Introduction: The Imaginative Capital of Lagos

The articles in this special section, organized by Abosede George, Saheed Aderinto, and Ademide Adelusi-Adeluyi, were presented at the first Lagos conference at Barnard College. Each addresses a piece of Lagos that exists as much, or far more, in the imaginary as it does in the real world. Although the first conference was, as one attendee observed, more pepperfarm than megacity, which is to say that it reflected a bias toward more distant eras in Lagos history, the contributions to this issue cover a variety of eras in Lagos history. As this introduction notes, while projects on the megacity tend to be concerned with the logics of disorder and instability in Lagos, more historical projects tend to consider Lagos through local lenses and reflect on the centrality of notions of modernity and urbanity to indigenous conceptualizations of the city.