Paper short abstract:

Focusing on Lagos, Nigeria, as a contextual site of an African polis, this paper provides a critical interrogation of the dialectical nature of art in postcolonial deconstruction and transformation of urban territorial space.

Paper long abstract:

The increasingly acrimonious debates on the dimensions, strategies and imperatives of decolonization tended to be limited by the less attention to the question of the roles of art in decolonizing urban space, planning and urban sustainability. Focusing on Lagos, Nigeria, as a contextual site of an African polis, this paper provides a critical interrogation of the dialectical nature of art in postcolonial deconstruction and transformation of urban territorial space. Art is a decolonial tool of contesting the power relations underpinning the urban strategic planning policies. This paper examines how various art forms have been deployed in postcolonial Lagos in reconfiguring and sometimes sustaining the colonial cartographic narratives and public space segregation in Lagos metropolis. Through art resistance, art memory and indigenous aesthetic paradigms, the policy of privatization and instruments of state's coercion in the enforcements of colonial logic of exclusion in urban residential planning in Lagos have been challenged. The supernatural/ontological, communal, historical, relational, functional, and non-alienating aesthetic prisms of African art are theorised in arguing that an actionable framework for decolonizing Lagos and other colonial sites in Africa can be developed to reduce the imperialistic and estranging relationships existing in African polis.