José Martí's Our America: From National to Hemispheric Cultural Studies

Considerable attention has been given to Cuban poet, essayist, and activist Jos Mart 's 1891 essay "Nuestra Am rica," but relatively little has been paid to the rest of the journalistic work that Mart produced during his fourteen-year exile in the United States. In Jos Mart 's Our America, Jeffrey Belnap and Ra l Fern ndez present essays from Latin American, Caribbean, and U.S.-based scholars who consider Mart 's rich and underexplored body of work and position Mart as an emblem of New American studies.
A Cuban exile from 1881 to 1895, Mart was a correspondent writing in New York for various Latin American newspapers. Grasping the significance of rising U.S. imperial power, he came to understand the Americas as a complex system of kindred--but not equal--national formations whose cultural and political integrity was threatened by the overbearing aggressiveness of the United States. This collection explores how in his journalistic work Mart critiques U.S. racism, imperialism, and capitalism; warns Latin America of impending U.S. geographical, cultural, and economic annexation; and calls for recognition of the diversity of America's cultural voices. Reinforcing Mart 's hemispheric vision with essays by a wide range of scholars who investigate his analysis of the United States, his significance as a Latino outsider, and his analyses of Latin American cultural politics, this volume explores the affinities between Mart 's thought and current reexaminations of what it means to study America.
Jos Mart 's Our America offers a new understanding of Mart 's ambiguous and problematic relation with the United States and will engage scholars and students in American, Latin American, and Latino studies as well as those interested in cultural, postcolonial, gender, and ethnic studies.

Contributors. Jeffrey Belnap, Ra l Fern ndez, Ada Ferrer, Susan Gillman, George Lipsitz, Oscar Mart , David Noble, Donald E. Pease, Beatrice Pita, Brenda Gayle Plummer, Susana Rotker, Jos David Sald var, Rosaura S nchez, Enrico Mario Sant , Doris Sommer, Brook Thomas