Jose Marti's Our America: From National to Hemispheric Cultural Studies (review)

José Martí's Our America: From National to Hemispheric Cultural Studies. Edited by Jeffrey Belnap and Raul Fernandez. New Americanists. Durham: Duke University Press, 1999. Notes. Index. viii, 344 pp. Cloth, $49.95. Paper, $17.95.

The generally intelligent and well-informed essays in this book underscore the difficulties in trying to salvage the work of the Cuban José Martí for our times in any other domain save that of literature. To read Martí as anything other than one of Spanish America's greatest writers, that is, to read him as a social commentator, or as an analyst, and even a theorist, of hemispheric affairs, is a melancholic exercise in belated recognition. Martí's life and works, it is true, foreshadowed many quintessentially "modern" experiences: among others, the artist's alienation from the masses, the plight of exiles and "stateless people" all over the world, and the rise of U.S. imperialism. However, as several of the essays in this collection show, he was not unique in this respect. The essays by Rosaura Sánchez, Beatriz Pita, and Brenda Gayle Plummer remind us that other contemporaries, such as the californiana novelist Amparo Ruiz de Burton and the Haitian Anténor Firmin, also wrote, perhaps less elegantly, about their condition as liminal subjects in the borderlands between the U.S. and Latin America, and as individuals caught in the clash between tradition and modernity. Moreover, the "canonical" founding figures of Western modernity, the trinity of Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud, in particular, performed similar and more openly influential analyses of modernity in a more general context. Martí indeed foresaw many things, but so did others, and their voices, unlike Martí's, were heard in their time. Thus to read Martí as a precursor of present-day trends in theory such as "border studies" or "cultural studies" risks reducing his work to a series of commonplaces.

Nevertheless, this is what most of the articles in this collection end up doing. Despite the insightful observations by Donald E. Pease about Martí's and Tocqueville's differing views of the U.S., Doris Sommer's about Martí's re-fashioning of Walt Whitman for Spanish American consumption, or Susana Rotker's about Martí and the condition of exile, to mention three instances, these essays all underscore the dearth of "theory" in Martí's text.

In fact, what Martí states eloquently but with no immediate impact in his essay "Nuestra America" ("Our America," 1891) was later said by others (such as the Uruguayan José Enrique Rodó and his followers) and these ideas were in turn dismantled by subsequent generations of writers from marxist, anthropological, and deconstructive perspectives. (A useful account of the fate of Latin American ideologies of "autochthony" such as those of Martí and Rodó can be found in Carlos J. Alonso's book The Spanish American Regional Novel: Modernity and Autochthony.)

Only the last essay in this collection, Oscar R. Martí's "Jose Martí and the Heroic Image," deals extensively with the issue of how Martí has been read (and misread) in this century. For Professor Martí, the key to the permanence of Jose Martí's heroic image lies in "the power of his words. . . . It is Martí the writer who rises above the politician and the apostle. He left a body of work that stood on its own merits even before the political hero was created" (p. 330). Tellingly, Professor Martí's essay closes this book in the manner of a dissenting opinion. Had the collection begun with this piece, the ones that followed would have had to come to grips more explicitly with implicit attempts to recast yet another "heroic image" of Martí, this time as a proto-theorist of Latin American as well as "Latino" cultural studies.

Anibal Gonzalez
Pennsylvania State University

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