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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...