cannibalistic tendencies. It also reveals The Carnivorous City is rich towards the use of formal elements in the conceptualization of Lagos City in text, and indicates further that the novel is a city fiction rich in language, animal imagery and sensual dictions that portray Lagos as the universal subject in text.The study recommends a close reading of African city fictions as this approach enriches the artfulness of the sub-genre and sharpens the meaning of the urban literary texts beyond what extrinsic reading offers.