JOVAN SCOTT LEWIS
I am Professor and Chair of the Department of Geography and the Haas Distinguished Chair in Economic Disparities at the University of California, Berkeley. I am the author of Scammer’s Yard: The Crime of Black Repair in Jamaica (University of Minnesota Press, 2020) and Violent Utopia: Dispossession and Black Restoration in Tulsa (Duke University Press, 2022) and also co-editor of The Black Geographic: Praxis, Resistance, Futurity (Duke University Press, 2023).
I am a critical human geographer and anthropologist whose scholarship explores the intersections of Black geographies, racial capitalism, reparative justice, and economic inequality. My work is grounded in a commitment to understanding how Black communities—particularly in the Caribbean and the United States—navigate and respond to the enduring legacies of slavery, colonialism, and global economic inequities. At the heart of my research is a focus on how these histories of dispossession and exploitation shape contemporary struggles for justice, particularly emphasizing the role of reparations in addressing structural disparities.
Economic inequality is a central concern of my work. I investigate the systems and structures that produce racialized disparities in wealth and opportunity while also examining the practices through which Black communities create life-sustaining economies and networks despite these inequities. This focus deeply informs my approach to reparations. I critique dominant frameworks that reduce reparations to financial redress or symbolic gestures, instead advocating for reparative models that address the root causes of economic injustice while fostering repair and collective Black futures beyond the referent of injury. This perspective drives my broader intellectual project of imagining reparative justice not simply as a response to harm, but as a pathway to economic and social transformation.
My first book, Scammer’s Yard: The Crime of Black Repair in Jamaica (2020), exemplifies this approach by examining the informal economies of Jamaican lottery scammers, who disrupt global hierarchies of wealth and power through their own forms of economic survival and resistance. By interrogating the ethical, class, and racial dimensions of their practices, I highlight the structural inequities that necessitate such survival strategies while also critiquing the limits of Caribbean scholarship in capturing these dynamics. My second book, Violent Utopia: Dispossession and Black Restoration in Tulsa (2022), extends this focus to the U.S., exploring the economic legacies of racialized violence and the possibilities for Black restoration in the face of ongoing inequality.
I am currently finishing up my third book, State of Repair. Building from my appointment to the California Reparations Taskforce (2021–2023) by Governor Gavin Newsom, the book draws on research and direct experience advancing state-level reparations in California for the history and contemporary experience of African American discrimination in the state.
Across my scholarship, I position the Caribbean and the United States as key sites where the afterlives of slavery and colonialism remain visible in global capitalism. My work traces how racialized labor, land dispossession, and wealth extraction continue to shape contemporary economic systems while also uncovering the ways Black communities challenge these structures through creative and often unrecognized forms of resistance, repair, and restoration.
As Chair of the Department of Geography at UC Berkeley and Haas Distinguished Chair in Economic Disparities, I am deeply committed to advancing scholarship that interrogates inequality's spatial and economic dimensions in applied ways that remake our public institutions.
BOOKS
FINALIST: C WRIGHT MILLS AWARD
HONORABLE MENTION: JOHN HOPE FRANKLIN PRIZE
Violent Utopia: Dispossession and Black Restoration in Tulsa takes readers to Tulsa, Oklahoma—a city remembered for the 1921 Race Massacre and its enduring legacy of racial violence and economic dispossession. Through meticulous ethnographic and historical analysis, the book interrogates how Black Tulsans navigate the contradictions of living in a place marked by both profound injury and aspirational belonging.
The book unravels the layered histories of Black life in Tulsa, from the promise of Greenwood’s "Black Wall Street" to its devastation and the contested efforts at recovery and redress. Lewis examines how racialized landscapes of violence, from Indian Territory to urban renewal, have shaped Black struggles for autonomy and justice, while simultaneously asking what it means to belong in spaces defined by harm.
By framing Tulsa as a microcosm of the broader Black American experience, Violent Utopia moves beyond the narrative of trauma to explore the generative possibilities of repair, resistance, and relational transformation. This work challenges readers to confront the enduring structures of antiblackness while envisioning a world where flourishing might emerge from the ruins of violence.
Watch CBS Bay Area Profile on Violent Utopia
Praise for Violent Utopia
In Violent Utopia, Jovan Scott Lewis cautions that Tulsa’s historic Greenwood community is more than its Black Wall Street legacy. Situating the 1921 Tulsa race massacre within knotty and enduring place-specific geographies of anti-Black and anti-Native American violence, he masterfully outlines the complex structures of dispossession and trauma in which Tulsa’s Black population has been entangled from Indian Removal to Jim Crow to urban renewal to gentrification. With an ultimate interrogation of the possibilities for Greenwood’s twenty-first-century freedom and repair, this book stands out for its original and timely insights that only can be revealed through the mix of tools that Lewis leverages from geography, anthropology, and history.
Karla Slocum, author of Black Towns, Black Futures: The Enduring Allure of a Black Place in the American West
Jovan Scott Lewis makes an important, radical, and critical turn away from histories that exceptionalize the white violence of the Tulsa massacre and cast it as a singular event as opposed to a structural occurrence. Deftly and sensitively moving beyond narratives based on an easy nostalgia, cheap sentimentalism, and knee jerk patriotism, he painstakingly demonstrates that 1921 must be seen as a century-long project of deprivation and dispossession. With this important book, Lewis has given us a harrowing narrative of Black disenfranchisement.
Peter James Hudson, author of Bankers and Empire: How Wall Street Colonized the Caribbean
WINNER: EDUARDO BONILLA-SILVA BOOK AWARD
Scammer's Yard: The Crime of Black Repair in Jamaica, examines the intertwined realities of economic inequality, racial disenfranchisement, and ingenuity born of necessity through the lens of Jamaica's infamous lottery scam industry. Grounded in ethnographic research in Montego Bay, this book explores how young men—relegated to the margins of global capitalism—turn to scamming as both survival and subversion.
The book reveals the moral and economic tensions that underlie the scams, tracing their origins to the long histories of colonial extraction, systemic poverty, and the exclusion of Black Jamaicans from the promise of global economic mobility. The scammers, often vilified in international narratives, emerge here as complex figures, enacting their own forms of reparative justice through illicit means.
Interrogating the dynamics of victimhood, culpability, and agency, Scammer's Yard asks what happens when repair is sought outside the bounds of legality. At its core, the book challenges readers to rethink the geographies of racial capitalism and the ethical dilemmas embedded in survival economies, positioning scamming as both a critique of and a response to global systems of inequality.
Praise for Scammer's Yard
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, author of Political Life in the Wake of the Plantation: Sovereignty, Witnessing, Repair
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
REPARATIONS
I have devoted my scholarly career to identifying and accounting for the various harms experienced by African descended people in the Caribbean and the United States. The question of reparations and everyday articulations of repair have necessarily been central to those inquiries. On the basis of that record, from 2021 to 2023, I was appointed by California Governor Gavin Newsom to the State's Reparations Task Force, the first government-initiated reparations commission in US history. As the only academic working on matters of racial justice appointed to the Task Force, I was responsible for framing the community of eligibility and overseeing the development of compensation recommendations, what many consider to be the centerpieces of any reparative policy. Beyond those direct portfolios, I made sure that the Task Force understood that the stakes were not just matters of compensation but the very terms by which the Black community in California would be redefined. Coming out of the Task Force, I am leading a research group of economists and political scientists studying the racial wealth gap in California. I am also a core member of The Alliance for Reparations, Reconciliation and Truth (AART) with fellow Task Force colleagues Lisa Holder, Cheryl Grills, and Don Tamaki. I am currently a steering member of the Garifuna Heritage Foundation's movement for reparations in the Caribbean. I am also a regular pro-bono consultant to various US state and local government reparations initiatives, including New York, Washington D.C., and various counties and cities in California.
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Piers Morgan Uncensored
Evening News NBC Bay Area
Nightly News with Lester Holt
California's Case for Reparations: ABC Documentary
BLACK GEOGRAPHIES
I started the Berkeley Black Geographies Project in 2016 in the Geography Department at the University of California, Berkeley. The project has advanced an intellectual and institutional commitment to the geographic study of the Black experience and how racialization has been central to the imagining and organizing of modern society. Across programming, pedagogy, and publishing, and through my mentorship of over a dozen current graduate students, graduate alum, and faculty mentees ,Geography at UC Berkeley has become the primary incubator and institutional leader in the disciplines of Black Geographies and Black ecologies.
Born out of the Berkeley Black Geographies Project I started and the discipline-defining 2017 symposium organized by me and then graduate students Camilla Hawthorne, Kaily Heitz, and Jane Henderson, The Black Geographic explores the theoretical innovations of Black Geographies scholarship and how it approaches Blackness as historically and spatially situated. In studies that span from Oakland to the Alabama Black Belt to Senegal to Brazil, the contributors draw on ethnography, archival records, digital humanities, literary criticism, and art to show how understanding the spatial dimensions of Black life contributes to a broader understanding of race and space. They examine key sites of inquiry: Black spatial imaginaries, resistance to racial violence, the geographies of racial capitalism, and struggles over urban space. Throughout, the contributors demonstrate that Blackness is itself a situating and place-making force, even as it is shaped by spatial processes and diasporic routes. Whether discussing eighteenth- and nineteenth-century abolitionist print records or migration and surveillance in Niger, this volume demonstrates that Black Geographies is a mode of analyzing Blackness that fundamentally challenges the very foundations of the field of geography and its historical entwinement with colonialism, enslavement, and imperialism. In short, it marks a new step in the evolution of the field.
Praise for The Black Geographic
This volume takes on the monumental task of pulling together scholarship from different geographic areas, time periods, and disciplines to put forth a view on the current state of Black Geographies while gesturing toward new futures. Pushing the field, The Black Geographic is a defining text.
Ashanté M. Reese, author of Black Food Geographies: Race, Self-Reliance, and Food Access in Washington, D.C.
The Black Geographic will continue to extend and push the tradition of Black Geographies in fresh, insightful, and important new ways through the insights of the newest generation of scholars who are defining and redefining the terrain of these discussions and debates. A superb collection.
Nik Heynen, Distinguished Research Professor of Geography, University of Georgia
ARTICLES
In Black Studies, fugitivity embodies the dual process of resistance and resilience of Black subjects who seek liberation from racism and systemic injustice and of reclaiming and exercising agency and autonomy in a world that constantly marginalizes and subjugates. In exploring the concept of fugitivity and its implications for the liberation of Black subjects, it becomes crucial to consider whether and if fugitivity serves as a position, a process, or a relation from which Black individuals and communities can bring about repair as complete liberation.
Identifying that the harms against African Americans and Black life in the Americas more generally are harms against Black relations, the article engages with the possibility of the relational discipline of Black ecologies to offer a framework for conceptualizing a full sense of reparation. However, in recognizing that Blackness as conceived within Black studies, and thus Black ecologies, is still largely limited to a commitment to the study of antiblack violence and its related practices of resistance, the article advances novel pathways for pursuing a formula for repair outside the terms of Black injury, which might produce what I call relational repair.
In this essay, I return to Scammer’s Yard to further examine the issues of repair and refusal. Further analyzing the possibility of repair as advanced by the scammers, the essay encourages moving past the politics of refusal and resistance in analyses of postcolonial Blackness and instead offers a form of analytical and narrative suspension that avoids the urge for political reconciliation typical of Caribbean postcolonial social production and analysis.
In this article racial capitalism is argued to be a fundamentally ontologizing process. This point is advanced through the central role of labor in the development of post-emancipation Caribbean subjectivity.
This article explores how participation in cooperatives seeks to accomplish an ideal form of the market through the constitutive ethics of organization and skill development. Through the employment of a rhetoric, which emphasizes the importance of skill development and organization as a means of accomplishment the article shows to what extent cooperative ideologies, or imaginaries, serve to legitimize, console, or even frustrate the economic function of cooperation.
In this article, I consider the formulation for a decolonized curriculum by assessing what constitutes a 'colonial' education, especially one that is deserving of decolonization. I suggest a decolonized curriculum draws on diaspora theory and the framework of the Black Radical Tradition.
This article is concerned with the ways in which discourses of rights serve to destabilize indigenous logics when used for gains in the market. It does so through examining a Rastafarian group who challenge what they believe are infringed cultural property rights. As a means of commercially defending these rights, the group employs a discourse of indigeneity.
The article demonstrates how scammers, through criminal manipulations of development are able to reconcile longer histories and broader circuits of inequality through contemporary gain, producing a novel sense of postcolonial repair
Set in the competitive Jamaican tourist market trade, this article examines how Blackness operates by framing and exercising market practice and ethics. The article explores how collective racial identities are challenged by the economics of market competition and other demands, such as product homogeneity. Through the conflicting ethics of cooperation and “bad mind,” this ethnicized framing of the market illustrates how racial discourses are dynamically produced and reproduced by the terms of a capitalist economy.
EVENTS
Keynote
2023- 2024
Sarah Parker Remond Centre for the Study of Racism and Racialisation. University College London. June.
SOAS, Univ. of London. Global Blackness and Black Futures. June.
Interdisciplinary Humanities Center. UC Santa Barbara. May.
American Ethnologist/Association for Political and Legal Anthropology Conference. April.
Edward J. Taaffe Lecture. Ohio State University. Dept. of Geography. April.
University of the West Indies. Int’l Garifuna Conference. March.
Reparations Activism Symposium. UC Davis. Dept. of African American Studies. January.
Annual Lecture on Racial and Social Justice. Stanford University. Dept. of Anthropology. November.
2022-2023
Plenary Lectures. cultural geographies Journal and Political Geography Journal. American Association of Geographers Meeting. March.
Florida International University. Global and Sociocultural Studies. March.
Sonoma State University. Social Justice Conference. April.
2021-2022
Australian National University. Crawford School of Public Policy. February.
Loughborough University. Centre for Doctoral Training. February.
2020-2021
Columbia University. Heyman Center. March.
Invited
2023-2024
UC Davis Geography. April.
Other Universals Consortium. University of the Western Cape. December.
Centre for the Study of Race, Gender & Class. U. Johannesburg. November.
Johns Hopkins University. Department of Anthropology. October.
University of Chicago. Dept. of Anthropology. October.
Claremont Colleges. Munroe Center for Social Inquiry. September.
Cambridge University. Dept. of Anthropology. July.
2022-2023
Cornell University. Department of Global Development. December.
Stanford University. Stanford Humanities Center. October.
Cambridge University. Department of Anthropology. October.
Columbia University. Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation. October.
Columbia University. African American Studies. September.
Cambridge University. Legacies of Enslavement; Vice Chancellor’s Office. September.
The British Academy. September.
2021-2022
Columbia University. School of Social Work. April.
University of Illinois at Chicago. Institute for the Humanities. April
UCLA. Luskin Institute on Inequality & Democracy. April.
University of North Carolina - Chapel-Hill. Department of Geography. March.
University of Sussex. International Development Department. March.
Oxford. School of Geography and the Environment. February.
UCLA. Luskin Institute on Inequality & Democracy. December.
UC Berkeley. Institute for the Study of Societal Issues. December.
York University. Centre for Research on Latin America and the Caribbean. November.
AAA Presidential Roundtable. November.
Washington University, St. Louis. November.
UC Santa Cruz. Department of Sociology. November.
Cambridge University. Department of Geography. October.
Dartmouth College. School House Anti-Racism Experience. September.
2020-2021
University of Chicago. Anthropology Department. May.
Stanford University. African and African American Studies Program. May.
London Group of Historical Geography. May.
UC Davis, Dept. of Anthropology. April.
Syracuse University, Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs. April.
American University. School of International Service. March.
University of Sheffield. Dept. of Planning. March.
University of North Carolina - Chapel-Hill The Institute of African American Research. March.
UC Berkeley Social Science Matrix. March.
UCLA. Dept. of African American Studies. March.
UC Berkeley Law. February.
University of St. Andrews. Dept. of Anthropology. Scammer’s Yard. December.
UC San Francisco. Medical School. November.
London School of Economics. Dept. of Sociology. October
University of Essex. Dept. of Sociology. October.
Dartmouth College Dept. of Geography. October.