The Dawn of the Jazz Age in the Caribbean: Dance, Consumer Culture, and the Imperial Shape of Modern Entertainment

Abstract

After 1917 the word ‘jazz’ disseminated rapidly throughout the world attaining, along the way, a multiplicity of meanings, sometimes related to musical practices from the United States, but often associated with a diverse array of things, objects, ideas, and situations in the worlds of music entertainment, dance, leisure, and fashion. In the Caribbean, this process entailed not only the constitution of jazz as a symbol of social modernity but also revealed a long history of exchanges between the United States and the Caribbean – not to mention the Afrodiasporic origins of jazz. By examining jazz as a by-product and an expression of Caribbean modernity, this article disentangles some of the cultural meanings of the word ‘jazz’ in the Caribbean between 1917 and 1920, considering, ultimately, how imagining jazz as Caribbean was inevitably intertwined with imagining it as modern.