black nocturnal: Insurgent Ecologies of the Night in Lagos

Abstract

black nocturnal: Insurgent Ecologies of the Night in Lagos examines nighttime as one of the most embattled terrains of life in Lagos from the 1880s to the present, asking, how is the “night” in Lagos produced as a temporal category distinct from the day and what conflicting moral imaginaries, norms, and practices are at stake in its production? As mechanisms of criminalization emerge in this study as a major part of the production of the night, both social time and legal category, this project also asks, what does a colonial and postcolonial alike obsession with nighttime as a spacetime of regulation, teaches us, about colonial and postcolonial sovereignty? Engaging critical theory, ethnographic, archival and experimental art-based research methods, black nocturnal pursues three distinct objectives: 1) make visible the localized imaginations that produce nighttime as a stable object in need of discipline 2) interrogate the productivity of logics of criminalization of the night 3) explore the quotidian ways people reclaim and inhabit nocturnal ecologies as sites of life-making. Ultimately, black nocturnal names the condemnation of the night as inextricable from a condemnation of blackness, as well as the ability to make lives in the interstices of enlightenment regimes of being and propriety, illuminating how nighttime has often functioned as a privileged timespaces of Black continental and diasporic possibility, not as a site in which terror is absent or as the ground of some romance of resistance, but as a site where terror is nowhere as intimately linked to the promise of reprieve, an insistent life-making, and a disavowal of an order of things, that is also an order of times.