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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.