The Figuration of Martí

Jose Marti’s critical analysis of the late-nineteenth-century political and cultural order reveals an altogether exceptional understanding of the Americas. Driven by a tireless commitment to Cuban independence and a restless desire to know his era, Marti also possessed an expansive knowledge of modern art and world literature, history and philosophy, economics and the law. Moreover, his oeuvre is not limited to a particular language, genre, or geographic area; deported from Cuba first in 1871 during the Ten Years War (1868 –7 8), and again only a year after his return to the island in 1879, he lived most of his adult life in Europe, the United States, and in various countries of Latin America. The political force of Marti’s writing is particularly evident in the essays written during the late 1880s on inter-American politics (“Contra el ‘Panamericanismo’ ” [“Against ‘Pan-Americanism’ ”] and “Nuestra America” [“Our America”]),1 in which he outlines his critique of the United States as the new imperial force poised to annex the emerging nations of the south, the republics of Nuestra America. The aesthetic sensibility of his writing becomes apparent in the elaborate rhetorical constructions to be observed in his essays on Ralph Waldo Emerson and Walt Whitman and in his personal journal (Diario).2 Throughout Marti’s writing, one encounters a rich and complex representation of the culture and politics of the moment.3 The figuration of Marti is a reduction of a complex mass of texts and textual relations with the world to simple and singular signification bereft of contradictions and organized to serve narrow political function.4 Tensions between ethics and aes

Art · Cuban History and Society

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