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anthropolog y
Entrepreneurial Selves
Neoliberal Respectability and the
Making of a Caribbean Middle Class
carla freeman
Aurality
Listening and Knowledge
in Nineteenth-Century Colombia
ana maría ochoa gautier
“Carla Freeman’s scholarship reveals a delicate omnivorousness. She
offers a unique perspective on the affective economies through which
neoliberal capitalism and its middle-class subjects are made and remade,
demonstrating that neoliberalism is not monolithic or guaranteed. Its
varied ‘structures of feeling’ are produced, contested, and differentiated.
Freeman’s way of making and working with theory is rare; it traverses
multiple registers, holding in tension the specific, the general, the abstract,
and the concrete.”—CINDI KATZ, author of Growing Up Global: Economic
Restructuring and Children’s Everyday Lives
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.
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: Theorizing
Through Ethnography.
NEXT WAVE: NEW DIRECTIONS IN WOMEN’S STUDIES
A Series Edited by Inderpal Grewal, Caren Kaplan, and Robyn Wiegman
duke
“Aurality shows how hearing, writing, speech, and song were central to
the constitution of modern personhood in the nineteenth century. Using
Colombia as her case study, Ana María Ochoa Gautier explores how
colonial intellectuals, creoles, and indigenous people spoke, sung, and
wrote across difference as they struggled to establish new kinds of political
subjectivity and nationality. Her book offers a vital alternative to
a literature that has too often taken Western Europe and Anglophone
North America as points of historical departure. Aurality will transform
our understandings of the human and the animal; nation and citizenship;
music and language; speech and writing; and modernity itself.”
—JONATHAN STERNE, author of MP3: The Meaning of a Format
In this audacious book, Ana María
Ochoa Gautier explores how listening
has been central to the production
of notions of language, music, voice,
and sound that determine the politics
of life. Drawing primarily from
nineteenth-century Colombian sources,
Ochoa Gautier locates sounds produced
AurAlity by different living entities at the juncture
of the human and nonhuman.
Listening & Knowledge in
Nineteenth-Century Colombia
Her “acoustically tuned” analysis of
Ana María Ochoa Gautier a wide array of texts reveals multiple
debates on the nature of the aural.
These discussions were central to a politics of the voice harnessed in
the service of the production of different notions of personhood and
belonging. In Ochoa Gautier’s groundbreaking work, Latin America
and the Caribbean emerge as a historical site where the politics of life
and the politics of expression inextricably entangle the musical and
the linguistic, knowledge and the sensorial.
Ana María Ochoa Gautier is Associate Professor of Music and Director
of the Center for Ethnomusicology at Columbia University. She is the author
of several books in Spanish.
SIGN, STORAGE, TRANSMISSION
A Series Edited by Jonathan Sterne and Lisa Gitelman
ANTHROPOLOGY/CARIBBEAN STUDIES
November 296 pages, 8 photographs
paper, 978–0–8223–5803–9, $24.95/£15.99
cloth, 978–0–8223–5792–6, $89.95/£59.00
ANTHROPOLOGY/SOUND STUDIES
November 304 pages, 3 illustrations
paper, 978–0–8223–5751–3, $24.95/£15.99
cloth, 978–0–8223–5736–0, $89.95/£59.00
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