I am an anthropologist whose work focuses on the cultural politics of profit, transnational commerce, ethnonationalism, and diaspora. My first book manuscript (in progress) traces the extensive commercial migration of Igbo Nigerian businessmen across the Middle East and Asia. Based on ethnographic and archival fieldwork primarily based in Nigeria, the project examines how these transnational circuits are transforming social and economic life in Nigeria, with a focus on market formation, kinship and gender, race and ethnicity, and postcolonial economic sovereignty.
My future two projects are on 1.) Nigeria's continental presence and relation to south-south geopolitical and economic formations such as BRICS and 2.) the meanings and politics of “local business” and community in the Rocky Mountain Front Range of the contemporary American West.
Prior to Rice, I was an assistant professor of anthropology at Fordham University, an African Studies postdoctoral associate at Yale University, and a visiting Ph.D. student at the University of Lagos (Nigeria). My research has been supported by sources such as the National Science Foundation, the Wenner-Gren Foundation, and the American Council of Learned Societies. I am currently program co-chair for the Association for Africanist Anthropology, I am most regularly involved with the Lagos Studies Association.
SELECTED PUBLICATIONS
Articles
Lu, V. C.. 2024. "The Body Geopolitic: Afro-Asian pluralities and playful masculinities in Nigerian popular culture." The Black Scholar 54(3): 30-41.
Lu, V.C., 2022. “Emplacing capital: Securing commerce and citizenship in the Nigerian megacity.” American Ethnologist 49(4): 491-507.
Lu, V.C., 2022. “Mobilizing home: Diasporic agitations in the global remakings of postwar southeastern Nigeria.” African Studies Review 65(1):118-142
Huang, Mingwei, V.C. Lu, Susan MacDougall, & Megan Steffan, 2018. “Disciplinary Violence.” Anthropology News 59(3):79-82
Lu, V.C., 2017. “Agitating the State: Biafran Money, Memes, and Mobility.” The Republic: Journal of Nigerian Affairs Vol. 5: On Violence & Civil War
Lu, V.C., 2017. “Biafra—Nostalgia as Critique.” Africa is a Country