From Toussaint to Tupac: The Black International since the Age of Revolution

Nothing Matters but Color: Transnational Circuits, the Interwar Caribbean, and the Black International

Nothing Matters but Color Transnational Circuits, the Interwar Caribbean, and the Black International lara putnam In the first decades of the twentieth century, sojourners from the British West Indies created a migratory sphere that stretched from northern Venezuela to southern Harlem. Not only did individual lives and family units cross national boundaries, but so, too, did social networks, formal institutions, and cultural consumption. Marcus Garvey’s Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA) had chapters across the region, and the UNIA’s newspaper, Negro World, everywhere read, published news and letters from correspondents in Cuba, Panama, Jamaica, Barbados, and beyond. The Anglican and Wesleyan Methodist churches, the Salvation Army, and other Christian missions had a similar spread and helped members of distant chapters keep in touch. Records andradiosletsoundscirculateevenfasterthansingers,shapingamusicaltradition in which calypso, mento, plena, son, and jazz acquired echoes of mutual influence.1 Local newspapers played an important role in uniting distant settlements into a single social world. British West Indian–owned newspapers published inKingston(Jamaica),Port Limón(CostaRica),Panama City (Panama),and Port of Spain (Trinidad) circulated far and wide, as did the UNIA’s New York– based Negro World. News articles, social notes, and obituaries were commonly picked up and reprinted among these papers.2 Unusually high rates of literacy among British West Indian emigrants in these years assured a wide readership .3 The Negro World, the Kingston Daily Gleaner, the Limón Searchlight and Atlantic Voice, the Bocas del Toro Central American Express, the Panama Tribune, and the “West Indian News” page of the Panama Star and Herald bridged elite and popular culture within their sites of publication even as they linked these sites together. The frequency of steamer traffic also facilitated privatecorrespondence.Asearlyas1883–84(theheydayofJamaicanmigration to the French Panama canal project), more than 82,000 letters were dispatched fromJamaicatoColombiainthespaceoftwelvemonths.4Oral,epistolary,and print lines of communication together cycled rumors, ideas, and news around the region.5 At the height of migration in the late 1920s, British West Indian immigrants and their children made up roughly 16 percent of the population of Panama, 3.8 percent of that of Costa Rica, 1.2 percent of that of Cuba, and almost onequarter of that of Harlem.6 Smaller but significant communities resided in the Dominican Republic, Honduras, Guatemala, Nicaragua, Colombia, and Venezuela.Putanotherway,by1930,atleast150,000first-orsecond-generation British West Indians lived in the Spanish-speaking circum-Caribbean, while 145,000 more resided in the United States.7 Nearly 300,000-strong, then, the British West Indian diaspora was almost twice as large as the population of Barbados and fully six times that of Belize. Yet because these men, women, and children did not reside in a single nation, scholars have rarely seen them for the interrelated whole they were. True, the transnational world they created did not endure. Economic crisis and racist immigration laws cut short the circulation of migrants in the 1930s, and post–World War II political and economic shifts redirected migratory circuits toward the North Atlantic. Yet thelegacyofthatearlyBritishWestIndiandiasporaisextraordinaryandmarks black internationalism to this day. Scholars have long recognized the disproportionate number of foundational pan-African thinkers that came from the Caribbean, among them Marcus Garvey, Amy Jacques Garvey, Cyril V. Briggs, Richard B. Moore, Claude McKay, George Padmore, C. L. R. James, and Eric Williams. Winston James has argued that the migration experience itself was a key factor in their radicalization.8 I would go further to note that they were not just products of one particular migratory system; they were also products of a particular moment in its history. All stepped on the public stage in the interwar years, a critical juncture for British West Indians abroad. Most importantly, these leaders were not unique. In this same era, voices across the Caribbean public sphere were speaking out about the common experiences of African peoples aroundtheglobe,abouttheircommonsufferingandcommonaspirations,and about the need for collective action to make shared dreams a united reality. Such a vision of brotherhood and sisterhood among African-descended peoples on all sides of the Atlantic was built both against something and out lara putnam 108 of something. It was built against something: the racially defined nationalism of Latin American states, which across the region imposed race-based exclusions (often for the first time) in the late 1920s and 1930s. It was also built in opposition to the racist imperialism of U.S. military interventions, most especially in Panama, Cuba, and Haiti...