Abstract
Radical Moves: Caribbean Migrants and the Politics of Race in the Jazz Age, by Lara Putman. Chapell Hill: University of Carolina Press, 2013. Remixing Reggaeton: The Cultural Politics of Race in Puerto Rico, by Petra R. Rivera-Rideau. Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2015. Roy Cape: A Life on the Calypso and Soca Bandstand, by Joycelyne Guilbault and Roy Cape. Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2014. Broadcasting Modernity: Cuban Commercial Television, 1950-1960, by Yeidy M. Rivero. Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2015.
Highlights
– Radical Moves: Caribbean Migrants and the Politics of Race in the Jazz Age, by Lara Putman
At least until the 1990s, as John Lent observed in the introduction of his edited volume, Caribbean Popular Culture (1990), ‘the study of Caribbean popular culture, much like that of the field generally, has been very recent, uneven..., scattered, fragmented, and tentative’ (p. 3)
Caribbean popular music studies In Radical Moves: Caribbean Migrants and the Politics of Race in the Jazz Age, the first and most comprehensive book under review here, Lara Putnam investigates ‘the popular cultures of black internationalism’ in the early twentieth century and in particular the interwar era – or ‘Jazz Age’ – of the 1920s and 1930s, arguing that ‘black internationalism was not restricted to political leaders, nor to eloquent authors, nor to the print public sphere’ (p. 4)
Summary
– Radical Moves: Caribbean Migrants and the Politics of Race in the Jazz Age, by Lara Putman. The position that popular culture matters holds all the more true in the Caribbean, where the folk and working-class culture of the black masses has long been ridiculed and oppressed by the commercial and ‘high’ culture of the white (and brown) elites, first during slavery and later under ongoing patterns of discrimination and exploitation. With its hierarchical structures of power, the field of popular culture, defined by the influential British media scholar John Fiske (1989) as the production, distribution and consumption of ‘meanings and pleasures within a social system’ In the books under review here, Caribbean popular culture is invariably approached as a critical site of meaning creation, with the specific media under investigation being both barometers and catalysts that ‘mediate’, ‘reflect’, ‘articulate’, ‘(re)produce’, ‘shape’, ‘inform’, ‘influence’, ‘perpetuate’ and/or ‘challenge’ wider discourses and practices of power
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