Translating Empire: Jose Marti, Migrant Latino Subjects, and American Modernities
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Book Overview
Lomas challenges longstanding conceptions about Mart through readings of neglected texts and reinterpretations of his major essays. Against the customary view that emphasizes his strong identification with Ralph Waldo Emerson and Walt Whitman, the author demonstrates that over several years, Mart actually distanced himself from Emerson's ideas and conveyed alarm at Whitman's expansionist politics. She questions the association of Mart with pan-Americanism, pointing out that in the 1880s, the Cuban journalist warned against foreign geopolitical influence imposed through ostensibly friendly meetings and the promotion of hemispheric peace and "free" trade. Lomas finds Mart undermining racialized and sexualized representations of America in his interpretations of Buffalo Bill and other rituals of westward expansion, in his self-published translation of Helen Hunt Jackson's popular romance novel Ramona, and in his comments on writing that stereotyped Latino/a Americans as inherently unfit for self-government. With Translating Empire, Lomas recasts the contemporary practice of American studies in light of Mart 's late-nineteenth-century radical decolonizing project.
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