Jose Marti's "Our America"

Considerable inerest has been given to Cuban artist José Martì's 1891 essay Nuestra Amèrica, but relatively little has been paid to the rest of the journalistic work that Martì produced during his fourteen year exile in the United States. In Josè Martì's Our America, Jeffrey Belnap and Raùl Fernandez present essays from American, Caribbean and US based scholars who consider Martì's rich and under-explored body of work and position Martì as an emblem of New American studies. A Cuban exile from 1881 to 1895, Martì 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 Martì 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 Martì'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 Martì's thought and current re-examinations of what it means to study America. Josè Martì's Our America offers a new understanding of Martì'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, Raùl Fernandez, Ada Ferrer, Susan Gillman, George Lipsitz, Oscar Martì, David Noble, Donald E. Pease, Beatrice Pita, Brenda Gayle Plummer, Susana Rotker, Josè David Saldìvar, Rosaura Sanchez, Enrico Mario Santì, Doris Sommer, Brook Thomas