Research Interests for Charles D. Piot

I do research on contemporary culture and politics, as well as on histories of slavery and colonialism, in francophone West Africa. My first book, Remotely Global: Village Modernity in West Africa (1999) attempted to retheorize a classic out-of-the-way place as within the modern and the global. My recent book, Nostalgia for the Future: West Africa After the Cold War (2010), explores the way in which human rights discourse, democratization, NGOs, and charismatic Christianity are remaking sovereignty, the biopolitical, and political culture in West Africa. An in-progress book on Togolese applying for, and attempting to game, the US Diversity (green card) lottery also explores the experiences of West African expatriates in the US and Europe. I am co-editor of the journal Cultural Anthropology through 2015.

Representative Publications

1. Piot, C, Nostalgia For the Future: West Africa After the Cold War (2010), University of Chicago Press (Winner of the African Politics Conference Group Award for Best Book on African Politics published in 2010.)
2. Piot, C, Remotely Global: Village Modernity in West Africa (1999), University of Chicago Press (Co-winner of the Royal Anthropological Institute's Amaury Talbot Prize for Africanist Anthropology and a finalist for the African Studies Association's Herskovits Prize. French translation - "Isolement Global: la Modernite du Village au Togo" - Karthala Press, 2008..)
3. Piot, C, Heat on the Street: Video Violence in American Teen Culture, Journal of Postcolonial Studies, vol. 6 no. 3 (2003), pp. 351-365
4. Piot, C, Des cosmopolites dans la brousse, Les Temps Modernes, vol. 57 no. 620-21 (2002), pp. 240-260
5. Piot, C, Atlantic Aporias: Africa and Gilroy's Black Atlantic, South Atlantic Quarterly, vol. 100 no. 1 (January, 2001), pp. 155-170, Duke University Press, ISSN 0038-2876 [Gateway.cgi], [doi]