Jovan Scott Lewis, “Criminal Repair and Postcolonial Sovereignty in the Jamaican Lotto Scam” (co-sponsored talk)

Criminal Repair and Postcolonial Sovereignty in the Jamaican Lotto Scam

Structural adjustment continues to plague Jamaica with systemic and deepening poverty. I discuss how a group of young Black Jamaicans participated in what is known as the Jamaican lotto scam—an intricate scheme that targeted primarily elderly, White North Americans–to successfully mitigate these conditions. I examine the scam’s complex manipulation of Jamaican ICT through which scammers refashioned themselves and their country’s relationship to North America. I illustrate how scammers produce novel logics of capital, criminality, and Blackness to develop a radical formulary for postcolonial Black repair and postcolonial sovereignty.

Jovan Scott Lewis is Associate Professor and Chair of the Department of Geography at the University of California, Berkeley. His research is generally concerned with the questions of racial capitalism, underdevelopment, and radical terms of repair in the Caribbean and US. He is the author of Scammer’s Yard: The Crime of Black Repair in Jamaica and Violent Utopia, forthcoming this Fall, which traces the consequences of the 1921 Tulsa race massacre. In 2021, he was appointed by California Governor Gavin Newsom to serve on the state’s Reparations Taskforce.