Man on the Market: José Martí and the Poetics of Commerce

Man on the Market: José Martı́ and the Poetics of Commerce ericka beckman university of illinois, urbana-champaign  Artes y Sociedad económica van aparejadas. —José Martı́, Guatemala (1877) José Martı́ is without a doubt the most prominent figure in the articulation of an anti-imperialist and anti-commercial Latin Americanist discourse at the turn of the nineteenth century. Here I understand Latin Americanism to mean the construction of a unified, continental identity in opposition to AngloAmerica and/or Northern Europe, from the late nineteenth century until today.1 A key element of this discourse is the assertion that the ‘‘value’’ of Latin America lies in spiritual—and not material—wealth: if the United States and Britain were characterized by ‘‘materialism,’’ in this context a codeword for the money economy, Latin America was governed by a superior order of values. Today, Martı́’s Latin Americanism is rather consistently associated with antieconomist , anti-imperialist, and anti-capitalist positions (usually posited as interchangeable ). He is considered the architect of a spiritual and political economy based upon a uniquely American aesthetic expression, continental brotherhood, and national autonomy in opposition to the imperialist designs of the United States. The 1959 Cuban revolution, especially, has cast Martı́ retroactively as an enemy of capitalist society; or, as Roberto Fernández Retamar has put it, as anticipating the socialist future ‘‘sin haber sido socialista él mismo’’ (44). Most recently , within the U.S. academy, scholars in postcolonial, Latino/a and ethnic studies have looked to Martı́ as a cultural bridge between Americas North and 1 One of the most important assumptions of Latin Americanism—or in the case of Martı́, ‘Nuestro americanismo’—is that certain attitudes, beliefs, and practices are appropriate (propios ) while others are foreign (ajenos) to Latin America. An excellent description of Martı́’s literary-humanist articulation of the Latin American ‘‘we’’ in opposition to U.S. market society is elaborated by Julio Ramos. In his excavation of Latin Americanist discourse, Ramos places Martı́ in dialogue with key forerunners like Francisco Bilbao and Eugenio Marı́a de Hostos; and later twentieth-century figures such as Pedro Henrı́quez Ureña and Alfonso Reyes. In a different sense, the term Latin Americanism has been used recently to describe the discursive practices deployed to create ‘‘Latin America’’ as an object of study within the U.S. academy (under area studies paradigms within the social sciences, and through the popularity of ‘‘Boom’’ literature within Spanish literature departments). See Román de la Campa. 20  Revista Hispánica Moderna 61.1 (2008) South, denouncing U.S. racism and imperialism in favor of a more fluid, inclusive utopia of regional identity.2 Yet Martı́’s passionate anti-imperialist stance and defense of national, spiritual and aesthetic values above and beyond commodity exchange did not mean that he was entirely opposed to the institutions and practices of bourgeois liberalism; instead, he often looked to the ‘‘free’’ market as a utopian space of democratization and decolonization, a position that is rarely accorded critical attention. Martı́ became a key figure in the articulation of an anti-commercial, antiimperialist regional identity, even as he worked to construct an eminently commercial vision of ‘‘Nuestra América.’’ This argument is developed in two parts. First, I explore how ‘‘nature’’ became the materia prima of an aesthetic economy existing in willful opposition to the capitalist market in the well-known 1882 prologue to J.A. Pérez Bonalde’s Poema del Niágara. Not coincidentally, Martı́’s invocation of nature as non-commodifiable value coincided exactly with the consolidation of primary export economies in most of Latin America, as part of an emerging world-system in which peripheral nations and colonies alike became locked into providing the raw materials for industrial growth in capitalist centers. In dialogue with this paradigm, another set of Martı́’s texts from the late 1870s and early 1880s reveal an economic substrate to ‘‘nature’’ as the backbone of material progress in Latin America. Martı́, taking on the double role of poet and developer, thus attempted to make aesthetic production ‘‘useful’’ to commerce through an emerging discourse of marketing, presenting a rather contradictory conceptualization of the place of aesthetic production within regimes...