Entrepreneurial Selves: Neoliberal Respectability and the Making of a Caribbean Middle Class

Next Wave: New Directions in Women's Studies

by Carla Freeman

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.

Genres: Anthropology, Feminism

272 pages, Paperback

First published November 12, 2014

About 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 Entrepreneurial Selves: Neoliberal Respectability and the Making of a Caribbean Middle Class, High Tech and High Heels in the Global Economy: Women, Work, and Pink Collar Identities in the Caribbean, and a coeditor of Global Middle Classes: Ethnographic Particularities, Theoretical Convergences.

Reviews

[Joma Geneciran · Rating 2 out of 5]

An interesting monograph. Carla Freeman applies a poststructuralist reading to Barbadian middle-class society. Primarily drawing on Foucault, Bourdieu and then what-appears-to-be tacking on Peter Wilson's classic framework of respectability vs. reputation.

Her use of neoliberalism ignores an important intellectual history/genealogy from F.A. Hayek, to Ernest-Ulrich Petersmann, to schools of neoliberalism from the Freiburg School (the birthplace of German ordoliberalism) to the Chicago School (identified with Milton Friedman, Aaron Director, Richard Posner), the Cologne School of Ludwig Müller-Armack; and the Geneva School such as Willhelm Rópke, Ludwig Mises, and Michael Heilperin. Granted, her book was published in 2014 and this historiography was really most fully elaborated by Quinn Slobodian in 2018. However, it suggests that neoliberalism isn't precisely what's going on.

Her fieldwork lasted for a decade, which was a strength; allowing for deeply rich ethnographic data. However, her fidelity or use of poststructuralism hindered the project, IMO. I would've written this from the perspective of political economy, political ecology, and critical geography as much of what she was exploring is the results of a change in political economy (from the production of agricultural goods (namely sugar) toward a new middle class/service work economy.