Translating Empire. José Martí, Migrant Latino Subjects, and American Modernities by Laura Lomas (review)

The debate on immigration reform has recently come to the forefront in political debates, academic classrooms, conferences, seminars, and discussions. The Latino population has exponentially grown in the past decade and within the next ten to twenty years it will become a majority in several states. However, the history of immigration, the politics of the revolving door, and the color lines that have divided the United States since the nineteenth century, have been masked by discourses that promote assimilation and that have falsely appropriated the contributions of the diverse immigrant groups that made their homes in these lands.

In Translating Empire, Laura Lomas proposes to reevaluate American literature and modernity through the lens of Latino writing. For that purpose, she studies the works of Cuban José Martí during the Gilded Age (1880-1895). In keeping with the book’s title, Lomas focuses on Martí’s translations of American political and cultural phenomena and invites the reader to acknowledge him as one of the first writers who founded an intellectual Latino tradition and who critically reflected on U.S. expansionism towards Latin America. For Lomas, Martí’s work bears witness to the struggle not just of Latino migrant workers, but also that of Asian Americans and African Americans. Martí’s contribution to the field of American studies relies on his undermining of class and racial hierarchies. His focus on labor exploitation, among other topics, aimed to prove how U.S. economy grew by relying on migrant workers who were underpaid and worked under harsh conditions.

Unlike other studies of Martí that have mainly focused on his writing as representative of modernism, as well as on his role in the fight for Cuban Independence from Spain, Lomas explores this author’s writings from the point of view of “the deportee, the migrant and the prisoner as they cultivate the rage of the sea beneath the writer’s quill and below the ship’s keel” (53). What lies underneath Martí’s poems, stories, and essays are seeds for a revolutionary movement in the Americas that trusts in the power of minorities working together as one. In spite of his light skin and educational level, Martí disengages from an individualistic bourgeois perspective and does not identify with white, educated elite. He reflects on the collective Latino and immigrant struggles that he has witnessed and experienced while traveling and living abroad.

Two of the most poignant reflections in the book have to do with: a) translation as a way to engage and connect the Americas and b) Martí’s double consciousness as a postcolonial subject. Lomas uses the term “imperial modernity” to refer to the political and economic expansion of the US as a form of colonialism. Martí translates the political, economic and cultural implications of this expansion in order to educate possible readers. Translation in this sense becomes a form of resistance that undermines “imperial modernity” and proposes other modernities that break the homogeneity of the empire.

In addressing Martí’s double consciousness, Lomas departs from W.E.B. Dubois’s well-known essay “The Souls of Black Folk”, to explain how Martí’s writing constitutes a process in which the author realizes the dangers of seeing oneself through the eyes of the colonizer. Martí’s imagery speaks about the duality, violence, and destruction that affect Latino subjectivity and create tension and distance between the Americas. This idea questions whether leaving one’s homeland in the name of liberty is thwarted when subjected to the colonizer’s gaze in the country of adoption. In this sense, Martí anticipates discourses that promote assimilation but simultaneously exclude the foreign other by limiting his/her choices, exploiting them as cheap labor, and defining them by their race (and ethnicity although this term is not used in the book).

Martí chronicles his experiences and serves as a bridge between the two Americas. His translations give the texts new...