This essay considers how the historical production of the Caribbean as a space of relative surplus populations is implicated in contemporary efforts to criminalize and contain flows of finance across its borders. Extending a key theme in Jovan Scott Lewis’s Scammer’s Yard: The Crime of Black Repair in Jamaica (2020)—the crime of poverty—the essay explores how emerging anti–money laundering / combating the financing of terrorism (AML/CFT) regulatory policies are changing the terrain of struggle to recuperate and repudiate the devaluation of Black life in the Caribbean. It argues that difficult conversations about the processes that continue to produce the Caribbean as a racialized space of devalued surplus labor are needed nationally, regionally, and internationally before the region can truly embark on the road toward Black repair.
Criminalization on a World Scale: Racial Capitalism, Finance, and the Crime of Poverty in the Caribbean
Beverley Mullings is professor of feminist political economy in the Department of Geography and Planning at Queen’s University, Kingston, Ontario. Her research interests include the transforming nature of work within racial capitalist regimes, the financialization of remittance economies, and the place of diaspora in the remaking of Caribbean radical traditions. Her publications have appeared in the Annals of the Association of American Geographers; Gender, Place, and Culture; the Journal of Economic Geography; Antipode; the Review of International Political Economy; Small Axe; Geoforum; and Environment and Planning A, among others.
Beverley Mullings; Criminalization on a World Scale: Racial Capitalism, Finance, and the Crime of Poverty in the Caribbean. Small Axe 1 March 2022; 26 (1 (67)): 169–180. doi: https://doi.org/10.1215/07990537-9726007
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