RAPS Talk | Reparative Seizure in the Jamaican Lotto Scam

The Race and Public Space (RAPS) Working Group at NYU’s Institute for Public Knowledge invites you to join for a lecture by Jovan Scott Lewis about how disadvantaged black youth in Jamaica engaged in the practice of international “lottery scamming” mobilize a reparative logic. This event is part of the working group’s Reparations Project, a project which explores the prospect of reparations for Transatlantic slavery and colonialism, widely recognized as one of the most horrific events in world history. This inquiry will take the form of common readings to explore and frame the central issues, lectures by experts to interrogate the stakes, legal research to evaluate the case, and economic and statistical analysis to explore the feasibility of reparations for peoples and nations victimized by colonial slavery.

Can’t make it? Watch the live-stream on Facebook or Instagram.

Jovan Scott Lewis is Assistant Professor of African American Studies & Geography at UC Berkeley. An economic anthropologist who works in the field sites of Tulsa, Oklahoma and Montego Bay, Jamaica, his research examines the cultural mechanisms, institutional forms, and social practices through which an unequal living of, and coping with, the economy, its failures and contingencies are understood. Central to this inquiry is an exploration of contemporary inequality, which supports a generative definition of the economy in which poverty and race informs its articulation and spatial organization. Working between the US and the Caribbean, Jovan’s research endeavors toward an understanding of the political economy of inequality and race within the black diaspora.