Speed Metal, Slow Tropics, Cold War
This chapter examines the production and marketing of aluminum as a carrier of uneven global modernities, thus highlighting the ways in which mobility and immobilization were simultaneously created in the world of traveling commodities, transport systems, and tourism. More specifically, it considers the role of aluminum, the “speed metal,” in modernization by linking the North American world of mobility, speed, and flight to the heavier, slower Caribbean world of bauxite mining, racialized labor relations, and resource extraction. The chapter first looks at the emergence of U.S. air power in the early twentieth century before discussing the cultural motions of Caribbean modernity and the complex constellations of mobility and immobility that structure transnational American relations. It also discusses the role played by companies like Alcoa in promoting innovation in the United States in the use of aluminum and imagining the light modernity of the future.