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The Caribbean Genealogy Library’s Annual Meeting to Feature Guest Speaker Dr. Tami Navarro

Crucian Author, Cultural Anthropologist Tami Navarro (Photo courtesy of Tami Navarro)

The Caribbean Genealogy Library (CGL) on St. Thomas will have its annual membership meeting at 2 p.m. (AST), on Saturday, Feb. 4. The event is virtual on Zoom; registration is required. Contact the library at caribgenlibrary@gmail.com for registration information.

This year’s guest speaker for the annual meeting will be Tami Navarro, Ph.D.

Navarro is an assistant professor of Pan-African Studies at Drew University. She is a cultural anthropologist whose work has been published in Cultural Anthropology, American Anthropologist, Transforming Anthropology, Small Axe Salon, The Caribbean Writer, Social Text and Feminist Anthropology.

She is a founding member of the Virgin Islands Studies Collective (VISCO) and a member of the editorial board for the journal “Small Axe: A Caribbean Journal of Criticism.” Navarro is co-host of the podcast, “Writing Home: American Voices from the Caribbean” and the co-director of the Transnational Black Feminisms working group at Columbia University.

She is the author of “Virgin Capital: Race, Gender and Financialization in the U.S. Virgin Islands” (SUNY Press 2021), which has been recognized by the Association for Feminist Anthropology and the Society for Latin American and Caribbean Anthropology.

Her presentation is entitled “Putting Race to Work: Race, Gender, and Economic Opportunity in the U.S. Virgin Islands,” It is based on her book “Virgin Capital,” which examines the cultural impact and historical significance of the Economic Development Commission (EDC) in the USVI.

The Economic Development Commission is a tax holiday program that 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 U.S. 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.

The Caribbean Genealogy Library’s annual membership meeting will also include the election of the board of directors and a review of activities and projects undertaken by the organization during the last year.

The library is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization and is supported in part by the annual dues paid by its library members. Anyone interested in becoming a member of the library is encouraged to stop by the library and pick up an application or visit the membership page of the organization’s website at www.cgl.vi to learn more.

Caribbean Genealogy Library’s mission is to identify, preserve and provide access to Caribbean genealogy, history and cultural heritage information resources for the V.I. and the Caribbean. The library houses unique and rare books on Virgin Islands history and culture; funeral booklets and microfilms; it provides access to church records and other documents. It is located in the Al Cohen’s Plaza Building 3 (at the top of Raphune Hill).

For more information, email caribgenlibrary@gmail.com.

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