Profit Politics and Nigeria's Global South Shift

Nigeria’s importation markets are strikingly monopoly-resistant and actively defensive against corporate and non-Black foreign actors. Based on ethnographic and archival fieldwork amongst Nigerian commercial networks of the Global South, this talk situates these ethnoracialized protective market logics in longer histories of decolonization and postcolonial anxieties around economic sovereignty in Nigeria. Lu explores the different valences and sometimes conflicting visions of decolonial and anti-colonial rhetoric in Nigerian commercial spaces at multiple scales—municipal, national, and transnational. By revisiting decolonial African efforts to ‘indigenize’ economies, the talk traces its contested legacies and its recent contemporary invocations in the postcolonial era as Nigeria’s economic landscapes increasingly shift towards the Global South.

Vivian Chenxue Lu is assistant professor of Anthropology and faculty affiliate of African and African American Studies at Fordham University. Her first book project focuses on the politics of commercial profit amongst the extensive migratory circulations of Nigerian businessmen across contemporary trade sites in Africa, the Middle East, and Asia.