Virgin Capital

Tami Navarro

Description

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.
Acknowledgments

1. Introduction

2. Into the Field: Navigating Self-Reflexivity at "Home"

3. Spectral Time: Tracing Racial Capitalism in the USVI from Plantation Slavery to the Economic Development Commission

4. The End of an Era: The Shuttering of Stanford Financial

5. Putting Race to Work: Racialization and Economic Opportunity

6. Easy Money and Respectable Girls: Gender Ideology and Neoliberal Development

Conclusion

Notes
References
Index

Sujets

• Cultures
• Gender studies
• History of the Americas
• Indigenous peoples
• Ethnic studies

Informations

• Publié par: State University of New York Press
• Date de parution: 01 novembre 2021
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781438486048
• Langue: English

Extrait

Virgin Capital
Virgin Capital
Race, Gender, and Financialization in the US Virgin Islands
TAMI NAVARRO
Published by State University of New York Press, Albany
© 2021 State University of New York
All rights reserved
Printed in the United States of America
No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission. No part of this book may be stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means including electronic, electrostatic, magnetic tape, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise without the prior permission in writing of the publisher.
For information, contact State University of New York Press, Albany, NY
www.sunypress.edu
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Name: Navarro, Tami, author.
Title: Virgin capital : race, gender, and financialization in the US Virgin Islands / Tami Navarro.
Description: Albany : State University of New York Press, [2021] | Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: ISBN 9781438486031 (hardcover : alk. paper) | ISBN 9781438486048 (ebook)
Further information is available at the Library of Congress.
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
For my mother.
Contents
Acknowledgments
1 Introduction
2 Into the Field: Navigating Self-Reflexivity at “Home”
3 Spectral Time: Tracing Racial Capitalism in the USVI from Plantation Slavery to the Economic Development Commission
4 The End of an Era: The Shuttering of Stanford Financial
5 Putting Race to Work: Racialization and Economic Opportunity
6 Easy Money and Respectable Girls: Gender Ideology and Neoliberal Development
Conclusion
Notes
References
Index
“Welcome, neighbor,” I begin.
—Audre Lorde
Acknowledgments
In some form or another, I have been researching the Economic Development Commission (EDC) program since 2003 and have been the recipient of unspeakable grace along the way . Virgin Capital began at Duke University where I was gifted with the incomparable direction of Deborah A. Thomas. Deb, you are an incredible mentor, teacher, model, and aspiration. I am an anthropologist because of you. At Duke, I also had the good fortune to work with and learn from Anne Allison, Charles Piot, Orin Starn, Lee Baker, and Mark Anthony Neal. Ian Baucom and Karla Slocum graciously served on my dissertation committee and strengthened my analysis in critical ways. In graduate school, I was fortunate have a deeply committed community of fellow scholars-in-the-making who helped me find my voice: Bianca Williams, Micah Gilmer, Jamaica Gilmer, Attiya Ahmad, and the late Johnetta Pressley were my champions. Your friendship sustained me.
After leaving Duke, life brought me back to Middletown, Connecticut, in the form of a visiting professor stint at Wesleyan University, where I had begun my academic journey and where I was reunited with the brilliant and generous Kehaulani Kauanui and Krishna Winston. I thank them both for modeling what rigorous and engaged scholarship looks like. Thank you to Dorothy Hodgson, who took a chance on my work and offered me an incredibly generative postdoctoral fellowship at Rutgers.
A number of institutions have provided the funding that have enabled me to complete this project: The Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies at Duke allowed me to conduct much early fieldwork on St. Croix, and a fieldwork grant from the Wenner-Gren Foundation funded my extended fieldwork. The period of writing is challenging for many academics, and my own such time in the wilderness was made much easier by a dissertation fellowship from the Ford Foundation.
At Barnard College, the community of scholars I encountered—many of whom are now friends—has elevated my work. To Janet Jakobsen, thank you for your consistent demonstration of your belief in my work. Tina Campt is a force to be reckoned with and I continue to learn from her. Thank you for sharing your scholarship, your approach to collaboration, and your razor-sharp wit. Elizabeth Castelli, your dedication to ethical living and community building is an inspiration. One of the happiest surprises of being at Barnard has been working with Kaiama L. Glover. Thank you for joining me in crafting Critical Caribbean Feminisms and Writing Home . The work we do together is restorative. Monica Miller, Yvette Christiansë, Maja Horn, Neferti Tadiar, Paige West, Pam Philips, Hope Dector, Avi Cummings, Premilla Nadasen, Celia Naylor, Miriam Neptune, Natasha Lightfoot, and Eve Kausch have all made Barnard a welcoming and productive space for me and I am indebted to them all.
In the New York area, I have benefited greatly from the insight and support of Vanessa K. Valdés, Dána-Ain Davis, and David Scott. As a scholar, I believe deeply in the value of intellectual collaboration and have been fortunate to be included in several spaces of cothinking and cowriting: Thank you to the KRUSH writing group (Abosede George, Kimuli Kasara, and Molly Tambor). Our deadlines and mutual accountability are a large part of the reason this book is in the world. To my fellow members of the Virgin Islands Studies Collective (VISCO)—LaVaughn Belle, Hadiya Sewer, and Tiphanie Yanique: your work, zeal, and politics continue to energize me. What a world we are making for ourselves. At Barnard, both the Gender Justice and Neoliberal Transformations working group and the Transnational Black Feminisms working group have been profoundly productive spaces for my present and future scholarship. Over the course of this project, I have shared portions of this manuscript in lectures at the University of the West Indies, Cave Hill, and have been honored by the collegiality and warmth of Tonya Haynes, Halimah DeShong, Veronica Jones, and Charmaine Crawford.
St. Croix is such a large part of my life that it took me many years to find a balance between inhabiting it as “home” and engaging my work there as time in “the field.” It remains a tricky balance—a slippery slope in either direction. In any case, my friends and informants on St. Croix are the heart of this project. Nicole Y. Canegata, Ana Castillo, Emily Graci, Deanna James, and Quiana Adams kept me going in the early (and middle and late) days of fieldwork. Anthony Weeks and Governor Albert Bryan gave generously of their time and expertise. We view many things differently, but their insight and perspectives have greatly enriched this book.
This book has been shepherded into the world by my wonderful editor, Rebecca Colesworthy, who has believed in this project from the day we met. Marisa Escolar has also helped to make this a better book, for which I am grateful.
My deepest thanks are reserved for my family, who have endured countless conference hotels, lectures, and drafts. Richard, Ella, and Judah, we have made something together that is larger than any of us. I am humbled every day. To my mother, Ursula Navarro, thank you for making this life possible for me. To Seeranie Seewah, Susi Persaud, and Amanda Bonilla, the love, support, and care you provide keep us moving forward. I became a mother during the course of this project and had no idea how that change would shift my world and ability to write. Clarissa Caban, Keena Utley, and Zaryah Aparicio have done me the honor of minding my children so that I might put these words on the page. Thank you.
The epigraph on page viii is from the poem entitled “Judith’s Fancy” by Audre Lorde, taken from The Marvelous Arithmetics of Distance: Poems, 1987–1992. Permission has been granted by W. W. Norton Company, Inc.
This book has taken a long time to come into the world, but as it has been said, “time is not counted from daylight, but from midnight.”
Chapter 1
Introduction
At the outset of fieldwork, the question of methodology loomed large in my mind. My central concern was how to get at the complexity of the Economic Development Commission (EDC) program on St. Croix. In 2007, everywhere I went on the island, this tax holiday program seemed to be all anyone could talk about. There was excitement and optimism around St. Croix’s economic future, but there was just as much suspicion and fear surrounding the program and the mainland Americans it had brought to this US territory. How would I construct a methodology that would bring together both the anxiety and anticipation of the EDC program: Would I conduct focus groups? Engage in the “deep hanging out” offered by Clifford Geertz? As these questions swirled in my mind, I dedicated myself to perfunctory tasks: checking the mail was ideal because it afforded me an opportunity to interact with people and, vitally, offered the illusion that I was busy—a person with somewhere to be and something to do, when I was, decidedly, not.
As I walked into the post office one Wednesday afternoon and stood in line to buy stamps, I heard shouting. Although yelling was not in itself unusual, as customers often loudly grumbled about the long wait time or inefficient service, this was different. This was an argument, a shouting match really, between two customers: a middle-aged white woman and a Black man from St. Kitts in his sixties. They were debating the skyrocketing cost of real estate and property taxes on St. Croix. The woman, Karen, insisted that these increases were the fault of the EDC program in general and of “that Stanford man” in particular (Allen Stanford was a billionaire who had recently relocated his considerable business operations to St. Croix—and had been in the process of purchasing large tracts of land across the island since his arrival). The man with whom Karen was arguing, however, insisted that these developments were the fault of unmotivated locals, arguing that it “is we, is we! If we don’t buy,