Criminalization on a World Scale

Abstract

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.