Walt Whitman and His Caribbean Interlocutors: Jose Marti, C.L.R. James, and Pedro Mir: Song and Countersong

Walt Whitman and His Caribbean Interlocutors: Jose Marti, C.L.R. James, and Pedro Mir explores the writings of Whitman (1819-1892) and of three Caribbean authors who engaged with them: the Cuban poet, essayist and revolutionary Jose Marti (1853-1895); the Trinidadian activist, historian and cultural critic C.L.R. James (1901-1989), and the Dominican poet Pedro Mir (1913-2000). Whitman and his Caribbean interlocutors are discussed against the background of the contradictions of capitalist modernity, as exemplified by the United States between the 1840s and the 1940s. Marx’s exploration of the liberating and oppressive dimensions of capitalist expansion frames the discussion of each author and of Marti’s, James’s and Mir’s responses to Whitman and, more generally, to North American capitalist and industrial civilisation and its imperial projections.