Emplacing capital: Securing commerce and citizenship in the Nigerian megacity

Since the 1990s, commercial sites across Asia and the Middle East have seen an uptick in visits from Nigerian importers, tens of thousands of whom are now passing through every year. In this context, in which circulatory South–South migration has intensified and transnational commercial links have s...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:American ethnologist 2022-11, Vol.49 (4), p.491-507
Main Author: LU, VIVIAN CHENXUE
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Capitalism
Citizenship
Civil war
Decolonization
Imports
Indigenization
Markets
Migration
Monopolies
Postcolonialism
Rhetoric
Trade
Transnationalism
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Summary:Since the 1990s, commercial sites across Asia and the Middle East have seen an uptick in visits from Nigerian importers, tens of thousands of whom are now passing through every year. In this context, in which circulatory South–South migration has intensified and transnational commercial links have strengthened, Nigerian mass commercial markets have remained strikingly resistant to monopolies. This is largely shaped by traders’ associations, which defend against corporate and non‐Black foreign actors. This article situates these defensive market practices in longer histories of decolonial “indigenization” efforts, postcolonial anxieties of the petrostate economy, and ethnoregional mobilizations undertaken by Igbo people in Nigeria's post–civil war era. Transnational importers mobilize a distinct politics of “emplacement” in Nigeria, where market actors explicitly attempt to create and control the conditions of exchange. They do so by making political claims to profit and by using the rhetoric of citizenship. [ capitalism, emplacement, citizenship, transnational, commerce, Lagos, Nigeria, Africa, Global South ]
ISSN:0094-0496
1548-1425
DOI:10.1111/amet.13102