Tami Navarro discusses first book, Virgin Capital: Race, Gender, and Financialization in the US Virgin Islands
sx editorial committee member Tami Navarro and journalist Brian Goldstone will discuss their book-writing process in the upcoming event, From PhD to Book: How Ethnography Is An Important Step, sponsored by Duke University's Ethnography Workshop.
Date: Friday, October 15th
Time: 12pm EDT
Register here.
Navarro's first book, Virgin Capital: Race, Gender, and Financialization in the US Virgin Islands will be published by SUNY Press in November. Read Virgin Capital's blurb below:
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.