Translating Empire: José Martí, Migrant Latino Subjects, and American Modernities (review)

Laura Lomas's new book complements a strong body of work, by talented scholars with a transnational Americas focus, that has emerged in the first decade of the twenty-first century: important work by people like Kirsten Silva Gruesz, Robert McKee Irwin, and Raúl Coronado, whose formal disciplinary locations vary widely, but who are chipping away at literary-historical verities and dramatically changing the understandings of the nineteenth century on this continent.

The key questions Lomas addresses in this book intersect closely with theirs, and her focus is on a particular case: How does Cuban writer-hero José Martí "inscribe the Latino migrant's difference from a U.S. literary and intellectual tradition? How do his texts define a U.S. literary tradition from a place within it but not of it, so as to make space for another American modernity?" (p. 63). Her method—as the title of the book suggests—is to take up Martí's role and method as a cultural translator between the Americas to bring her own metaphorical (and sometimes literal) translations of Martí's thought to English-speaking audiences. While the book overall wants us to think about alternative ideas of modernity, Lomas's explicit goal is to change U.S. literary history by emphasizing Martí's dialogue with thinkers like Whitman and Emerson. The Cuban author famously introduced these writers to his Latin American readers, and Lomas wants to extend that dialogue back to his intended U.S. audience, demonstrating not only that Martí could speak to these U.S. canonical writers de tú-a-tú, but that his vision is a proleptic one.

One of her favored tactics is to use Martí's essays themselves to demonstrate how he recognized specific issues earlier and more clearly than these contemporary English-language writers. As she does so, she shows that the Cuban author was aware that the highly praised icons had feet of clay. His initial unbridled enthusiasm for their work gave way to a more qualified and measured rebuttal of their positions, something that has not been previously analyzed with such care in work on any of these authors. Through close reading of Martí, Lomas offers a fuller, bicultural reading of Emerson and Whitman, thereby both filling holes in U.S. scholarship and adding complexity to Latin American analyses.

In addition to these Anglo writers, Lomas also wants to insist upon the Cuban writer's place in the genealogy of Latino borderlands thinkers, alongside late twentieth-century Chicano writers (p. 223). This is, for my taste, the least successful section of the book, since it begins by making Martí into a kind of honorary Mexican "with the same concern over a possible second U.S. invasion of Mexico that a son feels for a beloved parent" (p. 216). Treating Martí in this way is an effort to bridge chronology and geography, adducing a parallel between Gloria Anzaldúa's discussion of la frontera in Borderlands: The New Mestiza = La Frontera (1999) and Martí's commentary on news articles he had recently read about the Wild West, or observations about Buffalo Bill's Wild West Show.

This smart, provocative book tussles with a couple of firmly held positions that are not-easy to reconcile. On the one hand, Lomas argues that Martí has been ignored by precisely the audience he most eagerly sought; this book, therefore, aims to "excavate a message encoded in 1895, but which the Anglo readers whom Martí originally sought to address have not yet received" (p. 55), from which it follows that once Anglo readers appreciate the full depth of Martí's critique, American literary history will have to be fundamentally rewritten. Paradoxically, she undermines this argument herself. A favorite tactic in her case studies is to show how Martí anticipated other writers. Thus, she describes his work as "prefiguring James Baldwin's 1962 epistle on incomplete emancipation" (p. 57...