Citizens of Empire: Education and Teacher Exchanges in Canada and the Commonwealth, 1910–40

This article examines how one group of actors actively infused education, citizenship and Canada’s international relationships with a sense of empire in the first third of the twentieth century. Making use of archival and published sources from collections in Canada and Britain, it focuses in particular on imperial citizenship teaching in Canadian schools, a number of education conferences held in the United Kingdom and the exchanges of elementary and high school teachers and school inspectors between commonwealth countries. In this period, politicians and bureaucrats in Canada and other dominions actively connected their education systems to an imperial network at the very moment that others were striving to attain more economic and political autonomy from the British government. Education came to occupy a significant cultural space alongside the trade agreements and constitutional changes that slowly recalibrated the nature of the British imperial system in the interwar period. Imperial education projects were an important feature of the cultural politics of a fading empire, but they were driven by actors in both the imperial centre and the self-governing dominions. This article argues that between 1910 and 1940 teachers and politicians in Canada drew on an international support network, actively fostered new ideas of citizenship, and strove to assert the country’s belonging in the British Empire.     

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

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.