Emplacing capital

Abstract

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

China and the Global South: A Comparative Analysis of Knowledge Networks in Africa, Asia, and Latin America and the Caribbean

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Long-distance nationalism, diaspora mobilisation, and the struggle for Biafran self-determination in Nigeria

“…Consider, by way of example, the ethnographic observations of the anthropologist Vivian Chenxue Lu derived from interactions and interviews with several Igbo merchants in Lagos―the commercial capital of Nigeria―most of whom rejected any inclination toward conflating Igbos with Biafran activism:Many of the market leaders adamantly insisted that their markets had not in fact been closed for the sit-at-home protests, and some market association leaders have publicly denounced Biafran secessionist organisations’ use of wholesale markets in Lagos as political stages. (Lu, 2022a: 503).…”

“…Many of the market leaders adamantly insisted that their markets had not in fact been closed for the sit-at-home protests, and some market association leaders have publicly denounced Biafran secessionist organisations’ use of wholesale markets in Lagos as political stages. (Lu, 2022a: 503).…”

“…Indeed, existing literature tends to engage in ‘methodological nationalism’ (Wimmer and Schiller, 2003) by confining the study of renewed ethnic separatism in Nigeria to geopolitical boundaries of the Nigerian state, with scant attention given to transnational forces that shape ethnic mobilisation in the homeland. When the Igbo diaspora is considered, if ever, it is not so much on secessionism in Nigeria but on their transnational business ties and development projects (see Fonta et al, 2015; Amagoh and Rahman, 2016; Reynolds, 2004) and especially in Igboland (see Lu, 2022a; Reynolds, 2002). Hence, the Igbo diaspora is often depoliticised and not fully explored in the copious literature on secessionism in southeastern Nigeria.…”