Description
In Parenting Empires, Ana Y. Ramos-Zayas focuses on the parenting practices of Latin American urban elites to analyze how everyday experiences of whiteness, privilege, and inequality reinforce national and hemispheric idioms of anti-corruption and austerity. Ramos-Zayas shows that for upper-class residents in the affluent neighborhoods of Ipanema (Rio de Janeiro) and El Condado (San Juan), parenting is particularly effective in providing moral grounding for neoliberal projects that disadvantage the overwhelmingly poor and racialized people who care for and teach their children. Wealthy parents in Ipanema and El Condado cultivate a liberal cosmopolitanism by living in multicultural city neighborhoods rather than gated suburban communities. Yet as Ramos-Zayas reveals, their parenting strategies, which stress spirituality, empathy, and equality, allow them to preserve and reproduce their white privilege. Defining this moral economy as "parenting empires," she sheds light on how child-rearing practices permit urban elites in the Global South to sustain and profit from entrenched social and racial hierarchies.
About the Author
Ana Y. Ramos-Zayas is Professor of American Studies; Ethnicity, Race, and Migration; and Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Yale University and author of Street Therapists: Race, Affect, and Neoliberal Personhood in Latino Newark and National Performances: The Politics of Class, Race, and Space in Puerto Rican Chicago.
Reviews
"In this brilliant ethnography, Ana Y. Ramos-Zayas invites us into the intimate worlds of parents and children in two affluent enclaves to listen carefully to conversations about ordinary things: nature, yoga, Eastern spirituality, mindfulness, government corruption, austerity, and sovereignty. She astutely and sensitively shows us how to read the mundane worlds of childrearing as imperial formations that are recasting hierarchies of race and class in very unequal societies under the shadow of U.S. empire." -- Laura Briggs, author of * Reproducing Empire: Race, Sex, Science, and U.S. Imperialism in Puerto Rico *
"This ambitious and fascinating book connects the interior lives, affects, and childrearing practices of urban elites in Brazil and Puerto Rico to their spatial environments, interpersonal relationships, and national and international political and discursive contexts. Based on rich ethnography in an understudied field, Parenting Empires makes a strong contribution to research on elites and will be of interest to people working on a broad range of issues from class, race, and identity to parenting, urban studies, and development." -- Rachel Sherman, author of * Uneasy Street: The Anxieties of Affluence *
"Social scientists and political philosophers - as well as professional politicians and all those who are concerned with racial and class injustices - should take careful note of this contribution by Ana Y. Ramos-Zayas, especially on how Latin American elites come to morally justify wealth and inequalities in the name of parenting and austerity subjectivities." -- Jaime Fierro * Ethnic and Racial Studies *
"Parenting Empires reveals that a strategy for governability in subject populations is to cultivate the imperial core's likeness in them, or at least in the key elite. I recommend this high-end science for students and scholars of social/racial stratification, political economy, and Latin Americanists of all stripes." -- Stanley Bailey * American Journal of Sociology *
"Agile, informed, and engaging prose.... Where Parenting Empires reveals itself as a trail-blazing text within critical race studies in Latin America is in the author's knack for picking up, and keenly reflecting, on the anxiety and uncertainty that sit at the root of white identities." -- Guillermo Rebollo Gil * CENTRO *
"Brimming over with insightful analyses, memorable fieldwork, and instigating arguments, Parenting Empires is a pathbreaking monograph on the workings of race and class privilege among Latin American upper classes." -- Maureen E. O'Dougherty * Anthropos *
Book Information
ISBN 9781478008217
Author Ana Y. Ramos-Zayas
Format Paperback
Page Count 296
Imprint Duke University Press
Publisher Duke University Press
Weight(grams) 408g
About the Author
Ana Y. Ramos-Zayas is Professor of American Studies; Ethnicity, Race, and Migration; and Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Yale University and author of Street Therapists: Race, Affect, and Neoliberal Personhood in Latino Newark and National Performances: The Politics of Class, Race, and Space in Puerto Rican Chicago.
Reviews
"In this brilliant ethnography, Ana Y. Ramos-Zayas invites us into the intimate worlds of parents and children in two affluent enclaves to listen carefully to conversations about ordinary things: nature, yoga, Eastern spirituality, mindfulness, government corruption, austerity, and sovereignty. She astutely and sensitively shows us how to read the mundane worlds of childrearing as imperial formations that are recasting hierarchies of race and class in very unequal societies under the shadow of U.S. empire." -- Laura Briggs, author of * Reproducing Empire: Race, Sex, Science, and U.S. Imperialism in Puerto Rico *
"This ambitious and fascinating book connects the interior lives, affects, and childrearing practices of urban elites in Brazil and Puerto Rico to their spatial environments, interpersonal relationships, and national and international political and discursive contexts. Based on rich ethnography in an understudied field, Parenting Empires makes a strong contribution to research on elites and will be of interest to people working on a broad range of issues from class, race, and identity to parenting, urban studies, and development." -- Rachel Sherman, author of * Uneasy Street: The Anxieties of Affluence *
"Social scientists and political philosophers - as well as professional politicians and all those who are concerned with racial and class injustices - should take careful note of this contribution by Ana Y. Ramos-Zayas, especially on how Latin American elites come to morally justify wealth and inequalities in the name of parenting and austerity subjectivities." -- Jaime Fierro * Ethnic and Racial Studies *
"Parenting Empires reveals that a strategy for governability in subject populations is to cultivate the imperial core's likeness in them, or at least in the key elite. I recommend this high-end science for students and scholars of social/racial stratification, political economy, and Latin Americanists of all stripes." -- Stanley Bailey * American Journal of Sociology *
"Agile, informed, and engaging prose.... Where Parenting Empires reveals itself as a trail-blazing text within critical race studies in Latin America is in the author's knack for picking up, and keenly reflecting, on the anxiety and uncertainty that sit at the root of white identities." -- Guillermo Rebollo Gil * CENTRO *
"Brimming over with insightful analyses, memorable fieldwork, and instigating arguments, Parenting Empires is a pathbreaking monograph on the workings of race and class privilege among Latin American upper classes." -- Maureen E. O'Dougherty * Anthropos *
Book Information
ISBN 9781478008217
Author Ana Y. Ramos-Zayas
Format Paperback
Page Count 296
Imprint Duke University Press
Publisher Duke University Press
Weight(grams) 408g
