In "Translating Empire," Laura Lomas uncovers how late
nineteenth-century Latino migrant writers developed a prescient
critique of U.S. imperialism, one that prefigures many of the
concerns about empire, race, and postcolonial subjectivity
animating American studies today. During the 1880s and early 1890s,
the Cuban journalist, poet, and revolutionary Jose Marti and other
Latino migrants living in New York City translated North American
literary and cultural texts into Spanish. Lomas reads the canonical
literature and popular culture of the United States in the Gilded
Age through the eyes of Marti and his fellow editors, activists,
orators, and poets. In doing so, she reveals how, in the process of
translating Anglo-American culture into a Latino-American idiom,
the Latino migrant writers invented a modernist aesthetics to
criticize U.S. expansionism and expose Anglo stereotypes of Latin
Americans.
Lomas challenges longstanding conceptions about Marti through
readings of neglected texts and reinterpretations of his major
essays. Against the customary view that emphasizes his strong
identification with Ralph Waldo Emerson and Walt Whitman, the
author demonstrates that over several years, Marti actually
distanced himself from Emerson's ideas and conveyed alarm at
Whitman's expansionist politics. She questions the association of
Marti with pan-Americanism, pointing out that in the 1880s, the
Cuban journalist warned against foreign geopolitical influence
imposed through ostensibly friendly meetings and the promotion of
hemispheric peace and "free" trade. Lomas finds Marti undermining
racialized and sexualized representations of America in his
interpretations of Buffalo Bill and other rituals of westward
expansion, in his self-published translation of Helen Hunt
Jackson's popular romance novel "Ramona," and in his comments on
writing that stereotyped Latino/a Americans as inherently unfit for
self-government. With "Translating Empire," Lomas recasts the
contemporary practice of American studies in light of Marti's
late-nineteenth-century radical decolonizing project.
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