{"id":8056,"date":"2023-07-24T11:38:37","date_gmt":"2023-07-24T15:38:37","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/bcrw.barnard.edu\/staging\/2435\/?p=8056"},"modified":"2023-07-24T12:07:24","modified_gmt":"2023-07-24T16:07:24","slug":"who-do-you-want-to-talk-to-a-conversation-with-tami-navarro-on-race-and-gender-within-neoliberal-financialization","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/bcrw.barnard.edu\/staging\/2435\/who-do-you-want-to-talk-to-a-conversation-with-tami-navarro-on-race-and-gender-within-neoliberal-financialization\/","title":{"rendered":"\u201cWho do you want to talk to?\u201d"},"content":{"rendered":"

A Conversation with Tami Navarro on Race and Gender within Neoliberal Financialization<\/strong><\/p>\n

Virgin Capital: Race, Gender, and Financialization in the US Virgin Islands<\/span><\/i>, Tami Navarro\u2019s (Assistant Professor of Africana Studies at Drew University and former BCRW Associate Director) first book, is an ethnographic exploration of the Economic Development Commission (EDC), a finance agency that encourages American-based financial services companies to relocate to the Virgin Islands for significant tax breaks. In this groundbreaking book, Navarro writes on her fieldwork in her home of St. Croix at the height of the EDC program during the years preceding the 2008 financial crisis, focusing on many aspects including the program\u2019s position in the economic and political history of the island, the racial tensions between native Crucians and mainlanders, and the young women employed in the program, known as EDC girls. She explores the ways that the program was a symptom and an exacerbating cause of long-standing tensions on the island around US imperialism, Black dispossession, gender, economic survival, and exploitation, and the Islands\u2019 legacy of slavery.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

In March, Kelsey Kitzke talked with Navarro about the major questions of the book, as well as broader questions for anthropologists about method and flexibility. They also discussed the \u201cI Am Queen Mary\u201d statue that Navarro, while BCRW\u2019s associate director, helped bring to Barnard Hall in the fall of 2019. The statue honors Mary Thomas, a St. Croix plantation worker whose 1878 protest of slavery-like working conditions was the largest labor revolt in Danish colonial history. Thomas\u2019 legacy rings through Navarro\u2019s work on the contemporary stakes of labor, race, and colonialism.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

This interview has been edited for clarity.\u00a0<\/span><\/i><\/p>\n

#<\/span><\/p>\n

BCRW:<\/b> I’m always really interested in how people come to their projects. You talked about this in the book: Where did your initial idea come from?<\/span><\/p>\n

TN:<\/b> Yes, thank you. I guess I always knew that I was interested in working in the Virgin Islands ethnographically. My initial project was not this one, but one that came out of my undergraduate work. I was really interested in images as they related to gender and sexuality, like images of hyper-sexualized women in the Caribbean. I wanted to look at postcards and ephemera. So, tourist material. Why do we see young women in see-through t-shirts? And what on earth does that have to do with the family vacation? I wanted to trace some of those images and what they told us about long-standing ideas about sexuality, gender, and Black women, in particular.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

But what happened when I went to the Virgin Islands to do the preliminary research was that all people wanted to talk about was this, at the time, new economic development program. It was just everywhere. And I learned, as an anthropologist, that one of the things you have to do is be willing to let your informants not necessarily take the lead but\u2026 You have to be attentive to the environment that you’re in and what they are interested in talking about. I was not an economic anthropologist. It wasn’t anything I was interested in. But just talking to people about their everyday lives, you know, How are you making money? Where are your kids going to school? Where do you grocery shop? That seemed to be a kind of newly emerging center of life for them, and I thought, Oh, I better pay attention to this.<\/span><\/p>\n

BCRW:<\/b> That brings me to your methodology. I liked how you started with that moment of uncertainty in the very beginning of the introduction, where you’re like, What do I literally do with myself now that I\u2019ve arrived at my field site.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

TN:<\/b> It’s one thing to have the theory and the material, but there is a kind of everydayness and embodied-ness to it. It\u2019s tough. You know, it\u2019s 2 p.m. on a Tuesday or it\u2019s 11 a.m. on a Thursday, well? What, where do I belong? Where should I be? I know this is the data I want to access. Who makes that happen? And the hard answer is you. As the ethnographer, you have to figure out how to create those environments, how to create those circumstances, where you go to get to some of that information. But a lot of it is kind of waiting around. And kind of steering conversations and curating encounters to make those things be at the center of the conversation.<\/span><\/p>\n

BCRW:<\/b> I want to talk about your position as the \u201cnative anthropologist,\u201d especially in terms of Zora Neale Hurston, who has been a big inspiration for you. You helped to organize <\/span>Hurston@125<\/span><\/a> at Barnard\u2026\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

TN:<\/b>\u00a0<\/span>Yes, with Monica Miller.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

BCRW:<\/b> Yeah. And thinking about Zora as an anthropologist who returned home, how have you thought with her as a native Black woman ethnographer? Did you have hesitancy there? How were you thinking about that kind position as you were going forward in the project?<\/span><\/p>\n

TN:<\/b> Zora was doing her work much, much earlier than I was, of course, but I think that there\u2019s a legacy of Black feminist anthropologists who still really look to her. Not just as a predecessor, but as a space of hope. In some ways, you have more access [to your interlocutors]. And in other ways\u2014I wouldn\u2019t say you have less access, I would say you have complicated access. You do have to do the work that Zora writes about of distancing yourself. You\u2019re not just Zora coming home or Tami coming home. You are trying to inhabit a new positionality. And there\u2019s work there. For many years, I thought it was just external work, like demonstrating to the discipline: This is a real project, I\u2019m the person to do it. But as you go on, you realize, Oh, maybe a lot of it is internal work. Coming to a sense that these people who are your friends, your aunts, your neighbors, your classmates from grade school, that they, too, can be interlocutors, that they have valuable information, ethnographic information, to share with you. Some of that is internal. Coming to a place where you both present yourself as a social scientist, and you understand yourself as a social scientist, and that just takes time.<\/span><\/p>\n

BCRW:<\/b> Did you get resistance from doing work in your own home from the academic institutions you were a part of? And also, conversely, did you get resistance at home from the people that you already knew?<\/span><\/p>\n

TN:<\/b> I don\u2019t feel that I got explicit opposition disciplinarily. There was no official governing body of anthropology saying don\u2019t do that. But I do think there are informal encouragements to maybe look at more broadly. I would say in the wider sphere of academia, things like funding do that work. You can think your project is all well and good, but who\u2019s going to pay you to do a year or two of research? My field site is kind of ambivalently positioned. Some of the international grants, many of the international grants, I wasn\u2019t eligible for. But the project also wasn’t entirely eligible for domestic funding. The US Virgin Islands is an unincorporated territory of the United States, which is to say a colony. That political reality made getting the money to study it difficult. So to answer your question, no. Like Franz Boaz didn\u2019t stand up and say, You can’t do that. But there are pressures.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

It all worked out. I got the money. I got to go.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

And I\u2019m glad because when I got to the Virgin Islands, I don\u2019t think any of the people in my circle objected to anthropological work. I think it’s a case, a lot like Zora\u2019s, where none of them really got what was going on. First of all, what is anthropology? What are you doing? I thought we were just hanging out. So there was a lot of clarifying on my part. I\u2019d say no, I’m setting this up. There was just a lot of reiterating what my position was. Because for them, it\u2019s like, they’re so glad to see you, you\u2019re their friend, you\u2019re their fill-in-the-blank, and they\u2019re glad to give you information, some of which they think you must have lost your mind for asking about because it\u2019s like, you know this just as well I do. Why are you asking these questions? So there wasn\u2019t a ton of pushback at home. It was just more clarifying work on my part: This is what I\u2019m doing, this is what I’m trying to get at, this is why I’m asking you these questions that you think I already know the answer to.<\/span><\/p>\n

BCRW:<\/b> I want to turn to the book. I particularly love how you write about the \u201cEDC girls\u201d [highly-educated young Crucian women of middle to upper class background employed at EDC companies] in the discussion of the feminization of labor, which seems relevant to your undergraduate work, but in a very different way. How does gender take hold as a form of neoliberal development in this situation?\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

TN:<\/b> There\u2019s both a dehumanization of Black women, what Hortense Spillers called ungendering, and a deep reliance on their labor at the same time. We see this during slavery, but also post-emancipation where the feminization of labor that I talk about in the book really comes up. Why is it that women in general\u2014and then, more particularly for my project, Black and brown women\u2014why is it that they are seen as ideal candidates for certain kinds of work? My argument is that it\u2019s not entirely new. And that the reason that these particular women are hired for this job relies exactly on these kinds of old narratives about who should be working. In terms of class, in terms of race. And in the Caribbean, it\u2019s not just race, but color as well. I talk a lot about the role of color and the pigment-tocracy that really governs life in a lot of the Caribbean. So all that to say, gender like sexuality is really crucial in thinking about how people navigate the world. And if you’re apprehending neoliberalism, in the sense that I\u2019m trying to in the book, thinking about how it has reshaped people\u2019s everyday lives, how reliance on this thing called the free market has reshaped what people can expect their everyday life to look like, then gender plays a huge part in that.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

BCRW:<\/b> I guess it\u2019s not a turn against tourism, but the EDC girl sort of stood in opposition to tourist labor<\/span> \u2014<\/span>which is, to me, a classic example of feminized labor.<\/span><\/p>\n

TN:<\/b> Tourism jobs are not even so much an option. Yes, they have tourism on St. Thomas, they have it on St. John. On St. Croix, it\u2019s not such a robust offering. And so I think it\u2019s interesting to look at middle-class Black labor because so much of the literature, you\u2019re right, is about this kind of service-oriented labor that Black women are doing in the Caribbean. But thinking about the middle class perspective offers us a different way of seeing some of the continuities across feminized labor sectors. Okay, so the EDC girls are making more money. But the point here is that the ideology is remarkably stable. Whether you’re cleaning the hotel room, serving the drinks on the beach, or working in the office, these ideas about race, color, gender, and class, and how do those relate to work, and what kinds of lives people can make possible for themselves, they really hold steady.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

BCRW:<\/b> The connection seems especially strong when thinking about the \u201cI Am Queen Mary\u201d statue. You were involved in getting the statue to Barnard. I am wondering how it felt for you in the context of your work. What did it mean to you? What was the relevance?<\/span><\/p>\n

TN:<\/b> It was incredible. That statue was co-created by somebody I worked really closely with, La Vaughn Belle, who\u2019s an artist based in the Virgin Islands, and her colleague, an Afro-Danish artist named Jeannette Ehlers. The statue at Barnard, while very large, is a small-scale replica. The original is huge, several stories tall, in Copenhagen.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

It\u2019s the first sculpture of a Black woman that\u2019s been on display in Denmark. The US Virgin Islands has been the US Virgin Islands for just over 100 years now, but it was for many years The Danish West Indies. So thinking about the history of Blackness and Scandinavia is something that Monica Miller and I have spent a fair amount of time thinking and talking about. So to get that sculpture to Barnard, to New York, it just felt incredible. It felt like a sort of full circle moment to be able to work with La Vaughn on its arrival and presentation there. But also to think about what it means. I have seen, in the years since, students and visitors sitting in Barnard Hall, looking at it, engaging with it, studying in front of it, just kind of sharing space. People are sharing space with her without necessarily knowing the whole history. But what an incredible story it is. She takes this place of pride being the object of their attention. It\u2019s a beautiful sculpture too. I think it matters that she is sitting in a very regal way. She\u2019s reclining in a chair. She\u2019s definitely holding court. And I think it’s amazing to think about the history of Black women who were fighting for just a few pennies\u2019 increase in this labor revolt in the mid-1800s, and a figure who represents this is now in one of the top institutions in the United States. I think it\u2019s an incredible story. And I’m very proud to have played any part in it at all.<\/span><\/p>\n

BCRW:<\/b> I am so glad it\u2019s here too. Ok, so to return to the book, you discuss the anxiety that the EDC program brought to Virgin Islanders, this foreboding sense of a return to slavery days. You do that through your discussion of spectral time. You show how neoliberal development brings changes that people may narrate as progress, but many also experience with fear as a return to old social and political orders. That fear, that sense of the past being present, undoes the myth of progress. That reflection of affect within time, I thought was unique. And I really liked it.<\/span><\/p>\n

TN:<\/b> I had to do that. These people were real people. The theorization they were offering was an actual theorization. It wasn\u2019t just anxiety. It wasn\u2019t misapprehension, like, Oh, they don\u2019t get it, they\u2019re anti-development and we have to educate them. No. People were presenting an alternate theorization of time, of capital, of wealth accumulation. They have had generational experiences with wealth accumulation that have not gone great for them or their communities. The theorization that they\u2019re offering, what we can call spectral time, centers this longer history of capital. The beginning is not 2000 or the mid-90s or whatever. They\u2019re saying, We’re looking at this whole thing. This whole thing being our political status, the long history of privateers and pirates and different folks coming through the region, and how come when these folks come in they leave richer and we always end up poorer? These are the kinds of relations and hierarchies that they\u2019re pointing to, which, of course, make no sense to the people on the other side, the EDC advocates who are like, What are you talking about? Why are you talking about slavery right now? This is completely irrelevant.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

I really see the book as an act of translation. To try to sit at the center and say, You all are talking past each other. You\u2019re talking from different relations to time. And it\u2019s because of an embodied experience of being disempowered over time by very similar <\/span>feeling<\/span><\/i> projects.<\/span><\/p>\n

BCRW:<\/b> Which I’m sure was extremely confusing to the EDC people who thought that they were doing the opposite of slavery.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

TN:<\/b> Yes, they were like, Where’s the red carpet? Like, why are you so angry at us? Why do you keep talking about slavery? Why do you keep calling me a racist? I am not a racist. If you don’t have a sense of the fuller history of how race, color, class, and gender have worked over time, it is very confusing.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

BCRW:<\/b> Yes, over time the US Virgin Islands\u2019 status as a colony has been a point of stability in the area, but it has also brought instability to the region and people\u2019s daily lives, as you point out. I was wondering if you could talk about what you saw during your fieldwork regarding any transformations in US imperialism in this moment?\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

TN:<\/b> It’s a neoimperialist moment. We see the ways that the economic sector is deeply reliant on the notion that being a US possession will bring political and economic stability. Even on the EDC website they say, We\u2019re under the protection of the US flag, we have US courts. The subtext there, of course, being, Your money is safe.<\/span><\/p>\n

BCRW:<\/b> As you mentioned before, there are conflicting feelings about the EDC program, its promise and its foreboding specter. Can you talk about the views that Virgin Islanders have about the Islands\u2019 status?\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

TN:<\/b> In the Virgin Islands, in the formal political sphere, that conversation is just not as present. Which is not to say, Oh, Virgin Islanders just don’t care about it. That’s not true. There are moments of inflection where it is very clear how much people care, like these constitutional conventions where Virgin Islanders get together and try to think about exactly this: Questions of status, questions of protecting land use and rights, employment, generational protections around wealth accumulation, all kinds of stuff. But those moments are fewer and further between and there isn\u2019t a formalized political structure where people are thinking about these questions in longer-term ways, which means that when they happen, they are really imbued with feeling. You feel the urgency.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

BCRW:<\/b> That brings me back to the value of ethnography. To get at feeling. Rather than stopping at formalized structures.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

TN:<\/b> It\u2019s a good takeaway for an anthropologist: Just because you don\u2019t open the phone book and see, <\/span>Organization of Independent-Minded Colonial Subjects<\/span><\/i>, that doesn’t mean that people aren\u2019t deeply concerned about these things. It means you have to look differently.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

BCRW:<\/b> In the book, that us vs. them dynamic is a really shifting thing\u2026\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

TN:<\/b> Between the EDC and the local community?<\/span><\/p>\n

BCRW:<\/b> Yeah, and but also I want to talk about in terms of who is considered from the Virgin Islands and who has a right to speak about the Islands\u2019 political, economic future.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

TN:<\/b> Exactly. You could have been born there and grown up there, but this question of are you a native, are you an ancestral native, that\u2019s another story. There’s a deep obsession with figuring out who really, really, really belongs here.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

My new project is thinking about belonging and investment in multiple registers. For the first book, the EDC, I focused on financial investment. But Virgin Islanders are really curious about whether you\u2019re invested in the community more broadly, in its history, in its future, in its culture, in what we are doing. Are you invested in partnering with local actors who are trying to envision an alternate, sustainable future? It is a deep concern about displacement. You only have to look at neighboring St. John to see it. Many St. Johnians can no longer afford to live on the islands. People who have historically lived on St. John now live on St. Thomas, but they still work on St. John. They take the ferry in for work. At the beginning and end of each day, you see these ships of Black bodies coming and going. You know that they\u2019re coming and going for work. This was their ancestral home. This is the specter for people in the Virgin Islands.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

BCRW:<\/b> And how did your own sense of belonging shift while you were doing fieldwork and moving between spaces, both on St. Croix and when you returned to your academic institution?<\/span><\/p>\n

TN:<\/b> It was tricky. I had these nontraditional, what they wanted to call, internships. And so I was, for these EDC folks, the right kind of local. I was coming from a well-respected graduate institution, I was a PhD student, I seemed to know what I was talking about, but I was also from there. And they thought, Great. Here’s somebody who can really help us translate this program to these people who don\u2019t understand what we’re up to.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

But there was also so much of what we talked about at the start of this conversation, like the Hurstonian home-going. I was home. And\u2014and this goes back to your question about Queen Mary and La Vaughn Belle and that sculpture\u2014why am I doing this work? Is it to articulate the benefits of capitalist accumulation to Virgin Islanders? Not really. It\u2019s to make sense of what seems to me to be a glaring disconnect. How come these people who I know to be sane and caring for their communities, who want to envision alternate futures that they can live in, futures that do not involve being wiped off the face of the earth by category-five hurricanes and privatized emergency management companies, how do I make legible their concerns and their anxieties to the people who have the capital to do something about it? That\u2019s when my feelings of belonging came into sharper relief. When I pulled back and said, Why are you doing this work? Who do you want to talk to?\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

A Conversation with Tami Navarro on Race and Gender within Neoliberal Financialization Virgin Capital: Race, Gender, and Financialization in the US Virgin Islands, Tami Navarro\u2019s (Assistant Professor of Africana Studies at Drew University and former BCRW Associate Director) first book, is an ethnographic exploration of the Economic Development Commission (EDC), a finance agency that encourages […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":7254,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1401,519,424],"tags":[78,1362,298],"class_list":["post-8056","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-interview","category-publications","category-students","tag-economics","tag-financialization","tag-transnational-feminisms"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/bcrw.barnard.edu\/staging\/2435\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8056","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/bcrw.barnard.edu\/staging\/2435\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/bcrw.barnard.edu\/staging\/2435\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bcrw.barnard.edu\/staging\/2435\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/5"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bcrw.barnard.edu\/staging\/2435\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=8056"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/bcrw.barnard.edu\/staging\/2435\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8056\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":8061,"href":"https:\/\/bcrw.barnard.edu\/staging\/2435\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8056\/revisions\/8061"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bcrw.barnard.edu\/staging\/2435\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/7254"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/bcrw.barnard.edu\/staging\/2435\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=8056"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bcrw.barnard.edu\/staging\/2435\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=8056"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bcrw.barnard.edu\/staging\/2435\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=8056"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}