Jennifer Tucker’s book Outlaw Capital shows how transgressive economies are central to globalized capitalism. With an ethnography of the hemisphere’s largest contraband economy on the Paraguay/Brazil border, including a vibrant popular economy, Outlaw Capital shows how race/class conflicts over everyday illegalities shape capitalist urbanization. Further, racialized discourses of economic and spatial legitimacy sort which practices are celebrated, and which ones are condemned. Today, the rise of US authoritarianism challenges old imaginations that locate informality, impunity, illegality and corruption in the Global South. In this talk, Tucker extends the book’s key concepts to analyze the racialized politics of elite illegalities at the heart of our present conjuncture.

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. As an anti-racist feminist with a long history of social movement activism, she is committed to scholarship and action that expands our political imaginations toward enacting justice. Tucker's recent book Outlaw Capital: Everyday Illegalities and the Making of Uneven Development, shows how transgressive economies and grey spaces are central to globalized capitalism.