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 programme, 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 programme, 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. Knopper, scholar of race and financialisation, the racial-gender wealth gap, criminalisation, and Black-Asian solidarities and conflicts.

Accessibility

Live transcription (English/Spanish) and ASL interpretation will be provided. Please email any additional access needs to skreitzb@barnard.edu.

Streaming information will be provided closer to the date of the event.

Register to attend here

About the Speakers 

Tami Navarro is an Assistant Professor of Pan-African Studies at Drew University. She is the author of Virgin Capital: Race, Gender, and Financialization in the US Virgin Islands (SUNY Press 2021). Tami is trained as a cultural anthropologist, and her work has been supported by the Mellon Foundation, the Wenner-Gren Foundation, the Social Science Research Council, the American Anthropological Association, the Ford Foundation, and the National Endowment for the Humanities. She serves on the Board of the St. Croix Foundation and is a member of the Editorial Board for the journal Small Axe: A Caribbean Journal of Criticism. Tami is the co-host of the podcast, “Writing Home: American Voices from the Caribbean” and a founding member of the Virgin Islands Studies Collective.

Tamara K. Nopper is a sociologist, writer, editor, and data artist with experience teaching in Asian American Studies and Ethnic Studies and working for and with Asian American community and anti-war organizations. Her research focuses on Black-Korean conflict, the racial and gender wealth gap, financialization, criminalization, punishment, and the social impact of technology. 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) and researched and wrote several data stories for Colin Kaepernick’s Abolition for the People series.

Header Image: Stephen Melkisethian, CC by 2.0