Building African Futures: Afropreneurialism and Innovation in Lagos
This dissertation examines how actors in the Lagos startup ecosystem deploy discourses and practices of technological entrepreneurship to fashion new subjectivities within and beyond national boundaries in order to imagine alternative futures for their nation and the African Continent. In so doing, I argue for a reconceptualization of technological innovation beyond materialist preoccupations with objects to include innovative practices of self-making and national boundary-making. I also urge for a redefinition of African entrepreneurship beyond neoliberalism as a complex sociocultural practice at the interstices of culture, capital, and class. And ultimately, I conclude that Africa has always been a site and source of technological innovation, through an examination of the Lagos tech ecosystem as a convergence of deeply entangled global and local processes, practices, and imaginaries.