Re-imagining the Nation

From The Politics of Letters:

José Martí’s Revolutionary Discourse

Thesis for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy, University of Toronto, 2006 

References to Martí’s work are from Obras completas. 27 vols. La Habana: Editorial de Ciencias Sociales, 1975

Scroll down for a bibliography of works cited

In José Martí’s internationalist worldview, every nation can and should contribute to human progress. His revolutionary discourse conveys a radical optimism in both the creative power of individuals and nations to change and develop, and in resistance and unified struggle as means to achieve historical transformation and genuine human progress. (In the writings of both José Martí and Franz Fanon, the nature of resistance is consistent with Edward Said’s suggestion, in Culture and Imperialism, that “Three great topics emerge in decolonizing cultural resistance ...” One is “the insistence on the right to see the community’s history whole, coherently, integrally ... Second is the idea that resistance, far from being merely a reaction to imperialism, is an alternative way of conceiving human history ... Third is a noticeable pull away from separatist nationalism toward a more integrative view of human community and human liberation” (215-6).)

Martí’s ideas transcend his era and his region. His writings occupy a central place in the anti-imperialist literature in the new political and economic era emerging in the final decades of the nineteenth century. Martí’s ‘radical democratic nationalism’ and critical response to the ‘global transformations of modern imperialism’ as they were emerging represent the first serious challenge to Eurocentrism, register a prescient voice against United States hegemony, and mark the beginning of radical nationalist revolutions in Latin America (Larsen 184-5). The military intervention of the United States in the Cuban independence war in 1898 confirmed his prescient analysis of the United States’ imperialist policy toward its neighbours.

His struggle against imperialism and colonialism and his criticism of the national bourgeoisie of neo-colonial Spanish America anticipate radical intellectuals such as Franz Fanon, a revolutionary leader in the war that won Algeria’s independence from France. Both Antillean-born, their vision and revolutionary activism reached beyond national and regional frontiers. For Martí (1853-1895), as for Fanon (1925-1961), humanism is the necessary foundation and defining characteristic of the political and social consciousness required to transform nations into independent and just societies. For both, human development and moral progress are as important indicators of national development as material accumulation and technological growth. Their ideas about the nature of progress, human development, and culture are relevant to contemporary discourses. The priorities, interests, and ideologies of dominant economies, powerful nations, and elite sectors still create political, social, and economic problems in their own societies and around the globe, and are now widely acknowledged even to have placed the sustainability of our planet in jeopardy.

    Imagining the Nation: the Latin American Writer in the 1800s

Martí’s discourse of identity, inclusion, and resistance is a critical voice positioned outside the elitist discursive realm that Angel Rama calls la ciudad letrada, which throughout the colonial period and most of the nineteenth century was the urban-centred domain of writing closely linked to and dependent on the state (Rama 88). Writing was the enterprise of elite intellectuals whose task it was to articulate the ideology and edicts of the institutions of state that authorized them. Julio Ramos states that letters ‘occupied a central place in the organization of the new Latin American societies’ (Ramos xxxvi), and the lettered city guaranteed ‘the close relationship between letters and politics that remained dominant until the 1870s’ (Ramos 44). The letrados artificiales of Martí’s ‘Nuestra América’ are the nineteenth-century intellectual successors of the letrados that documented and served the interests of empire in the colonial period. (‘Nuestra América’ appeared in La Revista Ilustrada de Nueva York on 1 January 1891, and later that month, on 30 January 1891, in Mexico’s El Partido Liberal. It is included in volume 6 Martí’s Obras completas (OC 6: 15-23).

Roberto Fernández Retamar has long contended, in Calibán y otros ensayos, that a defining characteristic of Martí’s nuestra América mestiza is the history and culture of resistance initiated by its indigenous populations and continued throughout the independence wars and other rebellions in the region, and furthermore that the importance of Martí’s concept is in uniting indigenous, African and European populations in nuestra América within a common identity and a common cause.) They had the ‘remarkable capacity,’ says Rama, not only to ‘weather the revolutionary storm and reconstitute their power in the independent republics’ (Rama 45), but even ‘to graft themselves comfortably on to the trunk of caudillo power’ (51), broadening and strengthening their foundations when urban-centred reforms in education expanded their ranks in the areas of education, diplomacy, and journalism (57). Their institutionalized patterns of thinking maintained the exclusion of the marginalized sectors, and ensured that a new colonialism prevailed within the newly independent republics.

The leaders of the anti-colonial revolts had consciously adopted European models of bourgeois revolutions, and the hegemony of European knowledge and culture remained unbroken in the new republics (Larsen 184-5). When the leaders and intellectuals of the new nations surveyed the cultural, political, and geographical landscape after the devastating independence wars, like the colonizers before them, they recognized and understood only through comparison with European forms of knowledge and realities, which they valued and privileged. They saw a vast empty landscape of nothingness. Their understanding of the ‘national’ and their capacity to apprehend was restricted and informed by elitist values and sectarian interests. These values and interests did not include local knowledge, culture, and human potential, or the indigenous myths and realities that reinforced and sustained the values and cultures of autochthonous America. Disposed to measure progress in terms of technology, material accumulation, and paradigms of bourgeois rationality and refinement, they sought wisdom in the familiarity of imported discursive traditions, and fixed their servile gaze on Europe and North America. They overlooked the original character of the new nations, the value of the knowledge and cultures of the people, and the people’s potential for social transformation, as well as economic and human development, based on creative local solutions for local conditions.

In the writings of the letrados, the marginalized rural people of the neglected countryside – autochthonous America – supply a barbaric opposing force. ‘Beginning with the 1820s,’ says Ramos, ‘the activity of writing became a response to the necessity of overcoming the catastrophe of war, the absence of discourse, and the annihilation of established structures in the war’s aftermath. To write, in such a world, was to forge the modernizing project; it was to civilize, to order the randomness of American “barbarism”’ (Ramos 3). Barbarism became institutionalized in the rhetoric of the era as the primitive force opposing civilization. It was the unformed and undisciplined reality ultimately inaccessible to progress and modernity.

Such is the view represented in Domingo F. Sarmiento’s influential Facundo, first published in 1845. Ramos argues that Sarmiento positions himself as the polemical adversary of Andrés Bello’s disciplined and university-authorized discourses, and furthermore assumes a subaltern position in relation to the disciplined discourse characteristic of the letrados and European scholarship (Ramos 3-20). Sarmiento manipulates this position, says Ramos, to establish and benefit from the authority of an alternative discourse, representing himself as the intellectual best placed to mediate between civilization’s written discourse and the orality of barbarism. He claims an attempt to establish order and achieve modernity by listening to and transcribing the alternative knowledge of the other to incorporate it into the nation’s modernizing project, thereby closing the ‘interstitial gap’ between civilization and barbarism through which caudillos rose to power. ‘To hear, then, is the technique of a historiographical practice. And it was literature ... that would be the discourse most suited to that project of listening to the voice of tradition’ (Ramos 12).

In the ‘hierarchized space of discourse,’ continues Rama, Sarmiento assumes for himself the role of transcriber between civilization and barbarism to re-present the other, ‘the feared outside of discourse’; but the confused and irregular voice of barbarism renders it resistant to representation and it must ultimately be subdued and subordinated to the rational laws governing civilization, productive labour, and the emerging market (Ramos 18). Ramos maintains that ‘the formal procedure of including the spoken word of the other, only to subordinate it to a higher authority, indicates an attempt to resolve a contradiction on which Facundo continually reflects: the lack of law in a society based on the irregularity and arbitrary nature of the caudillo’ (Ramos 18). Notwithstanding Sarmiento’s self-representation as civilization’s subaltern voice, and regardless of the locus of the writer within institutionalized discourse, the rhetoric of barbarism presupposes a civilized we that is morally, culturally, and biologically superior to a primitive, undisciplined other. Writing was a civilizing project through which the letrado could claim an attempt to replace chaos and backwardness with order and modernity, for it was assumed that the unwritten word, unauthorized by institutionalized discourse, lacked the power to order chaos and the capacity to modernize.

Martí criticizes the ‘false erudition’ of the letrados and faults the incapacity of the ruling elites, who owe their privileges to those who labour without benefit, to govern for the good of all sectors and for the welfare of the nation. He condemns their sectarian agenda and their consequent failure to integrate and transform their nations into just societies for the good of all their people. Their disdained America is his ‘hombre natural’ (OC 6: 18). He urges the creation of ‘new men’ in America and calls for the political and economic independence, cultural emancipation, and social transformation of these nations into just and integrated societies developed in harmony with local, natural elements (OC 6: 20). For Martí, the creation of truly decolonized people and just societies requires radical changes in institutionalized patterns of thinking, as well as in social and economic relations. It must also include the integration of the lower classes and marginalized sectors through meaningful and productive work, the enjoyment of rights and benefits, and the celebration of culture.

Fanon, like Martí, challenges the governing ideologies that assume, not only that local elites are the effective, rational agents of progress and development, but also that marginalized populations are primitive forces whose confused voices and backward traditions must be subordinated. It is the condition of colonialism, writes Fanon, that ‘every effort is made to bring the colonized person to admit the inferiority of his culture, ... to recognize the unreality of his “nation,” and, in the last extreme, the confused and imperfect character of his own biological structure’ (The Wretched 236). Furthermore, the ‘scapegoat for white society - which is based on myths of progress, civilization, liberalism, education, enlightenment, refinement - will be precisely the force that opposes the expansion and the triumph of these myths’ (Black Skin 194). For Fanon, the neo-colonial elites are the obstructive forces that must be opposed if social transformation and progress are to be achieved (The Wretched 176); they must be opposed if ‘the process of retrogression’ - in which ‘the nation is passed over for the race, and the tribe is preferred to the state’ - is to be avoided (The Wretched 148-9).

Their unwillingness to mobilize the masses and their incapacity to harmoniously unite and develop the nation render them useless when national consciousness must rapidly transform into ‘consciousness of social and political needs, in other words into humanism,’ (The Wretched 204). Particularly useless is the ‘national bourgeoisie’; not being ‘authentic bourgeoisie,’ says Fanon, it lacks both the capital and imagination to contribute to the material and cultural development of the nation (The Wretched 176-9); and ultimately, ‘the poverty of the people, national oppression, and the inhibition of culture are one and the same thing’ (238). For Fanon, as for Martí, a decolonized political and social consciousness requires ‘the disappearance of the colonized man’ (The Wretched 246) and ‘the veritable creation of new men’ (36). Only then will forms of national culture emerge that can contribute to human progress.

In the neo-colonial Spanish American republics, the realities and aspirations of the majority were systematically excluded from the road to progress charted by the ruling elites and from the exclusive we that defined for the privileged the identity of the nation. The authority of representation rested with the letrados, for whom the interests and desires of the elite urban sectors represented the welfare and good of the nation. The modernizing spirit that emerged around 1870 created professions and institutions less dependent on the state, but did little to include the margins within the representation of the nation. Nor did it reduce the authority and prestige of the letrados. It did, however, allow educators and journalists a degree of autonomy from the state and opened a space for writing outside the lettered city, mostly through journalism, to intellectuals who could not or would not include themselves within that privileged space.

The spirit of modernity thus gave rise to the literato, made possible an autonomous literary voice, and enlarged the space for creative writing. In so doing, it also initiated a struggle for legitimacy attended by the need to situate the locus of authority for letters in the literary sphere, for autonomy from the state also removed the writer’s claim to that authority. It was not until 1896, following a break between letters and law, that letters was institutionalized as a separate authority in the academic domain (Ramos 49-53). Nevertheless, larger urban populations, gradually expanding literacy, and expanded markets for newspapers and magazines in cities and towns made the literato accessible to unprecedented numbers of new readers (Rama 50-7). The neglected countryside, however, was largely excluded from the institutionalized ideologies and educational reforms. Even when elements of rural customs and oral traditions became incorporated into the canonized literatures of the new nation states, the subaltern remained beyond hearing distance of the critical voice, and outside the dialogue of discourse and the written word.

    Re-imagining the Nation: the Inversion of Values

Martí’s nuestroamericanismo discourse subverts the civilization-barbarism dichotomy by re-ordering the hierarchy of knowledge, culture, and values to claim the autochthonous and original as the spiritual foundation of national identity. This discourse of identity, affiliation, and resistance challenges the authority and relevance of European rationality for the task of creating a new people and original republics; it also redefines national identity to meaningfully integrate all social and economic sectors. To the extent that the non-literate subaltern remains beyond hearing distance of Martí’s discourse, and thereby excluded from the ‘you’ and ‘I’ of dialogue and the written word, it is subordinated in a hierarchical relationship with the intellectual and the reading public. However, Martí reverses this hierarchy by privileging the indigenous and original over the European and imported.

Unlike Sarmiento, who claims an unsuccessful attempt to mediate between ‘civilization’ and ‘barbarism,’ Martí makes no claim to mediate between the margins and the governing ideologies; nevertheless, his discourse effects such mediation. Neither does Martí claim to represent the subaltern voice, but the marginalized sectors are included in his collective we as the foundational elements of the re-imagined national identity. They are no longer the other - the undisciplined, irredeemable force of barbarism. The other is represented in Martí’s discourse by the forces of ‘retrogression’ and imperialism: the outside-looking ‘artificial’ intellectuals (the metaphorical crouching tiger within the republic), and the aggressive industrialized United States (the tiger that threatens from outside) (OC 6: 19). However, all sectors are redeemable in his discourse of unity.

Humanism propels both Martí and Fanon to challenge to the intellectual status quo and elitist ideologies. Martí’s idea of progress is informed by social and historical consciousness and founded on the principle that self-development, freedom, justice, and dignity for everyone are necessary and achievable through social and political transformation. While technology and material accumulation are important elements, a just society is the critical measure of human progress. He anticipates Fanon’s idea that the nature of social relations and the placement of the people in the vision of the nation are factors that will either open the future or lead to ‘retrogression.’ To transform society and open the future, leadership and national institutions must take account of the realities and aspirations of all the people and govern for the good of all.

For Fanon, like the elitist sectors that promote them, ideas of progress that do not involve ‘the combined effort of the masses’ (The Wretched 175) and lead to the ‘harmonious development of the nation’ are ‘good for nothing’ and must be opposed (176). The leaders of the nation must be ‘highly conscious and armed with revolutionary principles’ (The Wretched 175), says Fanon, for ‘no leader, however valuable he may be, can substitute himself for the popular will; and the national government, before concerning itself about international prestige, ought first to give back their dignity to all citizens, fill their minds and feast their eyes with human things, and create a prospect that is human because conscious and sovereign men dwell therein’ (205). For Fanon, ‘everything else is mystification, signifying nothing ‘ (The Wretched 235).

In both Martí and Fanon, economic growth and material accumulation without social consciousness and development in social welfare is not genuine human progress. Leadership, therefore, must extend beyond the interests of elites and intellectuals to recognize the reality of the people and incorporate it into a national agenda that is for the good of all. Otherwise it is an obstacle to social transformation and betrays the people’s aspirations for personal and social development. In Black Skin, White Masks, recalling Hegel, Fanon writes: ‘Man is human only to the extent to which he tries to impose his existence on another man in order to be recognized by him … It is on that other being, on recognition by that other being, that his own human worth and reality depend’ (216-7). Social transformation requires the marginalized sectors to impose their existence and to participate in the national consciousness through ‘free conscious activity,’ which for Marx, as Petrovic; reminds us, ‘is the species-character of the human being’ (386). Meaningful social relations require reciprocal recognition and affirm the humanity of individuals. Representation and inclusion are steps toward the future, but alone cannot effect the necessary political and social changes.

The revolutionary intellectual, the empathetic activist, must recognize the other but must also be recognized. In Martí, this reciprocity is enabled through a discourse that remembers the past in order to situate autochthonous values, original tradition, and local conditions at the centre of nuestra América. The intention is not to attempt a return to the values, traditions, and cultural forms of the past, but to separate the autochthonous from the denigrating myth of barbarism, acknowledge the roots and the original character of America, and bring the marginalized sectors into the centre of national life and culture. ‘The colonized man who writes for his people,’ says Fanon, ‘ought to use the past with the intention of opening the future, as an invitation to action and a basis for hope’ (The Wretched 232). Enabling reciprocity is a concrete step toward the future.

    A rhetoric of the nation

Martí’s discourse of resistance can claim its authority from the culture of resistance that characterizes the history of the region. Roberto Fernández Retamar has long contended, in Calibán y otros ensayos, that a defining characteristic of Martí’s nuestra América mestiza is the history and culture of resistance initiated by its indigenous populations and continued throughout the independence wars and other rebellions in the region, and furthermore that the importance of Martí’s concept is in uniting indigenous, African and European populations in nuestra América within a common identity and a common cause.

In a critique of the culturalismo ideas of the Cuban José Antonio Saco and the Chilean Francisco Bilbao, Ramos suggests that representations of the United States in Latin America were significantly altered after the North’s expansion into Mexican territory beginning in 1840 (Ramos 154-7). He suggests further that the development of a literary and cultural authority is integral to the formation of modern latinoamericanismo. He adds, referring specifically to Bilbao’s writing, that in the historical origins of modern latinoamericanismo are represented ‘on the one hand the exclusion and reification of the North (rationalization, reason, industry, interest), and on the other, the inclusion of the distinct others in modernization (the beautiful, disinterest, spirit, tradition, the subaltern) by means of the aesthetic subject’s integrating gaze’ (Ramos 157).

Martí’s discourse of resistance condemns Spain’s colonial hold on Cuba and warns against the United States’ hegemonic intentions in the region. It also condemns the internal obstacles to cultural authenticity, particularly the tendency in the independent republics for the ruling elites to disdain the autochthonous, maintain colonial traditions, and import habits and traditions from Europe and the United States.

His resistance extends to the domain of aesthetic values and national literature. In his Cuaderno No. 5, Martí suggests there will be no Spanish American literature until there is a Spanish America. Without the essence there can be no literary expression, and the immortalized writer in America will have conveyed the essence of his complex epoch with consummate artistry (OC 21: 163-4). For Martí, the aesthetic and political dimensions of America’s transformation are linked, giving the writer, artist or intellectual a central role in the political and cultural emancipation of the nation. It was precisely the transformative purpose of La Revista Venezolana (OC 7: 195-212) to encourage the creation of original and uniquely Spanish American literary works. These would reflect the essence and spirit of Spanish America and participate in the development of national consciousness and the creation of emancipated nations.

Martí’s evaluative criteria consider artistic expression as well as social awareness, reject the colonized mentality, and emphasize originality, authenticity, and relevance. He exemplifies the revolutionary role he assigns to writers and intellectuals in colonized and developing nations, one that requires empathetic, non-alienated individuals who are fully aware of the true nature of social relations. Whereas for the letrados writing was a process for articulating institutionalized ideologies and definitions of the national identity, for Martí, to write is to challenge the governing ideologies, to subvert the sectarian assumptions of the national good that jeopardize the future of the nation, and to convey his revolutionized vision of progress and hemispheric relations. He urges pride in the history of Spanish America, a celebration of the autochthonous as the spiritual foundation of the nation, the integration of all sectors in the national agenda, and unity among the nations of nuestra América to protect their political and economic independence.

Martí’s writing brings together the activist and the poet to unite the aesthetic and political. His essay, ‘Nuestra América,’ seamlessly combines reason and poetics to warn against the expansionist politics of the industrialized, modernized United States, and to urge the Spanish-speaking nations to unite in defence of their sovereignty. It relies on history as well as figurative language inspired by the forests and mountains of the hemisphere to convey a forceful and timely warning: now is the time to stand guard, like the trees in close formation, and to march united and strong, like the silver in the base of the Andes (OC 6: 15).

The revolutionary nature of his aesthetic creativity gives form to original and distinctive texts that challenge literary boundaries and represent the struggle to create, legitimize, and establish relevant critical standards for modern literature in Spanish America. His revolutionary spirit and the transformative nature of his aesthetic are evident in the poeticized prose, figurative language, and the proliferation of images that overturn traditional constraints and characterize his literary style. His persuasive strategies channel the power of mythology and sacred oratory and the familiarity of religious symbolism toward his revolutionary purpose – ‘Por símbolos, a la Mitología: por aspiraciones, a la Religión,’ he records in his Cuadernos de apuntes (OC 21: 161).

National consciousness, social awareness, and the will to resist colonialism, the new imperialism, and cultural domination are conveyed through figures and tropes drawn from the natural world, the ideology of work, indigenous mythology, and the world of religion. His tropology and figurative allusions represent a harmony between nature and humanity, include the autochthonous in the representation of national identity, and value the everyday lives and work of the labouring classes. Nature, for instance, though devastated by war, regenerates and provides the promise of food and materials required by revolutionary soldiers. Figurative language also recovers the past, concisely rendering history and the passing of time through a rapid accumulation of images and the encapsulating power of symbols. Metaphors and allusions represent knowledge that is confirmed by the reality of everyday experience. Martí’s tropology speaks to people’s souls and intellects and moves their passions, transforming literature into the vehicle of truth, communicating not only through rational understanding, but also through direct appeal to their intuitive soul.

For Martí, the purpose of writing, the process of national consciousness, and the authenticity of all forms of national culture are linked. Fanon observes, generations later, that the strengthening of national unity propels the intellectual beyond the indictment and appeal of his initial protest toward a literature of combat (The Wretched 239-40). For Fanon, national literature begins as a literature of combat and emerges in the process of national consciousness at precisely the moment that the writer abandons writing as a project directed toward the colonizer as the intended reader and begins to address his or her own people (The Wretched 240). ‘The conscious and organized undertaking by a colonized people to re-establish the sovereignty of that nation constitutes the most complete and obvious cultural manifestation that exists,’ and it is the struggle for national liberation that provides the impetus for cultural authenticity and creativity (The Wretched 244-5).

Like Martí, Fanon makes it clear that the objective is not to return to former values, cultural forms, and social relations, for the end of the struggle, which is fundamentally transformative, will mark the appearance of a new humanity that will ‘define a new humanism both for itself and for others’ (The Wretched 246). For Martí and Fanon – active revolutionaries in anti-colonial wars of liberation – the intellectual’s role is not limited to writing and speaking. They emphasize the duty of insurrection when it is required to achieve a just society, with all and for the good of all. The struggle that will give rise to a new humanity and transform society, to paraphrase Fanon, involves the brain and the heart (The Wretched 192); but it also usually requires a war of liberation and the arduous physical work of reconstruction and nation-building.

Martí’s intellectual must participate physically in liberating and building the nation, for the hierarchy that privileges intellectual labour over manual work undermines the work of reconstruction to which everyone must actively contribute (e.g., OC 4: 264-5; OC 6: 12). He overturns and replaces this hierarchy with an ideology of work that emphasizes meaningful labour that participates in national development. Similarly, Fanon’s intellectual ‘must take part in action and throw himself body and soul into the national struggle. You may speak about everything under the sun; but when you decide to speak of that unique thing in man’s life that is represented by the fact of opening up new horizons, by bringing light into your own country, and by raising yourself and your people to their feet, then you must collaborate on the physical plane… We must work and fight with the same rhythm as the people to construct the future and to prepare the ground where vigorous shoots are already springing up’ (The Wretched 232-3).

Martí led the struggle for Cuba’s liberation through the ideological preparation and mobilization of the people to ensure popular support for the independence war that would achieve dignity for each Cuban in a just and sovereign state. For Martí, although Cuba would achieve its independence late in the century, through governance for the good of all and faithful adherence to the concept of nationhood as the embodiment of the popular will, it was poised to avoid the neo-colonial trap fallen into by the Spanish American nations that entered the world as new republics at the beginning of the nineteenth century. Nevertheless, the historical transformation of these nations into inclusive and just societies, and the development of valid forms of national culture, as well as regional unity, and vigilance in a world of competing ideologies would secure their sovereignty and their future. He affirmed that Cuba, the doorway to the Americas, would complete the final stanza in the poem of 1810. Its liberation would precipitate the true independence of nuestra América, save the honour of English America, and contribute to the equilibrium of the world. His internationalism and contribution to ideas of human progress resonate in the politics of liberation and revolutionary activism of Franz Fanon.

Ultimately, both Martí and Fanon urge transformation in the political, social, and economic dimensions of national culture in order to create and defend sovereign states and just societies. Within this moral and cultural space, and if we understand praxis to be the criterion of truth, then ultimately, it is the people’s affirmation of the truth it conveys, realized through praxis, that legitimizes the authority of discourse, art, and other valid forms of national culture. For Martí, as for Fanon, these include the political, social, and economic dimensions of national life, embody the aspirations of the people, ensure the existence and sovereignty of the state, and contribute to human development beyond national borders. Their ideas of human progress are clearly relevant to contemporary discourses on national culture, humanism and global justice, and continue to inspire social activism and liberation movements in a world in which the new imperialism has fully exploded into hegemony on a global scale.