Inside Empire: Jose Marti and Cultural Translation in the Late 19th-Century U.S.

FAIN: FB-50641-04

Laura Lomas
Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey, Newark (Newark, NJ 07104-3010)

This project demonstrates the limits of national paradigms for studying Cuban poet, journalist, translator and revolutionary, Jose Marti, and other writers like him whose poetics, notions of community and political vision call for comparative, multilingual and transamerican methods of inquiry. I define a nascent Latino subjectivity in Marti's texts that I propose to compare to other multicultural literature by Zitkala-Sa, Sui Sin Far, Maria Amparo Ruiz de Burton, Jose Ignacio Rodriguez, W.E.B. DuBois and others. I also juxtapose Marti's perspective with mainstream U.S. writers of the late nineteenth century including Mark Twain, W. D. Howells, William and Henry James (Jr.), Stephen Crane and Helen Hunt Jackson. This constellation of texts not only nuances our scholarly understanding of Jose Marti as a founding father of Latin American traditions, but also offers a new reading of multicultural U.S. literature of this period as a response to U.S. imperialism.

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