Virgin Capital: Race, Gender, and Financialization in the US Virgin Islands
Live transcription is available here.
The forthcoming book, Virgin Capital: Race, Gender, and Financialization in the US Virgin Islands (2021) by Tami Navarro 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 will discuss her new book with Tamara K. Nopper, scholar of race and financialization, the racial-gender wealth gap, criminalization, and Black-Asian solidarities and conflicts.
Accessibility
Live transcription and ASL interpretation will be provided. Please email any additional access needs to skreitzb@barnard.edu.
This event is free and open to all. RSVP here.
Streaming information will be provided closer to the date of the event.
About the Speakers
Tami Navarro is an Assistant Professor of Pan-African 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. She is a founding member of the Virgin Islands Studies Collective (VISCO) and a member of the Editorial Board for the journal Small Axe: A Caribbean Journal of Criticism. Dr. Navarro is co-host of the podcast, “Writing Home: American Voices from the Caribbean” and the author of Virgin Capital: Race, Gender, and Financialization in the US Virgin Islands, which has recently been recognized by the Association for Feminist Anthropology.
Tamara K. Nopper is a sociologist, writer, and editor. She is the editor of We Do This ‘Til We Free Us: Abolitionist Organizing and Transforming Justice, a book of Mariame Kaba’s writings and interviews (Haymarket Books), researcher and writer of several data stories for Colin Kaepernick’s Abolition for the People series, and guest editor of the recently published Critical Sociology forum “Race and Money.” She has published widely on the topic of Korean immigrant entrepreneurship as it pertains to resource capitalization, the globalization of ethnic banking, and Black-Korean conflict. Her current scholarship examines the credit scoring industry and the push for alternative data among elected officials, policy makers, and community advocates. She is a Fellow at Data for Progress, an Affiliate of The Center for Critical Race and Digital Studies, a member of the inaugural cohort of the NYU Institute for Public Interest Technology, and a 2021-2022 Faculty Fellow at Data & Society as part of a cohort focused on race and technology.