Virgin Capital: Race, Gender, and Financialization in the US Virgin Islands

Virgin Capital: Race, Gender, and Financialization in the US Virgin Islands (SUNY Press, 2021) examines the cultural impact and historical significance of the Economic Development Commission (EDC) in the United States Virgin Islands, a tax holiday scheme. 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.

This virtual book talk features author Tami Navarro, Assistant Professor of Pan-African Studies at Drew University, in conversation with Hannah Appel, Associate Professor of Anthropology and Global Studies and Associate Faculty Director of the UCLA Luskin Institute on Inequality and Democracy.

Co-sponsored by the UCLA International Institute and the UCLA Center for the Study of Women