The Tales of Two (Glittering) Cities: Light in Selected Anglophone Nigerian Noir Fiction

Juxtaposing two Nigerian writers, this article scrutinizes how Cyprian Ekwensi’s urban proto-noir novels (People of the City; Jagua Nana) and Chika Unigwe’s urban quasi-noir (On Black Sisters’ Street) mobilize and implement images of light. The analysis addresses the cross-generational and gendered dialogue between Ekwensi’s mid-twentieth-century tropical glare and Unigwe’s contemporary feminist deconstruction of Antwerp’s red-light district, charting the evolution of postcolonial anxieties and the structural subversion of the Afropolitan dream.