Book Talk – Outlaw Capital: Everyday Illegalities and the Making of Uneven Development

Outlaw Capital shows how transgressive economies and gray spaces are central to globalized capitalism.

With an ethnography of the largest contraband economy in the Americas running through Ciudad del Este, Paraguay, Outlaw Capital hows how conflicts over everyday illegalities shape urban development. By studying the differential treatment of “elite illegalities” and the “street illegalities” of street vendors, Outlaw Capital shows how racialized narratives of economic legitimacy across scales—not legal compliance—sort whose activities count as formal and legal and whose are targeted for reform or expulsion. Ultimately, reforms criminalized the popular economy while legalizing, protecting, and “whitening” elite illegalities.

Registration is required: https://yorku.zoom.us/meeting/register/tJEocOmspzopHt2A9zPP1Zk3SdEvQTvS-ZRS

Speaker:

Jennifer L. Tucker is an associate professor of Community and Regional Planning at the University of New Mexico. Her research focuses on urban inequality, social justice struggles and the frontiers of racial capitalism in the Americas.