In the generations after emancipation, hundreds of thousands of
African-descended working-class men and women left their homes in
the British Caribbean to seek opportunity abroad: in the goldfields
of Venezuela and the cane fields of Cuba, the canal construction in
Panama, and the bustling city streets of Brooklyn. But in the 1920s
and 1930s, racist nativism and a brutal cascade of antiblack
immigration laws swept the hemisphere. Facing borders and barriers
as never before, Afro-Caribbean migrants rethought allegiances of
race, class, and empire. In
Radical Moves, Lara Putnam takes
readers from tin-roof tropical dancehalls to the elegant
black-owned ballrooms of Jazz Age Harlem to trace the roots of the
black-internationalist and anticolonial movements that would remake
the twentieth century.
From Trinidad to 136th Street, these were years of great dreams and
righteous demands. Praying or "jazzing," writing letters to the
editor or letters home, Caribbean men and women tried on new ideas
about the collective. The popular culture of black internationalism
they created--from Marcus Garvey's UNIA to "regge" dances,
Rastafarianism, and Joe Louis's worldwide fandom--still echoes in
the present.