Paper short abstract:

How does Japa live an aspirational and improvisational life in the imaginaries of Nigerian youth who have not moved? How do young urban dwellers make spaces of belonging in dense cities? What orientations to movement and flight do they embody in relation to the spaces they take up in the city?

Paper long abstract:

The term japa – to run, break away, - has gained traction over the last few years in Nigerian urban youth language and popular culture to talk about the phenomenon of youth emigration. While popular discourse has primarily treated the concept in relation to mobility towards the global North, this paper turns away from the event of leaving the country and explores how it can offer a broader conceptual framework for the ways young urban residents orient to space in uncertain times and amidst economic precarity. This paper asks three related questions: How does Japa live an aspirational and improvisational life in the imaginaries of Nigerian youth who have not (will not) move(d)? Second, how do young urban dwellers make spaces of belonging in dense cities? Third, what orientations to movement and flight do they embody in relation to the spaces they take up in the city? To do this, I will do a sociolinguistic analysis of contemporary uses of “japa” in Nigerian popular culture and draw on ethnographic material from three provisional spaces of youth in Lagos: street betting shacks, street performance sites, and “pop-up” queer shops to trace how young residents inhabit shifting spaces in the city. I argue that the space making practices of young urban dwellers in these sites inhere logics of Japa that are not immediately evident in popular middle-class discourses of movement to the global North.