Radical Moves

Caribbean Migrants and the Politics of Race in the Jazz Age

Bibliographic Data

ID2796205
AuthorsDevyn Spence Benson (Louisiana State University, corresponding author)
Year2014
Volume94
Issue1
Pages151-152
Publication date2014-02-01
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessNo
TypeARTICLE
VenueHispanic American Historical Review (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0018-2168 • E-ISSN: 1527-1900
PublisherDuke University Press (PUBLISHER • US)
DOI10.1215/00182168-2390294
OpenAlexW2313503868
LanguageEN
Citations received5

Lara Putnam provides a unique glimpse into the daily rituals, rhythms, and rumors that forged a “supranational” black consciousness in the greater Caribbean during the first quarter of the twentieth century. By chronicling the transnational lives of British Caribbean workers and the global ramifications of their actions, Radical Moves adds a new and provocative chapter to African diaspora studies. Putnam’s research reminds us that forging diaspora in the 1920s and 1930s was not solely an elite or intellectual endeavor. Encounters between workers of African descent in the English-, Spanish-, and French-speaking Caribbean collectively made and remade nations, borders, and ideas about race in the interwar period. Like a master juggler, Putnam gives readers the transnational backstory to seemingly local events. Yet, even as Radical Moves erases the national and linguistic boundaries that state leaders (and, at times, scholars) have imposed on Caribbean history, it opens the door for future research about the conflicts and tensions that arose as black transnationals worked together to resist new antiblack immigration laws.The large number of British Caribbean migrants in the early twentieth century allows Putnam to decenter the typical characters in black internationalist history. It is estimated that nearly 150,000 Jamaicans migrated off the island between 1880 and 1920 and that by 1930 one-third of the black population of Manhattan was British Caribbean, the majority of whom traveled there in search of employment. Rather than focus solely on leaders like Marcus Garvey, Putnam highlights the workers and families whose labor built the “circum-Caribbean migratory sphere.” This shift in register—from the internationalist world of prominent black intellectuals to the vibrant spaces constructed by rural folks and migratory workers—is a result of Putnam’s creative source base. She analyzes a combination of print and popular culture materials from archives across the region and shows how different mediums (like dance moves, musical performances, and newspaper articles) were mutually reinforcing and shaped a supranational black consciousness.In the greater Caribbean world of the 1920s, English-speaking migrants participated in jazz jam sessions in the United States, African American performers toured Latin America, and everyday people throughout the region danced to musical performances that combined Cuban rumba, North American jazz, Dominican merengue, and Trinidadian calypso. But Putnam (quite correctly) does not want readers to leave the book thinking that these different musical traditions simply influenced each other; rather, she demonstrates how they emerged collectively and collaboratively. In arguing that “labels like ‘black North American music’ mask more than they reveal” (p. 195), Putnam disrupts accepted national origin narratives of popular genres like jazz and reggae.Radical Moves pushes beyond existing literature about the British Caribbean by examining the experiences of English-speaking blacks in Latin America. In fact, it is the first monograph in English or Spanish to analyze the contributions of British West Indians to the labor and border disputes in Venezuela. Highlighting the cooperation of antiracism and racism in “mestizo populism,” Putnam finds that while Latin American leaders in the 1930s were claiming to build inclusive nations, they were also enacting antiblack legislation against “foreign” migrants (p. 200). That antiblack immigration laws were at the heart of Latin American nationalisms is not surprising, given what we know about the limits of racial democracy in the region; however, Putnam’s transnational lens allows readers to see how this trend played out differently in the circum-Caribbean depending on global economic forces, population demographics in each country, and national rhetoric about race. The case study of Venezuelan leaders, who forcibly expelled black British Caribbean workers (and some longtime residents) from their country’s shores in the 1930s, and Trinidadian officials, who refused to give asylum to these same black migrants unless they fit a new narrow definition of citizen, provides a glimpse into the role that antiblackness played in making borders throughout the hemisphere.In the end, Putnam’s greatest contribution comes from her ability to bring seemingly disparate stories together to tell a transnational history of migration, racism, and everyday resistance. By tracing the movement of Caribbean workers in the early twentieth century, Radical Moves points scholars to new and more inclusive possibilities for studying the analogous transnational elements within so-called black nationalist movements like Rastafarianism and the Nation of Islam. Moreover, by successfully establishing the existence of a “supranational black public sphere” (p. 153), Putnam opens the door for additional research on how local people of African descent responded to black migrants. For instance, what were the limits of the “oneness of people of African ancestry” (p. 237)? How did Afro-Latin Americans participate in building mestizo nationalisms that excluded black English-speaking Caribbeans while simultaneously being excluded from these nations themselves? Putnam’s examination of the ways that black Trinidadians discriminated against Chinese workers in response to their own marginalization points us to these questions. Ultimately, it is the contradictory making and unmaking of racial solidarities that Putnam’s transnational lens gestures to

Art history · Diaspora · Elite · Ethnology · Immigration · Jazz · Political science · Politics · Population · Quarter (Canadian coin) · Race (biology) · Sociology · State (computer science) · Caribbean history, culture, and politics · Cuban History and Society · Gender Studies · History · Law · Migration, Ethnicity, and Economy

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