Radical Moves: Caribbean Migrants and the Politics of Race in the Jazz Age

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.

The idea of the imagination is as evocative as it is elusive. Not only does the imagination allow us to project ourselves beyond our own immediate space and time, it also allows us to envision the future, as individuals and as collectives. The radical imagination, then, is that spark of difference, desire and discontent that can be fanned into the flames of social change. Yet what precisely is the imagination and what might make it 'radical'? How can it be fostered and cultivated? How can it be studied and what are the possibilities and risks of doing so? This book seeks to answer these questions at a crucial time. As we enter into a new cycle of struggles marked by a worldwide crisis of social reproduction, scholar-activists Max Haiven and Alex Khasnabish explore the processes and possibilities for cultivating the radical imagination in dark times. A lively and crucial intervention in radical politics, social research and social change, and the collective visions and cultures that inspire them.

Annotation Markides (chairman, strategic and international management department, London Business School) contends that the essence of business strategy is to allow a company to create and exploit a unique strategic position in industry, and helps managers zero in on critical choices that lie at the heart of all innovative strategies. He approaches strategic thinking as a creative process, and poses key questions for readers to ask as he guides them through a framework for developing strategic thinking skills.

With someone trying to harm the star skateboarder at the Thrashathon skateboard competition, Frank and Joe Hardy are determined to beat the skateboarding menace at his own game. Original.