Economies and Circuits of Repair: On Reparative Justice Within/Beyond the State

Abstract

Jovan Scott Lewis is an associate professor and chair of the Department of Geography at the University of California, Berkeley. He studies Black people’s lived experience of racial capitalism and underdevelopment in Jamaica and Tulsa, Oklahoma, through analyses of injury, violence, repair, debt, and reparations. He is 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). In 2021, he was appointed by Governor Gavin Newsom to California’s Reparations Task Force, the first state-level reparations commission in the country.