Marti in the borderlands

As a scholar of English Literature and American Studies, Laura Lomas offers in this study a bold, fresh and insightful reading of Martí's complex understanding of the state of modernity in the Americas in the late-nineteenth century. Reading Martí "from and for the United States" (p. xiii) rather than, as is normally done, with reference to Cuba or Latin America, Lomas interrogates and ultimately explodes many of the assumptions that have emerged regarding Martí's Americanism. By understanding him primarily as a Latino migrant in the US, she is able to underscore Martí's cultural and political awareness through his own subject positioning in what the chicana intellectual Gloria Anzaldua termed, a full century later, the "borderlands" or what the Brazilian intellectual Silviano Santiago understood as "the space in-between". Through this double consciousness or subjectivity, Lomas argues that Martí moved between languages, cultures, and versions of modernity, created texts with subtexts, and understood the asymmetries and inequalities of power relations in the Americas.

Exploring his personal correspondence and diaries, his literary creation and literary criticism, his work as a translator, journalist and editor with political activism, Lomas examines how Martí infused all of his writing with a resistance to the US imperial project - thus constructing a startlingly perceptive (and, one might add, contemporary) vision of the Americas. By relocating Martí between the two poles that have claimed him as their spokesperson - Cuba and Cuban-Americans in the US - Lomas succeeds in challenging all of the "official Martís" (p. xii) that exist today.

However, more crucially, Lomas's project also reframes other relationships and networks that surround this iconic figure. By re-examining Martí's views on the great thinkers of US modernity and progress, and by examining his subtle but radical reworkings of the cultures and realities experienced by him during his residence in the US in the 1880s and 1890s, she demonstrates how his respect for the founding principles of the US was tempered and qualified by his growing awareness of the imperial and expansionist project that underpinned US modernity. In exploring Martí's response to key narratives of North American civilization in literature and the press, she draws out his acute sensitivity to the imperial mechanisms that were already at work to stratify, exclude and recolonise access to modernity in the Americas. As such, she underlines Martí's deep suspicion and rejection of an idealistic, but always racially-inflected, modernist discourse of Pan-Americanism.

Martí's radical re-imagining of La América (with the accent demonstrating both its otherness and its resistance to totalising discourses emanating from the North) as resistant, ancient, multi-racial and transnational, thus ultimately reinforces his importance as perhaps the most sophisticated and prophetic intellectual of his time. By underscoring how Martí anticipated postcolonial writers, theorists and thinkers by almost a century, Lomas succeeds in redressing the imbalance that has led to the neglect of Latino and Latin American contributions to the project of modernity in the Americas.

Through the meticulous analysis of an astonishing range of sources, a return to Martí's original writing (or at least fragments and reconstructions thereof) as well as through close and intelligent textual analysis and translation, Lomas not only lays out the cornerstones of Martí's examination of North American culture, but combines this with his many affirmations on potential strategies of resistance and recovery against the imperial project: she explores his unshakeable faith on the power of language to promote social change through writing, reading, translation; his vision of popular education as the ultimate instrument of social justice and emancipation; and his ability to move and inspire others to action.

In short, her analysis offers an extremely original perspective that is bound to provoke debate on the nature of 19th century modernisms and modernities in the Americas. By placing La América at the centre of interpretation, Lomas not only allows for the fluid and shifting interpretations of reality of the migrant subject to be foregrounded, but also, as she herself states, anticipates a new American Studies in which the North can also stand as Other.

Par Kumaraswami is Lecturer in Latin American Cultural Studies at the University of Manchester, UK.

Copyright

Copyright for this work is held jointly between Par Kumaraswami and the International Journal of Cuban Studies under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-No Derivative 3.0 Licence http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/

IJCS Volume 2 Issue 1 June 2009