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  • Syncing the Americas. José Martí and the Shaping of National Identity ed. by Ryan Anthony Spangler, and George Michael Schwarzmann
  • Rafael Saumell-Muñoz
Spangler, Ryan Anthony, and George Michael Schwarzmann, editors. Syncing the Americas. José Martí and the Shaping of National Identity. Lanham, Maryland: Bucknell UP, 2017. 287 pp.

For more than a century after his death in battle against Spanish troops (1895), José Martí has been the most quoted and studied Cuban poet, writer, journalist, and politician. In modern-day Cuba, all political sides claim him as their most prominent national hero. His many sacrifices and efforts for Cuba's independence from Spain were countless. At the age of 16 (1869), he was sent to prison by a colonial court for the political content of a letter he wrote to a former classmate, and in January 1871, he was forced to abandon the island for Spain. Upon completing his college education, he moved back to the Americas and lived, subsequently, in three former Spanish colonies (Mexico, Guatemala, Venezuela). He then [End Page 320] resided in the United States for fifteen years (1880-95), considered by all scholars as his longest period of personal stability and literary productivity, and as the time in which he became a very prominent leader among Cuban exiles. His impressive political skills, intellectual maturity, and genuine dedication to the different task of assisting in Cuba's independence from Madrid were all evident during this time.

Syncing the Americas covers some of the most important subjects he wrote about during this last crucial period (1880-95), mostly from New York. In the introduction, George Michael Schwarzmann rightly states that New York "becomes the 'hub' from where the Cuban poet receives 'data' from Latin America and sends 'updates' of social and cultural events in the United States to various countries in the southern hemisphere, some as warnings, some as models to be emulated" (2). In addition, he explains the content of the book's two sections: 1): "Reading the Other America: History, Translation, and Political Landscapes," or the relationship between the author and the nation in political, historical, and literary terms; 2): "Defining and Building the Modern Nation: Race, Punishments, and Poetics," or the impact of this relationship on Martí's approach to notions of race, death penalty, poetics, modernity, and nation-building in regards to Cuba (8).

A total of fifteen Martí scholars from Argentina, Cuba, Mexico, the United Kingdom, and the United States contributed to this anthology. As desired and expected from a collection of this scope, the topics and critical approaches vary considerably. The first three articles of Part I deal with the following: Martí's "ambivalence toward so-called Latin America" (Enrico Mario Santí, 19–28); his role as a commentator of events and history within the United States, and as a translator (Esther Allen, 29–49); and his positioning as a "modern subject that projects the image of the United States culture–the informative discourse- and, simultaneously, an ideal concept of Hispanic culture–the object of desire" (Ivan A. Schulman, 51–79).

The next four focus on the analysis of Martí's informative discourse as a literary critic and translator of Walt Whitman and R. W. Emerson (Anne Fountain, 81–93; and Schwarzmann, 95–111); and as a historian influenced by the works of George Bancroft and John Lothrop Motley (Rafael Rojas, 129–38).

Part II includes essays on the topics of nation, race, punishment, and poetics: Latina/o Urbanism (Laura Lomas, 141–66); Martí's vision of race and the myth of "racial brotherhood" (Jorge Camacho, 167–78); Black issues in the US (Oleski Miranda Navarro, 179–93); "the concept, regulation, and application of the death penalty" (Reinaldo Suárez, 195–206); "the unity of Cubans by overcoming internal divisions (ideological, racial, etc.), and [Martí's] vision for the future Cuban republic" (Francisco Morán, 207–25); "literary modernity" (Ryan Anthony Spangler, 227–39); the book Versos libres as the inauguration of "contemporary poetry of the city, [a] poetry that has ceased to be symbolic" (Roberto González Echevarría, 241–52); and the "call of technology in Amor de ciudad grande" (David P. Laraway, 253–64).

Paradoxically...

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