Carla Freeman, "Entrepreneurial Selves: Neoliberal Respectability and the Making of a Caribbean Middle Class" (Duke UP, 2014)

Summary

This marvelous ethnography traces one of the surprising outcomes of shifting neoliberal regimes in Barbados. As women find themselves leading entrepreneurial lives, they also find themselves engaging in a new range of emotions, both at work and at home. Carla Freeman's Entrepreneurial Selves: Neoliberal Respectability and the Making of a Caribbean Middle Class (Duke University Press, 2014) follows the lives of a number of male and female Barbadians and finds that the demands of the twenty-first century economy create practices of care, attention and intimacy that shape their working lives and their leisure lives, their relationships with families and spouses as well as co-workers, their moments of rest or consumption as well as of business. It's an important transformation that has reshaped the lives of many Barbadians, and Freeman observes and probes changing landscapes of emotion with a great deal of nuance.

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Alejandra Bronfman

Alejandra Bronfman is Professor and Director of Undergraduate Studies Latin American, Caribbean & U.S. Latino Studies at SUNY, Albany.

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