New orientations: Incoherence

Abstract

In this commentary, I engage with Simone et al.'s article, ‘Inhabiting the Extensions’, by reflecting on its connections to my work on uncertainty and urban change in Ibadan and Lagos, Nigeria, and to my recent turn to queer theory to better understand the urban. In doing so, I highlight how youth think a new orientation towards a luxurious lifestyle is their answer to instability and consider the importance of embracing incoherence as a way of having a more nuanced understanding of everyday life and challenging teleological timeframes.

Introduction

Simone et al. (2025) emphasize over and over that the majority of people across the globe live in precarious times – a time of ‘renewed bewilderment’ as to what is happening in their city, a time where the hustle, if you will, is real, and there's profound unsettling. They thus offer ‘the notion of extensions as a way of thinking about operating in the middle of things, as both a reflection of and way of dealing with the unsettling that disrupts clear designations of points of departure and arrival, of movement and settlement, of centre and periphery, of time and space’.

When I first started reading their article, I smiled a little bit because in some (or many?) cases, ‘renewed bewilderment’ (concerning the uncertainty of city life) is almost an understatement. Over the past year, I have had multiple conversations with some people in Ibadan and Lagos, Nigeria, who were angry and frustrated, and thus looking to emigrate. For example, one evening, while trying to navigate Ibadan traffic with one of my friends – he had an outburst; he was incensed – in the 16 years that I had known him, I had never seen him so angry and his use of adjectives to describe all that was going on was, admittedly, quite impressive. Being stuck in traffic perhaps reminded him of all that was ‘wrong’ with the city, Nigeria as a country, and in his life. Although he has plans for the future, he seems ‘stuck in time’, waiting indefinitely for a future that might never materialise (Adeniyi-Ogunyankin and Peake, 2021: 120). By the time he dropped me off, he had explained his determination to leave Nigeria – he wanted to be part of the Japa (out-migration) train (Okunade and Awosusi, 2023). I tried explaining to him that there were no guarantees that he would not meet a similar level of precarity and uncertainty in the United States – where he desired to relocate – particularly as a Black foreigner. He looked at me with disbelief – and I quickly realized that my location in North America (Canada) and what appeared to be my ‘success’ seemed incongruent with my statement. Nevertheless, while his body is currently in Ibadan, Nigeria, awaiting things to fall into place, his mind is elsewhere, lured away from one central location (Simone et al., 2025) to another central location.

Despite my cheeky take on the use of ‘bewilderment’, Simone et al.'s (2025) article was quite provocative, and I thought the authors did an excellent job of demonstrating the reciprocity between each of the extensions they wrote about. My focus in this commentary is on how I thought through their use of extension in relation to my work on urban change in Ibadan and Lagos, Nigeria, including my current fascination with youth and luxury consumption. I end the commentary by briefly stating how their notion of extensions could have benefited from giving a more explicit nod to queer theory.

New orientations?

Simone et al. (2025) note that the urban majority, in a time of uncertainty, engages in acts of extension by drawing out the urban as they seek multiple opportunities and deploy strategies to create new orientations ‘until a desired urban life becomes viable’. This idea of extension as re-orientation reminded me a little of Boudreau's (2022) work on Mexico City and what she calls ‘acts of repair’, which refer to the daily practices people engage in to fix the city and ‘to create through uncertainty’ (857). I am thus curious about how we can read the practices of some urban dwellers whose ‘acts of extension’ and ‘acts of repair’ are oriented in ways that (re)produce even more bewilderment and precarity. To elaborate upon this point, I turn to my ongoing research on youth and upward social mobility in Ibadan and Lagos, which takes into account the relationship between social media consumption, urban identity, and social relations. My participants’ exposure to and obsession with Instagram and TikTok produces an unsettling that is less about the ills, precarity, and insecurity of the city, because the images circulated are about ‘high-end consumption, glamour and refined lifestyles’ (Boy and Uitermark, 2017: 622). The fixation and promotion of ‘soft life’ in the city, on social media, has led some youth to see themselves as ‘oppressed’. Note that oppression, in this case, refers, for example, to the inability to afford eating at a luxurious restaurant or not owning a range rover, and a Christian Dior or Hermes bag. As a participant pointed out, ‘the desire for luxury items is highly influenced by social media consumption. On a daily basis, we see our internet ‘faves’ rocking these high-end luxury brands, and it, in turn, registers in our subconscious that we can own it too and thus strive to get it … because we are attracted to that sort of ‘blessed and flourishing’ lifestyle, we begin to aspire to be like them and own such properties’.

This aspiration, while about enjoyment, is also arguably connected to uncertainty, because there no longer seems to be a ‘straight pathway’ (e.g. get a good degree and get a good job) for them (Fuh, 2021). One participant told me that about five years ago, she had her life figured out – but now that she is nearing the completion of her degree and sees that there are no good jobs in sight (especially one that will pay a decent wage), she has become interested in other ways to secure stability. Inspired by social media, she believes owing luxury, engaging in high-end consumption in the city, will be her pathway to becoming more stable. Luxury is also something that she thinks she deserves. Relatedly, #Godwhen is a popular response to some social media posts that showcase the good life in the city. By stating #Godwhen, they are asking God when their turn is coming and some even question whether there's something wrong with them; anthropocentric comments such ‘am I ugu (fluted pumpkin)? Am I water leaf?’ in effect questions their purported relegation to the realm of insignificance. For if they were indeed human, they would not be ‘oppressed’. Consequently, I would argue that some youth work to fix/repair this perceived ‘brokenness’ (Boudreau, 2022) by investing in themselves aesthetically, working on acquiring a foreign accent locally, and performing (upper)middle classness in hopes that it will attract others to them so that they can secure a wealthy partner or land a well-paying job or a large sum of money to start a business. One participant pointed out that they intentionally ‘make it a big deal to visit certain places, participate in social activities, own/borrow some fashion pieces just in a bid to fit into the lifestyle social media has created’, so that they too can post their pictures on social media, anticipating that wealthy people they interact with online and offline will see that they are worthy of being their friend/acquaintance. Thus, as noted by another participant, it is crucially important to always ‘carry yourself to an extent that people know you’re not from the slums’.

I am not here to necessarily judge this particular orientation towards wealth, but rather to ask what we do when particular forms of drawing out the urban look towards the market/consumerism for liberation (Dosekun, 2020) and whether this desired urban life is indeed viable. More so, this orientation is a form of cruel optimism (Berlant, 2011). As noted by a participant, ‘we have now put ourselves under so much pressure, setting unrealistic standards and in the end feel unaccomplished and dissatisfied when we cannot meet up’. Perhaps this commonsensical orientation needs re-evaluation (McKittrick, 2006, 2011).

Incoherence

I really appreciated Simone et al.'s discussion of extensions as infrastructure and what seemed to be an embrace of the incoherent, particularly through the example of Buna's story. Reading about incoherence made me go off on a tangent, particularly as I also thought about their brief mention of ritual processes and the sacred in their Frontiers section. In what ways does acknowledging incoherence add more richness to our understanding of urban lives/urban living and its extensions? I think embracing the seemingly incoherent also offers us ways to think about how what may not necessarily be ‘coherent’ is part of, and shapes, everyday life, particularly in times of uncertainty. For example, during my research on how low-income women in Ibadan navigate urban change and everyday life in increasingly precarious times, I noticed how Pentecostalism was very much part of most of their lives – to the extent that one of my research participants, enticed by the possible role of Pentecostalism in changing her socio-economic status, converted to Christianity after four decades of being a Muslim and now attends the Redeemed Church of God. And more recently, during my research on youth, identity, and urban change in Ibadan and Lagos, one of my youth informants articulated his refusal to commit himself to one particular church as a member, but rather engages in the continuous search for a church where miracles are constantly happening, so that he could be a beneficiary and finally get his breakthrough. According to Obadare (2022), Nigeria has become a clerical state, in which pastors have established an aristocracy of wonderment, and Pentecostalism is appealing because it offers a ‘coherent theory of history and futurity, including an explanation of the crisis of the Nigerian state and society’ (48) – which also conveniently ‘absolves political actors of responsibility for their actions’ (61). Yet, as De Boeck (2013) points out, in the case of Kinshasa, teleological time-frames, such as that promoted by Pentecostal churches, are side-stepped and people seize and capture the ‘opportunity of the moment to reinvent and reimagine their lives in different ways … [and] there is never a straight line between today and tomorrow, or between here and there, between possibility and the impossible, success and failure, life and death’ (544).

De Boeck's point about challenging teleological time-frames is a key theme in Simone et al.'s (2025) article, especially given its refusal of a ‘city-centric sense of linear progressions’. In fact, I could not help but notice multiple references that destabilized normativity such as acknowledging different conceptualizations of time; holding several orientations at the same time; embracing multiple notions of becoming and material incompletion; and centreing the margins/reversing the gaze. All of these, at least, for me, brought to mind queer theory, particularly queer temporalities (Halberstam, 2003) and the need to disrupt normative urban structures and deconstruct binary logic (Jaffe, 2019). I wonder why the authors did not really engage this scholarship, particularly because I read this article as an invitation to question familiar orientations and not perform the work of alignment (Ahmed, 2006) by allowing for diversions (Simone et al., 2025).