Lara Putnam

University of Pittsburgh, History, Faculty Member

Followers

Following

Public Views

Interests

Uploads

Papers by Lara Putnam

The Opportunity Costs of Remaining a Book Discipline

Essay suggests that technological shifts impacting scholarly communication should encourage us to... more Essay suggests that technological shifts impacting scholarly communication should encourage us to question the opportunity costs of insisting on maintaining the 100,000 word monograph as the core unit of published scholarship acknowledged for purposes of tenure and promotion within the historical profession. Consideration of visibility and access, the benefits of peer review, and flexibility to reward outreach may all advocate in favor of a move towards "book and/or article discipline" status.

Download

Young, Sidney Adolphus

African American Studies Center, 2016

Daily Life and Digital Reach: Place-based Research and History’s Transnational Turn

Theorizing Fieldwork in the Humanities, 2016

Download

Jazzing Sheiks at the 25 Cent Bram: Panama and Harlem as Caribbean Crossroads, circa 1910–1940

Journal of Latin American Cultural Studies, 2016

Both Harlem and Panama were, in the early twentieth century, crossroads of the Caribbean. This es... more Both Harlem and Panama were, in the early twentieth century, crossroads of the Caribbean. This essays traces the musical echoes of that fact, arguing that British West Indians had a central but often unrecognized role in the exchanges driving Black cultural innovation in the interwar metropoles. Hundreds of thousands of British West Indians came to and through Panama at the start of the twentieth century, creating a Pan-Caribbean space where the rhythms of son, tango, mento, cumbia, and ragtime rang out. From there many would travel onward. The lives of Panama-born, New York-based performers like Vernon Andrade, Luis Russell, Teófilo Alfonso ‘Panama Al’ Brown, and Estelle Bernier show how British West Indians shaped by the Greater Caribbean’s borderlands crossed boundaries within New York as well. Multilingual and multicultural, they moved easily within Harlem’s ‘Latin Quarter’ of Puerto Ricans and other Spanish-speakers, helping to bring rhythms and styles from the Hispanic Caribbean to the Afro-American listening and dancing public. Stories of the working-class dance halls of 1920s Panama and of the Latin connections of British Caribbean performers in New York together point to tropical circuits of music and moves rarely recognized as part of the metropolitan Jazz Age.

The Transnational and the Text-Searchable: Digitized Sources and the Shadows They Cast

The American Historical Review, 2016

media-reshaping-the-work-of-historians. Commenting on the results of Townsend's survey, Rwany Sib... more media-reshaping-the-work-of-historians. Commenting on the results of Townsend's survey, Rwany Sibaja concluded, "Tools that have the potential to change how we 'do' history-text mining, social media, GIS/mapping, and data visualizations-received few responses in AHA's survey"; Sibaja, "Teaching and Learning History in the Digital Age," National History Education Clearinghouse, March 11, 2011, http://teachinghistory.org/nhec-blog/24526. His conviction that the "digital cameras, scanners, search engines, word processors, and online archive searches" that are now pervasive cannot have a radical impact on "how we 'do' history" seems commonplace among mainstream historians. It is media historians, historians of rhetoric, and those identifying as digital humanists who have taken the lead in insisting otherwise.

Download

Sidney Young, the Panama Tribune, and the Geography of Black Belonging

Download

The Panama Cannonball's Transnational Ties: Migrants, Sport, and Belonging in the Interwar Greater Caribbean

Journal of Sport History, Nov 1, 2014

The interwar years saw the creation of a circum-Caribbean migratory sphere, linking British colon... more The interwar years saw the creation of a circum-Caribbean migratory sphere, linking British colonial sending societies like Jamaica and Barbados to receiving societies from Panama to Cuba to the Dominican Republic to the United States. The overlapping circulation of migrants and media created transnational social fields within which sport practice and sport fandom helped build face-to-face and imagined communities alike. For the several hundred thousand British Caribbean emigrants and their children who by the late 1920s resided abroad, cricket and boxing were especially central. The study of sport among interwar British Caribbean migrants reveals overlapping transnational ties that created microcultures of sporting excellence. In this mobile and interconnected world, sport became a critical realm for the expression of nested loyalties to parish, to class, to island, to empire, and to the collective they called "Our People," that is, "the Negro Race," worldwide.

Download

Migrants, Nations, and Empires in Transition

Immigration and National Identities in Latin America, 2014

The Politics of Return and Fractures of Rule in the British Caribbean, 1930–1940

Radical Moves, 2013

Global child-saving, transatlantic maternalism, and the pathologization of Caribbean childhood, 1930s–1940s

Atlantic Studies, 2014

In a rapid shift between the 1920s and 1940s, British imperial policy went from paying almost no ... more In a rapid shift between the 1920s and 1940s, British imperial policy went from paying almost no attention to child-rearing among colonized populations to hailing family order among the colonized as essential to economic progress and social stability. The shift resulted from the intersection of processes occurring on three different scales: global scientific and ideological developments, transimperial gendered professionalization, and local social and political struggles. This paper illuminates those multi-scalar dynamics by examining a specific subfield of empire, the British Caribbean. As riots and general strikes in Trinidad, Barbados, Jamaica, and other colonies shook the imperial order in the late 1930s, metropolitan observers discovered the "native" family as the crucial incubator of proper working-class citizens. This article uses British Caribbean newspapers and unpublished Colonial Office correspondence generated by the 1938-39 West India Royal Commission (Moyne Commission) to make visible the global and transatlantic dialogues that brought the "problem" of the Caribbean family to the forefront of policy debate. Although imperial rule would not last, the pathologization of Caribbean parenting would prove painfully persistent.

Download

Connecting Seas and Connected Ocean Rims

Connecting Seas and Connected Ocean Rims, 2011

With a series of rich case studies focused on mobile laborers, this book demonstrates how the reg... more

Rites of Power and Rumors of Race

The Politics of Caribbean Religion and Healing, 2012

Undone By Desire: Migration, Sex Across Boundaries, And Collective Destinies In The Greater Caribbean, 1840–1940

Indian, Atlantic, and Pacific Oceans and China Seas Migrations from the 1830s to the 1930s

Finance and industrial capitalists regarded regional marketing strategies as vital interests. Inv... more Finance and industrial capitalists regarded regional marketing strategies as vital interests. Investment and marketing strategies in turn shaped labor migrations. The acquisition of raw materials for the transatlantic worsted industry required a global oceanic reach protected by imperial systems. Regional economic development organized a transatlantic worsted industry during the nineteenth century. Overproduction and high profits resulting from Civil War demands for military cloth ushered in the first tariffs on woolen goods in 1867. From the beginning, Yorkshire worsted manufacturers had a clear perception of regional and transatlantic competition, the markets for their products, and their use of labor migrants. By 1850, West Yorkshire contained 90 percent of all worsted operatives in England and 50 percent of their number resided in Bradford parish. Internal and external migration shaped the worsted industry in Yorkshire and made it an integral part of the Atlantic labor economy. Keywords:Atlantic labor economy; investment; labor migrants; labor migrations; raw materials; transatlantic worsted industry; Yorkshire worsted industry

Contact Zones: Heterogeneity and Boundaries in Caribbean Central America at the Start of the Twentieth Century

Download

The Making and Unmaking of the Circum-Caribbean Migratory Sphere

Migrants and Migration in Modern North America, 2011

Eventually Alien

Blacks and Blackness in Central America, 2010

Sex and standing in the streets of Port Limón, Costa Rica, 1890–1910

Honor, Status, and Law in Modern Latin America, 2005

Download

Gender and political economy: Recent work in Latin American labour history

Social History, 2003

... and Working-Class History, XXXVI (Fall 1989), 4450, and Florence E. Babb, 'Women and ..... more ... and Working-Class History, XXXVI (Fall 1989), 4450, and Florence E. Babb, 'Women and ... 5 Emilia Viotti da Costa, 'Experience versus structures: new tendencies in the history of labor ... 9 But seeMichael Jiménez, 'Class, gender, and peasant resistance in central Colombia, 1900 ...

Borderlands and Border Crossers: Migrants and Boundaries in the Greater Caribbean, 1840–1940

Small Axe: A Caribbean Journal of Criticism, 2014

Borderlands are wider than borders, and people make them so. In cases where two states have succe... more Borderlands are wider than borders, and people make them so. In cases where two states have successfully extended de facto control until bumping up against each other, and where the populace on each side displays a uniformity of language, culture, ancestry, and allegiance, we speak of borders, not borderlands. Such cases have not been typical of the Greater Caribbean, to put it mildly. Here, relocation and remixing have been the rule rather than the exception, and newcomers have more often sought to duck central state authority than impose it. People have moved to where states could not follow; states have stalemated each other, creating space for people to move. The same seacoasts that give maps of the Caribbean the illusion of clarity have aided the creation of messy borderlands galore-some at the swampy fringes far from the centers of power, others in port alleyways where loyalty, color, and culture refused to align as authorities expected. Borderlands index the disjuncture between states' territorial claims and their effective reach. For that reason, popular initiative and mobility are at the center of their stories. 1 1 This core appreciation is shared by approaches to borderlands as diverse as Gloria E.

format_quoteIn 2013, the US citizenship regime was temporarily debated, revealing its dysfunction and the potential for policy reform effects.format_quote

Download

Provincializing Harlem: The “Negro Metropolis” as Northern Frontier of a Connected Caribbean

Modernism/modernity, 2013

The Survey Graphic's iconic March 1925 issue proclaimed Harlem the "Mecca of the New Negro." Mass... more The Survey Graphic's iconic March 1925 issue proclaimed Harlem the "Mecca of the New Negro." Mass migration from the U.S. South, wrote editor Alain Locke, had carried Harlemitesto-be "not only from countryside to city, but from mediaeval America to modern." 1 Black foreigners' transition to the "hectic metropolis" was equally transformative, wrote sociologist Charles Johnson in the same issue. 2 Jamaican-born contributor W. A. Domingo described those immigrants as a "dusky tribe of destiny seekers" on "a dogged, romantic pilgrimage to the El Dorado of their dreams," their "eyes filled with visions of their heritage-palm fringed sea shores, murmuring streams, luxuriant hills and vales." 3 In a poem by Jamaican-born Claude McKay on the same page, the sight of avocados at a New York stand summons memories of home: "dewy dawns, and mystical blue skies/In benediction over nun-like hills." 4 Passages like these make it easy to imagine that the move to Harlem was for British Caribbeans, just like Locke and Johnson claimed it was for black southerners, "a jump of two generations in social economy and of a century and more in civilization." 5 To go from "nun-like hills" to the "hectic metropolis" must surely have been a move from rural stasis to urban commotion, from local absorption to global connection, from enveloping custom to self-aware modernity. But in fact, the particular communities that Caribbean migrants were coming from were already globally connected and critically engaged. They were the product of a recent history of labor mobility and neocolonial (U.S.) expansion, part of broader global developments in which ideologies of white privilege played M O D E R N I S M / m o d e r n i t y 470 a central role: and migrants knew it and had much to say about it. It is not that every village or family in the British Caribbean was immersed in these processes and critically aware of them but rather that those migrants reaching U.S. shores came from precisely those sectors that were. Mass migration to New York was made possible by the resources and skills that certain British Caribbean working people had built through intraregional migration: to Trinidad and Venezuela in the mid-nineteenth century to cultivate cocoa or dig for gold, to Panama at the start of the twentieth to dig the canal or to care for those digging, to Central America to lay rail lines and heft bananas, and to Cuba after World War I to cut and haul cane during the great sugar boom. The communities migrants created at all these sites were connected to transatlantic intellectual and political currents not only by the travels of individuals but also by internationally circulating mass media: media that migrants produced as well as consumed. From Panama to Port of Spain, working-class British Caribbean migrants were active participants in transatlantic print culture-in particular, a burgeoning, multisited black press that spoke of and for "the Negro race." In Provincializing Europe, Dipesh Chakrabarty argues against treating the particular path Western Europe followed over the nineteenth and early twentieth century as definitional of modernity. Social, political, economic, and cultural change, he suggests, combined differently in the peripheries than in the metropole. Scholars must attend to the diversity of colonial modernities. But provincializing Harlem-by shifting our optic to more accurately capture the international perspective of the working-class migrants who made Harlem what it became-suggests the opposite lesson. The circum-Caribbean sites that sent British Caribbeans north to Harlem did share many of the characteristics we associate with modernity: wage labor, social and economic mobility, mass media, global awareness-and self-awareness, as people in the tropical peripheries debated the origins and consequences of all this and more through a vibrant periodical press. A recent wave of scholarship has highlighted the contributions of Caribbean immigrants to interwar Harlem's ferment. Dozens of British Caribbeans played leading roles in radical politics, literary production, or both, founding or editing periodicals including the Voice, the Crusader, the Emancipator, Opportunity, the Messenger, and the Universal Negro Improvement Association's Negro World.

format_quoteInterwar black internationalism roots extend beyond Harlem, highlighting Caribbean solidarity through widespread community organization.format_quote

Download

Lara Putnam

Uploads

Papers by Lara Putnam

Log In