Book Reading: Virgin Capital by Tami Navarro

THIS EVENT CAN BE ATTENDED IN PERSON OR VIRTUALLY.

Please join the Center for the Study of Women and Society for a book talk with Tami Navarro, author of Virgin Capital: Race, Gender, and Financialization in the US Virgin Islands.

Virgin Capital examines the cultural impact and historical significance of the Economic Development Commission (EDC) in the United States Virgin Islands. A tax holiday program, the EDC encourages financial services companies to relocate to these American-owned islands in exchange for an exemption from 90% of income taxes, and to stimulate the economy by hiring local workers and donating to local charitable causes. As a result of this program, the largest and poorest of these islands—St. Croix—has played host to primarily US financial firms and their white managers, leading to reinvigorated anxieties around the costs of racial capitalism and a feared return to the racial and gender order that ruled the islands during slavery. Drawing on fieldwork conducted during the boom years leading up to the 2008–2009 financial crisis, Virgin Capital provides ethnographic insight into the continuing relations of coloniality at work in the quintessentially "modern" industry of financial services and neoliberal "development" regimes, with their grounding in hierarchies of race, gender, class, and geopolitical positioning.

Tami Navarro is Assistant Professor and Chair of Africana Studies at Drew University. She is a Cultural Anthropologist whose work has published work in Cultural Anthropology, American Anthropologist, Transforming Anthropology, Small Axe Salon, The Caribbean Writer, Social Text, and Feminist Anthropology.

This event is co-sponsored by the CUNY Graduate Center Anthropology Department, the Feminist Press, Women's Studies Quarterly, and the Center for the Humanities.