Dean of the College and Anthropology Program Present
Developing America’s Paradise: ‘Foreign’ Investment and Gender in the US Virgin Islands
Monday, December 5, 2016
Olin Humanities, Room 201
6:00 pm EST/GMT-5
6:00 pm EST/GMT-5
Tami Navarro
Associate Director
Barnard Center for Research on Women
Associate Director
Barnard Center for Research on Women
This talk explores the impact of the Economic Development Commission (EDC) program in the US Virgin Islands and asks, “How do contemporary circulations of capital and people alternately build upon and complicate long-present hierarchies?” This lecture provides an engagement with the EDC, a tax holiday program that has attracted a number of primarily American bankers to the island of St. Croix, as a space in which struggles over quasi-offshore capital produces tensions rooted in race, class, color, gender, and generation. These clashes surrounding ‘appropriate’ financial and social investment have both integrated St. Croix into the global financial services market and produced a great deal of tension between the EDC community and residents of St. Croix. Moreover, the presence of this program has generated new categories of personhood that in turn have sparked new debates about what it means to ‘belong’ in a territory administered by the United States. These new categories of personhood are particularly gendered and alternately destabilize and shore up long-standing hierarchies of generation, gender, and place.
For more information, call 845-758-7219, or e-mail [email protected].
Time: 6:00 pm EST/GMT-5
Location: Olin Humanities, Room 201