Laura Lomas’s monograph is a superb contribution to the scholarship on José Martí and the ways in which he and other Latino authors in the late nineteenth-century United States laid the foundations for a critique of a rising United States by viewing its relationship to Latin America from their anticolonial perspective as migrants. The book connects with a new, critical literature in American Studies about the significance of the rise of the U.S. empire in the works of writers such as Emerson, Whitman, and Helen Hunt Jackson, and new explorations on the origins of modernism.
The author advances the scholarship on Martí beyond canonical works, e.g., “Nues-tra América,” to other lesser known and even recently discovered writing, subjecting both the well-known writings and the recent additions to a more complex interpretation. Lomas’s careful reading moves the scholarship beyond the conventional wisdom that Martí was critical of corruption and the rise...
