Radical Moves: Caribbean Migrants and the Politics of Race in the Jazz Age, written by Lara Putnam

This book focuses on a little studied theme-the movement of "Afro Caribbeans" or "British West Indians" to what Lara Putnam identifies as the "circum-Caribbean" (the central border nations of Panama, Costa Rica, and Venezuela) as well as to Cuba and the Dominican Republic.Trinidad, as both a migrant receiving and sending country and because of its proximity to Venezuela, is also included.It concentrates on the thousands of British Caribbean people who left their homes in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries to seek agricultural plantation work or manual labor in the building of railroads or, as in the case of Panama, the construction of the canal.Their enforced return and that of many of their descendants during 1930-40 was prompted by various factors, including world economic tensions, increasing antiblack prejudice, and Great Britain's rejection of West Indians born abroad.Many of those who returned were instrumental in creating social movements, contributing particularly to the labor unrest that spread through much of the Caribbean during the 1930s.The book's theoretical framework is on "Black Internationalism" whichunlike "Black Nationalism," which concentrates on racial solidarity among Blacks-focuses on "racial subordination as part of systems that function on a supranational scale" (p. 6).Putnam also attempts to interpret the perspective of these West Indian communities as "imagined communities" (following Benedict Anderson) defined solely in terms of their lack of sovereign status; her aim is to "trace the story of one set of connected peripheries and the Black Internationals that emerged from them or bounced back to them" (p. 7).While not ignoring the political undertones of the various phases of these migrations, her main sources are based on the popular culture that emerged in these communities and was reflected in populist religious systems, media, the press, and above all musical expression.In addition to the introduction and conclusion, six chapters discuss how these migrants experienced life in their new countries of residence.Chapter 1 describes the demographics of the migration and includes their working conditions and the constraints imposed on them by the state; it also features a case study from eastern Venezuela where "Venezuelan authorities, British officials, and tens of thousands of Windward Islanders argued over what kinds of prerogatives dark skinned imperial subjects could claim abroad" (p.12).Three of the following chapters focus on the migrants' popular culture, including religious practices (Chapter 2), the black press (Chapter 4) New West Indian Guide 89 (2015) 295-431 somewhat jarring.Although this is not a theory-based book, the theoretical framework that it calls on sometimes suffers from a disconnect with the data presented.Radical Moves is a dense and packed book, and certainly not an easy read!

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