‘I must first apologise’: advance-fee scam letters as manifestos

ABSTRACT

Advance-fee scam letters are email messages designed to engage the recipient in a fraudulent business partnership involving an initial investment on his/her part for the sake of making a large profit. Scam letters have sparked the interest of both ‘scam-busters’ and artists who use them as raw material in various artforms – music, films and installations. As they pass from one type of discourse and genre to another, and leave the Internet to become art, advance-fee scam letters cease to be just spam and become manifestary discourse. Neither loud and shouting, nor explicit and programmatic, they engage the reader/spectator in dialogue. In Joana Hadjithomas and Khalil Joreige’s video installation, ‘A Letter can always Reach its Destination’ (2012) they become a collective summons, via an embodied appeal to the spectator, engaging the spectator’s emotions and encouraging her to think critically and ethically about people’s destinies in developing countries. By tracing the history of both the manifesto and the advance-fee scam letter, this article shows their point of convergence. By this, it responds to Martin Puchner’s quest for a new type of hybrid manifesto and appeases Julian Rosefeldt’s doubts about the power of art to reach multiple audiences.

KEYWORDS:

• Manifesto
• advance-fee scam
• scam letters
• art manifesto
• Nigerian 419
• redescription

Acknowledgements

I wish to thank the reviewers for their insightful comments and suggestions which have substantially improved this article.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Correction Statement

This article has been corrected with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

Notes

1 For a linguistic approach, see Deborah Schaffer (2012); Finn Brunton (2015) studies spam letters from a media and communication perspective. Haema Hanafi (2020) revisits spam letters within a post-colonial paradigm.

2 This part is largely based on Yanoshevsky (2009).

3 Statistics are vague, but show that out of the millions of letters sent each year by email across the world, 1–2% of the receivers actually engage in ‘business’ with the sender and send in personal details and money (Dillon 2008).

4 ‘Les logiques ou modèles de production, les manipuler sous différents points de vue ou contextes, jusqu’à rendre au lecteur de nouvelles données que ce dernier pourra « réimporter » dans le monde réel pour s’en servir, de la même façon qu’il « vivait » avec les données initiales traitées’ (Leibovici 2007: 68).

5 Anonymous author, posted by Pompilio Cepeda on 11 February 2013, on the Spam Poetry Institute website. Available online.

6 https://fictionwritersreview.com/shoptalk/fiction-from-the-spam-box/

7 In 2019, a movie with the same name as the song was made by 21st Century Nigerian Movies, and uses the song as its theme. The movie ends with a statement to the press, made by the arrested scammer-protagonist, who uses the context of slavery and colonisation as a pretext for Nigerian 419 scams. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l_4yyuC49qA

8 For example, Leibovici and Seroussi (2016) is a compilation of transcriptions of the International Penal Court and Leibovici (2019) is an attempt to organise the amourus literary Internet production.

9 Leibovici (2012) is a 116-page booklet printed on the occasion of the Abraaj capital art prize. A section of it is reproduced in Kholeif (2015: 35–47).

10 Among their numerous films: The Lebanese Rocket Society: The Strange Tale of The Lebanese Space Race (2012); and Je Veux Voir [I Want To See] (2008). For more information, see the artists' official website: http://hadjithomasjoreige.com.

11 Information from the artists’ official website.

12 Villa Arson, Nice 2014; HOME, Manchester 2015; MIT List Visual Arts Center 2016; Jeu de Paumes, Paris, 2017.

13 For a full list of the exhibition’s installations, see the artists’ website: http://hadjithomasjoreige.com/scam/.

14 http://hadjithomasjoreige.com/a-letter-can-always-reach-its-destination-2/.

15 Which shows how the neo-dadaists kept – in the post World War Two era in the United States – the formal aspects of historical dadaism but avoided of any form of rupture in order to be easily accepted by the art market.

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Notes on contributors

Galia Yanoshevsky

Galia Yanoshevsky is associate professor in the French Department of Bar Ilan University. She is the author of L’entretien littéraire. Anatomie d’un genre [The Literary Interview. An Anatomy of a Genre] (Classiques Garnier, 2018), and of Les discours du Nouveau Roman: Essais, Entretiens, Débats [The discourses of the New Novel: Essays, Interviews, Debates] (Septentrion, 2006). Her research interests include the relationship between the press and twentieth century literature, and the question of the audience as expressed in journalistic genres (Front page, political leaders). She now studies visual argumentation and its articulation with the verbal. Her latest research (2016–2019, ISF research fund) focuses on representations of collective memory in tourist guidebooks. In 2014–2016 she led, with Prof. Silvia Adler, a community engagement project (financed by the Council for Higher Education) involving the improvement of French language skills through work with French Speaking elderly.