"Suspended City": Personal, Urban, and National Development in Chris Abani's Graceland

In Graceland (2004), Chris Abani extends a long tradition of Lagos literature by re-imagining the city from the perspective of its poorest population. By invoking and subverting the Bildungsroman genre through his narration of the young slumdweller Elvis's troubled coming of age, he suggestively critiques the instability and inconsistency of the postcolonial nation-state. Specifically, through his formal and thematic elaboration of a "suspension" leitmotif, Abani demonstrates the paralyzing imbrication of the local, national, and global discourses of development that collide at the urban margins. While national models of progress are proven untenable by the discrepant trajectories of development that intersect the city, the promise of cultural transnationalism is equally circumscribed by Elvis's immersion in a global economic system that perpetuates his marginalization. In his fictional representation of Lagos's uneven development, Abani thus responds to calls for more holistic accounts of development than those which emerge from dominant economic analyses.