Marketcraft and the Politics of Profit in Nigeria's Global South Shift
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This talk examines the cultural politics of profit, geopolitical history, and marketcrafting in the petrostate of Nigeria, Africa's most populous country. Since the 1990s, thousands of Nigerian businessmen have become key actors linking commercial sites in Asia and the Middle East to West Africa. In Nigeria, importation markets are strikingly decentralized yet modularly organized, monopoly-resistant, and actively defensive against corporate and non-Black foreign actors. Drawing from ethnographic and archival research, the talk traces three different ‘market origin stories’ of a particular commercial complex to consider the uneasy intersections of economic sovereignty and postcolonial nationalism amongst a shifting geopolitical world order.
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