Paper short abstract:

This discussion looks at engagement in e-fraud as an ambivalent resistance to neoliberal inequality. While it is positioned as a recipe for reduced inequalities, e-fraud however encourages predatory pro-capitalist practices and behaviours that upset the attainment of a sustainable economic growth.

Paper long abstract:

Among the United Nations’ SDGs are inclusive and sustainable economic growth through decent work for all, and reduction of inequality within and among countries. During the roundtable, I will discuss e-fraud economy, not only as a contemporary iteration of the multiple crises of modernity that threaten the global economy, but also a category that complicates these SDGs. From Teju Cole’s Every Day Is for the Thief and Petina Gappah’s “Our Man in Geneva Wins a Millions Euros” to Nkem Owoh’s “I Go Chop Your Dollar,” I argue that every critical reading of e-fraud literature invites us to consider the costs of economic growth when modelled along Western capitalist prototypes which have shaped the well-meaning yet sometimes misguided agendas of the UN in the Global South. Rather than simply moralize away portrayals of e-fraud in African literature or ignore them as an uncomfortable wrinkle in African experience in a postmodern world, the phenomenon of e-fraud can be appreciated as an intimation of agency in the face of disenfranchisement exacerbated by inequalities that have resulted from neoliberal structural adjustment. I will therefore discuss engagement in e-fraud to show how individual subjects ambivalently resist the structures of exclusion and inequality by adjusting to the perverse ideas of work and self-advancement that constitute these structures. While it is positioned as a recipe for reduced inequalities, however, this ambivalent resistance encourages predatory pro-capitalist practices and behaviours that both upset the attainment of a sustainable economic growth and accentuate the enforced continuity of imperial hegemony.