Radical Moves: Caribbean Migrants and the Politics of Race in the Jazz Age by Lara Putnam (review)

Scholars of both the British Caribbean and Latin America are sure to be enthused by Lara Putnam’s latest monograph. The historian focuses on the mass migrations from the British Caribbean in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and the immigrants’ role in forming discourses of “black internationalism.” Until now, the history of black radicalism at the dawn of the Jazz Age has been told largely from the perspective of the prominent émigré activists and their organizational efforts in the colonies and the metropoles like New York, London, and Paris, especially Marcus Garvey and his United Negro Improvement Association (UNIA).

Arguing that “black internationalism was not restricted to political leaders, nor to eloquent authors, nor to the print public sphere,” Putnam shifts our attention to the role of working-class migrants who traveled between peripheries—from British colonies such as Jamaica, Barbados, and the Lesser Antilles to the neighboring Latin republics (p. 4). From the late nineteenth century, hundreds of thousands of black migrants mined gold in Venezuela, excavated the Panama Canal, cut cane on Cuba’s plantations, and labored in the ports, railroads, and banana fields along the Central American coast. She argues that these tropical export zones formed key nodes in the regional circuits of migration and the emerging production of black consciousness and popular culture. In these “peripheral” locales, Putnam shows, these ordinary men and women actively participated in the making of modernity and in the imagination of the wider black world.

As Putnam shows, West Indian migrants’ understandings of identity included not only explicitly political ideas but also popular culture in the form of spirituality, associational life, and dance music, which both allied with and diverged from political activists’ conceptions of “black internationalism.” One fascinating chapter focuses on the common idioms of black Caribbean religion—including revivalist churches, obeah/voodoo practitioners, Eastern mystic healers, and others—that crossed national and colonial boundaries. At the same time, the author does not present a homogenous migrant population; for example, she explores how middle-class black activists at times bemoaned both wild revelry and “superstitious” religious behavior and the lewdness of the dance hall.

Looking at the transnational popular music circuit that linked musicians, promoters, and the consuming public in the circum-Caribbean, Putnam argues that peripheral populations were not mere recipients of metropolitan culture but rather were “part of the culturally contiguous space within which the Jazz Age and its deeply cosmopolitan music and dance were created” (p. 157). Sure to spark new debates over etymology is the authors’ documentation of weekly “regge dances” held by West Indians in the Costa Rican port town of Limón in the 1930s, decades prior to the use of term reggay/reggae in Jamaica itself.

Putnam’s vast reach across national and colonial borders to recreate this “transnational history ‘from the bottom up,’” is complemented by incredibly rich and fascinating local details (see for example p. 232). This massive effort required visits to archives in (at least) eight countries along with close reading of local newspapers. Putnam draws the readers’ attention to both the fluidity of borders and the importance of blockages to mobility. With economic contraction in the 1920s and 1930s, the United States and the Spanish Caribbean and Central American republics alike imposed exclusionary migratory laws that slammed doors on black migrants across the hemisphere.

Despite its obvious accomplishments and readability, the book would pose challenges for undergraduates or non-Area Studies scholars, given its lack of background information for the wide range of territories covered. For instance, the author provides spare detail on U.S. corporations’ domination of the archipelago of sugar and banana production in which these migrants labored. In the same vein, a clearer overview of the explicitly political organizations and ideologies of the prominent émigré West Indian intellectuals would have better conveyed the context in which these popular cultures...