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

Abstract

Gutierrez reviews "Jose Marti's 'Our America': From National to Hemispheric Cultural Studies" edited by Jeffrey Belnap and Raul Fernandez.

Jose Marti's "Our America": From National to Hemispheric Cultural Studies. Ed. by Jeffrey Belnap and Raul Fernandez. (Durham: Duke University Press, 1998. viii, 344 pp. Cloth, $49.95, ISBN 0-8223-2133-5. Paper, $17.95, ISBN 0-8223-2265-X.)

Jose Marti (1853-1895) was a Cuban journalist, educator, and nationalist. He lived in political exile in the United States from 1881 to 1895, and from there he militated for an independent homeland. Venerated in retrospect as the father of the Cuban nation, in life he agitated against Spanish colonialism in Cuba and against the expansionistic designs of the United States, anticipating the Spanish-American War.

Jose Marti's "Our America" is an anthology that gathers fifteen papers from a 1995 conference commemorating the centennial of Marti's death. All of the authors are humanities scholars who live and teach in the United States. Each attempts to recuperate long-neglected insights from Jose Marti's essay "Our America" to illuminate the contemporary moment. The essays, say the editors, have three goals: first, to explore the ways in which Marti articulated the relationship between national and transnational perspectives; second, to help Marti's perspectives internationalize American studies, for, as a revolutionary and transnational journalist, Marti saw Cuban events as local inflections of a transnational phenomenon; finally, to encourage "Marti's persistent rearticulations of the triangulated cultural and political relations between Europe and its various lines of imperial descent in America," which can inform a "new American cultural studies."

The first section, "Writing across the Line," reads Marti as a "Latino outsider," as a Cuban exile in the United States. The lead essay, "Jose Marti, Alexis de Tocqueville, and the Politics of Displacement," by Donald Pease, analyzes "Our America" and Democracy in America intertextually, comparing their respective rhetorical strategies, audiences, and receptions. Whereas Tocqueville authorized imperialism, Marti configured "Our America" as multiple political sites where refugees, migrants, nomads, exiles, and the dispossessed intersected with the "other America," that is, the national cultures, borders, and boundaries of empires and nation-states. For Marti the displacement of exile was "a strategic force in resisting hegemony," and it was from the alternative spaces of "Our America" that comrades would resist. Susana Rotker's essay expands our knowledge of the textual politics of exile, while contributions by Doris Sommer and Susan Gillman, respectively, delve into the ways Marti disseminated the works of Walt Whitman and Helen Hunt Jackson to further his vision of Pan-Americanism.

Section 2 turns to Marti's critique of United States imperialism and Manifest Destiny. Rosaura Sanchez, Beatrice Pita, and Jose David Saldivar introduce us to the fiction of a Mexican American novelist who lived in California, Maria Amparo Ruiz de Burton. They compare the anti-imperialist impulse in her novels, Who Would Have Thought It? (1872) and The Squatter and the Don (1885), with those of Marti. Ruiz de Burton and Marti both wrote as exiles about annexation and about United States imperialism; their lives and texts, placed side by side, greatly illuminate the dynamics of gender and race.

Section 3 maps the role of "Our America" in constructing new hemispheric cultural politics. Contributions by Enrico Mario Santi, Jeffrey Belnap, Brenda Gayle Plummer, and Ada Ferrer call attention to Marti's plea for new identities that bridged ethnic and national lines and thus resisted the power of states.

Section 4 closes with essays by David Noble, Brook Thomas, George Lipsitz, and Oscar Marti. Each tries to imagine a "New Americanism," one fully attuned to economic and global realities.

There are some dazzling essays in this volume that fully live up to the editors' goals, those by Pease, Sommer, Plummer, Ferrer, Noble, and Lipsitz. Had Marti's essay "Our America" been reprinted here, its fifteen dif ferent readings might have led to a better understanding of Marti. Such was not the case. Nor did the authors or editors who constantly vaunted Marti's Pan-Americanism and critiques of national formations ever seriously ponder the apparent contradiction of his death on May 19, 1895, fighting Spanish forces for an independent Cuba.