Jose Marti's Our America : From National to Hemispheric Cultural Studies (New Americanists)

Considerable attention has been given to Cuban poet, essayist, and activist Jose Marti's 1891 essay "Nuestra America," but relatively little has been paid to the rest of the journalistic work that Marti produced during his fourteen-year exile in the United States. In Jose Marti's Our America, Jeffrey Belnap and Raul Fernandez present essays from Latin American, Caribbean, and U.S.-based scholars who consider Marti's rich and underexplored body of work and position Marti as an emblem of New American studies. A Cuban exile from 1881 to 1895, Marti was a correspondent writing in New York for various Latin American newspapers. Grasping the significance of rising U.S. imperial power, he came to understand the Americas as a complex system of kindred-but not equal-national formations whose cultural and political integrity was threatened by the overbearing aggressiveness of the United States. This collection explores how in his journalistic work Marti critiques U.S. racism, imperialism, and capitalism; warns Latin America of impending U.S. geographical, cultural, and economic annexation; and calls for recognition of the diversity of America's cultural voices. Reinforcing Marti's hemispheric vision with essays by a wide range of scholars who investigate his analysis of the United States, his significance as a Latino outsider, and his analyses of Latin American cultural politics, this volume explores the affinities between Marti's thought and current reexaminations of what it means to study America. Jose Marti's Our America offers a new understanding of Marti's ambiguous and problematic relation with the United States and will engage scholars and students in American, Latin American, and Latino studies as well as those interested in cultural, postcolonial, gender, and ethnic studies. Contributors. Jeffrey Belnap, Raul Fernandez, Ada Ferrer, Susan Gillman, George Lipsitz, Oscar Marti, David Noble, Donald E. Pease, Beatrice Pita, Brenda Gayle Plummer, Susana Rotker, Jose David