This article mobilizes an analytic of racial responsibilization to interrogate the contentious logics of risk-taking and risk-making that shape “the urban entrepreneur,” an organizing figure of prisoner reentry workforce development programs in the American city of New Orleans. My ethnographic study explores the fraught relationships between entrepreneurialism and self-actualization by tracing the racialized and racializing evaluations of risk that formerly incarcerated business owners must navigate and negotiate. It uses the illocutionary act of “the pitch” as a performative space to question anti-Blackness within neoliberal capitalism. When refracted through the risk logics of punitive justice institutions, the guiding assumption of the entrepreneur as autonomous, self-actualized agent is fundamentally challenged. For the conjunctively racialized and criminalized, the requirements of entrepreneurialism do not potentiate self-actualization but rather both obscure and re/produce racial histories of dispossession and bondage.

中文翻译：

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创业陷阱

本文动员对种族责任的分析来探究塑造“城市企业家”的有争议的冒险和冒险逻辑，这是美国新奥尔良市囚犯再入劳动力发展计划的组织人物。我的民族志研究通过追踪以前被监禁的企业主必须驾驭和谈判的种族化和种族化风险评估，探索了创业主义和自我实现之间令人担忧的关系。它使用“球场”的言外之意作为表演空间来质疑新自由主义资本主义中的反黑人。当通过惩罚性司法机构的风险逻辑折射时，企业家作为自主的、自我实现的代理人的指导假设受到了根本性的挑战。