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

Abstract

Laura Lomas’s monograph is a superb contribution to the scholarship on José Martí and the ways in which he and other Latino authors in the late nineteenth-century United States laid the foundations for a critique of a rising United States by viewing its relationship to Latin America from their anticolonial perspective as migrants. The book connects with a new, critical literature in American Studies about the significance of the rise of the U.S. empire in the works of writers such as Emerson, Whitman, and Helen Hunt Jackson, and new explorations on the origins of modernism.The author advances the scholarship on Martí beyond canonical works, e.g., “Nues-tra América,” to other lesser known and even recently discovered writing, subjecting both the well-known writings and the recent additions to a more complex interpretation. Lomas’s careful reading moves the scholarship beyond the conventional wisdom that Martí was critical of corruption and the rise of monopolies in the United States but that he remained enamored of American technology and great literary figures.Lomas examines Martí’s texts in the context of his situation as a political exile and transitory migrant who depended on his journalism for a living, who worked often as a consular officer of Latin American countries, and who worked sometimes openly but often clandestinely to organize the Cuban revolution for independence. Martí’s work cannot be understood, as Lomas shows, except by taking into account the constraints he faced as a needy, politically active, foreign migrant in the United States trying to make sure that his writing was correctly apprehended in the Latin American culture context of his readership. Lomas shows how Martí’s texts of praise for American writers like Whitman and Emerson and his discussions of American technology are immersed in irony, subterfuge, and in a cultural as well as a linguistic translation that was necessary in order for his readers south of the border to grasp North American culture. Plowing in between the lines of Martí’s prolix prose, she discovers a “critique of Whitman’s racism and expansionism in his close reading of Whitman’s poetic form” (p. 203). She uses the term “untranslation” to describe the process whereby she renders in English and for American readers Martí’s camouflaged discourse about the involvement of literary figures such as Whitman in the construction of a U.S. idiom of empire. She shows how in Martí’s search for an anti-imperial stance he prefigures ideas advanced by C. L. R. James about the role of Caribbean masses in decolonization, and by Benedict Anderson about the importance of print culture as constitutive of national imaginaries.Another new and original aspect of the texts by Lomas is how she shows Martí’s writings to be at the foundation of two literary modes, Latin American modernismo and the modernism more well known in the United States. For many decades these two literary styles and approaches were not considered to be at all related. At best they were simply treated as false cognates; at worst they were viewed as standing in stark contradiction to each other.In fact, American critics remained largely ignorant of the existence of modernismo. More recently a number of critics — for example, writers Iván Schulman and Evelyn Picón Garfield and literary critic Fredric Jameson — began to recognize commonalities as both literary modes arose in response to modernity, with modernismo predating modernism by more than two decades. Lomas takes the argument further, arguing convincingly that one can find the first manifestations of both currents in Martí, whose Spanish poetry has long been identified with the beginning of modernismo, when examining his writings on/in the United States.Lomas’s work complements books by José David Saldívar, Doris Sommer, Jeffrey Belnap and Raúl Fernández, Julio Ramos, Susana Rotker, and Ada Ferrer that have provided a background on the history and society that surrounded Martí. It is a highly original and timely presentation on an exciting and growing field of literary and cultural scholarship. For U.S. scholars it provides a welcome warning against too quick an embrace of a perspective centered on the western hemisphere, which “may well reproduce the imperialist dynamics” (p. 34) they would criticize. Lomas’s book is also of great interest to an international audience, especially in the fields of Latin American history and literature. It will radically alter the way people study Whitman, Emerson, and Helen Hunt Jackson; how they conceive of the origins of modernism; and the ways in which Martí’s ideas have been understood until now.