Scammer's Yard

Jovan Scott Lewis is assistant professor of geography and African American Studies at University of California, Berkeley.

• ContentsIntroduction: To Be Poor Is a Crime1. The Planation Remains: A History of Sufferation2. Free Zones: Manipulated Development after Structural Adjustment3. Black Markets: The Color of Crime4. Repairing Blackness: Seizing Reparations through the ScamConclusion: Black Life beyond RepairAcknowledgmentsNotesBibliographyIndex

"Jovan Scott Lewis’s sophisticated and nuanced account of Jamaican lotto scammers’ efforts to escape ‘sufferation’ positions their ethics of seizure within the logic of reparations. If the historical generation of wealth has been criminal-the result of imperialism, slavery, and debt-then its redistribution offers a way to reimagine the postcolonial present and its models of sovereignty. Scammer’s Yard is a must read for those interested in the value of blackness in the wake of the plantation!"-Deborah A. Thomas, University of Pennsylvania"Scammer’s Yard repositions a network of impoverished, aspirational Jamaicans at the frontier of post-colonial, racial capitalism. Combining sharp-eyed ethnography, rich historical detail, and brilliant analysis, Jovan Scott Lewis takes seriously scammers’ attempts to redress colonial brutality by using scams-in their contradictory glory-as a means of laying claim to reparations. An instant classic, this book is essential reading for anthropologists, political theorists, and scholars of the Black Atlantic or anyone looking for new tools to radically reimagine markets and the forms of radicalized violence and criminality they reproduce."-Noelle Stout, author of Dispossessed: How Predatory Bureaucracy Foreclosed on the American Middle Class  "A page turner . . . the richness of the ethnography is as gratifying as Lewis’ deft blending of the empirical data and conceptual framework."-Antipode"Timely and necessary."-Ethnic and Racial Studies " This impressive work deftly weaves together and advances important theoretical constructs, which deepen readers' understanding of this research."-CHOICE"Scammer’s Yard, by Jovan Scott Lewis, is a rich ethnography of the existential question of Black repair."-Transforming Anthropology"Potentially transformative for the terrain of Black and Caribbean studies to the extent that it encourages us to strain against easy gestures to unitary futures on which discourses of reparations so readily rely."-Small Axe"An important ethnography in contesting the pathologizing of the urban poor and the villification of the scammer as a heartless, predatory criminal figure... the author makes a critical intervention to theory and praxes of libration by offering seizure as an ethical postcolonial mode for not only coping with but also challenging political-economic stagnation. "-American Anthropologist