Entrepreneurial Selves: Neoliberal Respectability and the Making of a Caribbean Middle Class (Next Wave: New Directions in Women's Studies) - Softcover

Freeman, Carla

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0822358034 ISBN 13: 9780822358039

Publisher: Duke University Press, 2014

Synopsis

Entrepreneurial Selves is an ethnography of neoliberalism. Bridging political economy and affect studies, Carla Freeman turns a spotlight on the entrepreneur, a figure saluted across the globe as the very embodiment of neoliberalism. Steeped in more than a decade of ethnography on the emergent entrepreneurial middle class of Barbados, she finds dramatic reworkings of selfhood, intimacy, labor, and life amid the rumbling effects of political-economic restructuring. She shows us that the déjà vu of neoliberalism, the global hailing of entrepreneurial flexibility and its concomitant project of self-making, can only be grasped through the thickness of cultural specificity where its costs and pleasures are unevenly felt. Freeman theorizes postcolonial neoliberalism by reimagining the Caribbean cultural model of 'reputation-respectability.' This remarkable book will allow readers to see how the material social practices formerly associated with resistance to capitalism (reputation) are being mobilized in ways that sustain neoliberal precepts and, in so doing, re-map class, race, and gender through a new emotional economy.

About this title

Review:

"Carla Freeman's remarkable book, at once ethnographically thick and theoretically sophisticated, is written with characteristic grace and clarity. Freeman complicates neoliberalism and the crafting of the entrepreneurial subject. She eschews easy generalizations that posit causation from neoliberalism to entrepreneurial subjects wherever they happen to co-exist, by pointing to the articulations of entrepreneurialism with the Caribbean dialectic of respectability/reputation, and by situating the complicated history of neoliberalism in the region's long engagement with global capitalism." Author: Akhil Gupta, author of Source: Red Tape: Bureaucracy, Structural Violence, and Poverty in India

From the Author:

Carla Freeman is Winship Distinguished Research Professor of Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, and associated faculty in Anthropology and Latin American and Caribbean Studies, at Emory University. She is the author of High Tech and High Heels in the Global Economy: Women, Work, and Pink Collar Identities in the Caribbean, also published by Duke University Press, and a coeditor of Global Middle Classes: Ethnographic Particularities, Theoretical Convergences.

About this edition

• Publisher: Duke University Press
• Publication date: 2014
• ISBN 10: 0822358034
• ISBN 13: 9780822358039
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 270