Jose Marti’s Our America: From National to Hemispheric Cultural Studies

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 14 years exile in the United States. In this book, Jeffrey Belnap and Raul Fernandez present essays from American Caribbean and US based scholars who consider Marti’s rich and under-explored body of work and position Marti as an emblem for 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 US 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 US racism, imperialism, and capitalism; warns Latin America of impending US 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 re-examination 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.