Inside the Circle: A Response to Jovan Scott Lewis's Scammer's Yard

Abstract:In a discussion of Jovan Scott Lewis's Scammer's Yard: The Crime of Black Repair in Jamaica (2020), the book is considered as ethnography written from "inside the circle" (Sadiya Hartman) of a generation of young Black men brought up in Jamaica. Nonetheless, Lewis shows genuine appreciation of the profound differences between himself and his respondents. However, the response ends by proposing that Lewis needed to widen the circle to include those who died in the terrible violence that was a consequence of the scamming practices that he describes, and that his arguments about Black repair might have been all the more convincing had he been able to do so.