Shreya P Subramani

SHREYA SUBRAMANI, then a graduate student at Princeton University, Princeton, New Jersey, was awarded funding in October 2016 to aid research on ‘Cartographic Citizenship: An Ethnography of Grassroots Mapping in the U.S. Gulf Coast,’ supervised by Dr. Joao Biehl. Renamed ‘Venturing On: The Carceral Politics of Entrepreneurialism in New Orleans, Louisiana,’ this study is an ethnography that explores how punitive and market logics are mutually dependent and entangled in the social and political processes of racialization. Based on two years of fieldwork in the city of New Orleans, the research traces the institutional and intimate socialites of the formerly incarcerated and their families as well as the legal professionals, nonprofit operatives, city planners and municipal bureaucrats — who, together, participate in the growing marketplace of reentry. Specifically, this work focus on the courts and city/nonprofit efforts that emphasize vocational training, sustainable employment, financial planning and business ownership as putative modes of emancipation. This work argues that the ethics of entrepreneurialism emphasized by these reentry projects obscure the racialized histories and logics constitutive of venture capitalism, property ownership, citizenship and labor today. Thus, Subramani more generally critiques the political potentials of progressive, ‘innovative’ redesigns of criminal justice institutions, neighborhoods, families and personhood alike through the narratives of my ethnographic collaborators.