Jose Marti and the Future of Cuban Nationalisms

Lopez examines the role of Jose Marti's writing on concepts of Cuban nationalism that fueled the 1895 colonial revolution against Spain and have since continued to inform conflicting and violently opposed visions of the Cuban nation. He examines how the same body of work has come to be equally championed by opposing sides in the ongoing battle between the Cuban nation-state, which under Castro has consistently claimed Marti as a crucial inspiration for its Marxist revolutionary government, and the diasporic communities in Miami and elsewhere who still honor Marti as a figure of hope for the Cuban nation in exile. He also shows how, more recently, Marti has become an international as well as national icon, as postcolonial and New Americanist scholars have appropriated parts of his writings and message for use in their own self-described ""hemispheric"" and even ""planetary"" critiques of Western imperialist projects in Latin and America and beyond. As the first study to examine the impact of Martis writings on both Cubans and Cuban Americans and to consider the ongoing polemic over Marti as part of the larger postcolonial problem of nation building, Lopez's study also considers the more general issue of literature within nationalist projects. He illuminates the common concepts and ideas that underlie the ongoing ideological chasm between the Cuban nation-state and the Cuban nation in exile and offers the possibility of a new way of reading and understanding notions of national identity that have historically both enabled and delimited the ways in which Latin Americans and U.S. Hispanics have understood and defined themselves.

Alfred J. Lopez is associate professor in the department of English at the University of Mississippi, author of Posts and Pasts: A Theory of Postcolonialism, and editor of Postcolonial Whiteness: A Critical Reader on Race and Empire.