The Dialectics of Our America

In the absence of a pope, what are we to do about the problem of the canon in rewriting American literary history?

—Werner Sollors, Beyond Ethnicity

In light of developments within the American literary historical community, Werner Sollors's rhetorical question about the American canon provides us with an appropriate frame of reference. Indeed, the new "ideological" school of American literary history led by Sacvan Bercovitch and Myra Jehlen, among others, has in many ways underlined and strengthened the need to study our literary and historical past.

Thus, the new American literary historians have directed their attention to new writers, addressed themselves to new problems, and, above all, sharpened their methodological tools. For example, Bercovitch in Reconstructing American Literary History (1986) has argued for what he calls a "dialogic mode of analysis." More precisely, his history of American literature resembles Bakhtin's description of the novelistic form: it is often marked by a clashing plurality of discourses, fragments, and a polyethnic system of American codes in what he sees as our age of "dissensus." Other Americanists, among them Paul Lauter, Juan Bruce-Novoa, Jane Tompkins, and Houston A. Baker, Jr., have centered their "dialectics of validation" on aspects of American literature such as race, class, gender, and difference that had received little attention; such scholars have given a new impulse to the study of subjects ranging from the reevaluation of what constitutes a "classical" American text to the role of a distinctly slave "vernacular" in American discourse in general and in African American literature in particular. The theoretical boundaries within which American literary history and interpretation unfold have been redefined in the theoretical works of Fredric Jameson, Frank Lentricchia, Hayden White, and Edward Said. Each has questioned the premises on which the concepts of American hermeneutics, alterity, history, and historiography rest.

Within the ideological framework of these varied tendencies I would like to add two oppositional voices to our new literary history—namely, the Cuban poets and revolutionaries José Martí and Roberto Fernández Retamar.

What lies behind this chapter is a growing awareness of the extremely narrow confines and conservative practices of literary study as it is now performed in the academy, and, with that, a growing conviction about the social and political implications of this exclusionary practice. As a literary theoretician outside the mainstream, educated in a segregated farm society in south Texas, I have been particularly sensitive to the absence of writers from Our America. In my view, the greatest shortcoming of the work being done on the American canon is not its lack of theoretical rigor, but its parochial vision. Literary historians (even the newer ones) and critics working on the reconstruction of American literary history characteristically know little in depth about the history, symbologies, cultures, and discourses of the Americas. One value of focusing on comparative cultural studies is that it permits us to escape from the provincial, limiting tacit assumptions that result from perpetual immersion in studying a single culture or literature.

The Dialectics of Our America proposes a new American literary, cultural, and critical cosmopolitanism that fully questions as much as it acknowledges the Other, thereby serving as a more adequate and chastening form of self-knowledge. This new critical cosmopolitanism neither reduces the Americas to some homogeneous Other of the West, nor does it fashionably celebrate the rich pluralism of the hemisphere. Rather, by mapping out the common situation shared by different cultures, it allows their differences to be measured against each other as well as against the (North) American grain.

I

During the past generation the new cultural history of America has been fractured into various professional shards: social history, ethnic history, women's history, African American history, and Chicano history. No longer is American history conceived exclusively as the story of Anglo-Saxon men from the first settlements in the Chesapeake Bay area in 1607 to the present. Looking at American history "from the bottom up," this revisionist scholarship has shattered the traditional consensus. But there has not been enough major revisionist scholarship. Moreover, a stark fragmentation of American intellectual history has plagued some of our revisionist historians, and the literary history of the Americas must be made whole again. Efforts to achieve this wholeness have been begun in the genealogical texts of Martí and Fernández Retamar who in their oppositional discourses attempted to unify the history of the Americas. By looking at the Americas as a hemisphere and by analyzing the real and rhetorical, often hostile, battles between the United States and what Martí called "Nuestra Améerica"—"Our America"—it is possible to perceive what the literatures of the Americas have in common. After the U.S. codes of fetishization—of transforming the realities of dependency, conquest, and military intervention into rhetoric about freedom, virtue, and an "Alliance for Progress"—have been negated, Martí's "Nuestra América" (1891) and Fernández Retamar's Caliban (1971), "Nuestra América y Occidente" (1976), and "Algunos usos de civilización y barbarie" (1977) are texts on which to base an illuminating indigenous American cultural studies critique.

Let me emphasize my goals in reconstructing pan-American literary history: first, to place the leading oppositional intellectual figures from Our America within a limited genealogy of their discursive and nondiscursive practices; second, to show how responsive to their historical situations of hegemony and hostility they have been.

As Jean Franco explains in An Introduction to Spanish American Literature (1969):

Only Martí significantly enriched and transformed the [Spanish literary tradition] on which he drew. He saw art neither as propaganda tools nor as play but as the expression which was communicable because universal. Yet this genuinely original poet and thinker had no followers and it was to be some time before his own optimistic statement [in "Nuestra América"] that "el libro importado ha sido vencido en América por el hombre natural" ["the imported book has been vanquished in America by natural man"] was truly applicable to the literature of the continent.

Enrico Mario Santí suggests, moreover, that because Martí never collected his prose works in book form, the "piecemeal, fragmented, and foreign publication of the first edition of Martí's collected works between 1900 and 1933 constitute both a cause and effect of this initial vacuum."

As the United States underwent the transition from "competitive" capitalism to "monopoly" capitalism in the 1880s, Martí grew more critical about the bourgeois way of life there. In "The Modernity of Martí," Fernández Retamar argues that Martí "identified and denounced the characteristics of what we now recognize as the beginnings of the last stage of capitalism: the rise of the monopolies ("The monopoly, says Martí, sits like an implacable giant at the door of the poor"), and the fusion of banking capital with industrial in a financial oligarchy ("those iniquitous consortia of capital"). In "Nuestra América" and in his newspaper analyses of the United States, Martí constructed a powerful cultural critique of capitalism and Anglocentrism.

From 1881 until just before his death in 1895 (he died battling the Spanish empire in Cuba), Martí rarely left the United States. As one scholar put it, "In the U.S., Martí became a politician, a chronicler of North American history, and a man of action." Although as chronicler he wrote on a variety of North American topics (for instance, Grant's Tomb, Whitman as the great poet of the Americas, Emerson as philosopher) as well as on subjects such as Darwin and Marx, he emerges in "Nuestra América" as a firm anti-imperialist who wrote about the emergent empire: "I know the monster; I have lived in its entrails."

Emerson's "The American Scholar" (1837) established the grounds for a popular national American literature: "Each age must write its own books; or rather, each generation for the next succeeding. The books of an older period will not fit this." Martí's "Nuestra América" similarly provided a base for a national Latin American, literature capable of incorporating both the Spanish and First American experiences in the New World. In "Nuestra América" and "Madre América," as elsewhere, his view of the American hemisphere is cast in a Manichaean struggle. He proposed in La Nación:

On the one hand, there is in [the Americas] a nation proclaiming its right by proper investiture, because of geographical morality, to rule the continent, and it announces ... that everything in North America must be its, and that this imperial right must be acknowledged from the Isthmus all the way south. On the other hand, there are the nations of diverse origins and purposes ... [Nuestra América.]

Any revisionist literary history of the Americas would have to contend with Martí's conviction of a profound gap between "Our America" and the other America, which is not ours. "Nuestra América" in particular can provide the central oppositional codes on which to base a dialectical view of the American continent and of the Americas' many literatures.

"Nuestra América" marks the beginning of a new epoch of resistance to empire in the Americas. As a specific intellectual in Foucault's sense, Martí stands between two ways of thinking: the last representative of a nineteenth-century romantic idealism and the first forerunner of a Latin American socialist ideology of continental solidarity. Cuban Foreign Minister Raúl Roa, speaking to the United Nations in May 1968, emphasized: "At the level of international relations, the fundamental antagonism of our epoch is expressed in the struggle between imperialism and the peoples of the underdeveloped world." Martí is one of the first cultural critics from Our America bold enough to document to the rest of the hemisphere what he saw as emerging U.S. ideas, languages, and reality of empire. (Parenthetically, the Nicaraguan "modernista" poet Rubén Darío would join Martí in attacking Teddy Roosevelt's "Big Stick" policy in his 1903 poem "To Roosevelt.") Martí prophetically stated in "Nuestra América":

Our America is running another risk that does not come from itself but from the difference in origins, methods, and interests between the two halves of the continent, and the time is near at hand when an enterprising and vigorous people who scorn or ignore Our America will even so approach it and demand a close relationship. And since strong nations, self-made by law and shotgun, love strong nations, and them alone; since the time of madness and ambition—from which North America may be freed by the predominance of the purest elements in its blood, or on which it may be launched by its vindictive and sordid masses, its tradition of expansion, or the ambitions of some powerful leader—is not so near at hand, even to the most timorous eye, that there is no time for the test of discreet and unwavering pride that could confront and dissuade it; since its good name as a republic in the eyes of the world's perceptive nations puts upon North America a restraint that cannot be taken away by childish provocations or pompous arrogance or parricidal discords among Our American nations—the pressing need of Our America is to show itself as it is, one in spirit and intent, swift conqueror of a suffocating past, stained only by the enriching blood drawn from the hands that struggle to clear away ruins, and from the scars left upon us by our masters. The scorn of our formidable neighbor who does not know us is Our America's greatest danger. And since the day of the visit is near, it is imperative that our neighbor know us, and soon, so that it will not scorn us.

Stylistically, the passage is typical of Martí's rhetorical grace, power, and lexical play: the balanced schemes of repetition, especially anaphora; the willingness to use alliteration to present harsh judgments; the amused, delicate use of understatement ("an enterprising and vigorous people ... will demand a close relationship"); the tropical cadence of apostrophe; and the active use of a binary methodology. Its content, however, is a striking description of "the development of underdevelopment" in Latin America, for Martí's primary concern in the passage is the reality of relentless expansion by the North Americans. No Cuban has surpassed Martí in his lucid denunciation of American empire. No writer has been more graceful and clear than Martí in describing the negative way of life in the United States.

By 1882 Martí became convinced that the United States had given up its rhetoric of freedom and dignity. In New York he witnessed the huge influx of European immigrants bringing with them "their wounds [and] their moral ulcers." Describing the miserable life of the underclass there, he wrote: "He who can observe the deplorable life of today's wretched workingman and woman in the cold latitudes without feeling his soul wrenched with pity, is not only barely insensitive, but commits a criminal act" (Obras Completas 32:168). He also observed, with pen in hand, the rise of blatant forms of white dominance over nonwhite populations in the urban metropole—blacks, Chinese, and the First Americans (Amerindians) were characteristically discriminated against by a white supremacist ideology. So it came as no surprise to Latin American readers of "North American Scenes" when, in 1886, he wrote of the prototypical North American character: "[Achieving a] fortune is the only object of life.... Men, despite all appearances, are tied together here only by interests, by the cordial hatreds that exist between those who are bargaining for the same prize.... It is urgent to feed the lamp of light and reduce the beast."

Thus, to fully understand Martí's call for Latin American cultural autonomy, nationalism, and self-determination in "Nuestra América," it is essential to note his emergent sociopolitical radicalization in the United States. At the same time, his antiimperialism stemmed from a close reading of U.S. "manifest destiny" doctrine. His allegory of reading the imperial designs of North American foreign policy became a warning to Our America to prepare itself to withstand relentless expansion. From 1881 to 1889, then, he clearly perceived that U.S. foreign policy and industry would need both a cheap source of raw materials and a world market for their surplus goods. Our America, he predicted, was ripe for both: "The descendants of the pilgrim's father had their celebrations. What a difference though! Now they are no longer humble, nor tread the snow of Cape Cod with workers' boots. Instead they now lace up their military boots aggressively and they see on one side Canada and on the other Mexico." What Martí dramatizes for us in his voluminous essays, letters, and journalistic pieces (collected in seventeen volumes by Cuban publishers) is an alienated Cuban, exiled in the ghettos of New York, one of the first Latin American intellectuals of his time audacious enough to confront U.S. imperial history, its imperial ethic, and its imperial psychology. Imperialism, he suggests, penetrated the very fabric of North American culture and infected its imagination. The U.S. metropole, once and for all, would now enjoy and exploit a structural advantage over the Latin American "periphery." He reads the grammar of imperialism and dramatizes how U.S. domination of the weaker economies in Our America (and its political and social superstructure) were to ensure the extraction of economic rewards—what André Gunder Frank calls the "development of underdevelopment."

As a handbook describing the codes of imperialism, "Nuestra América" not only analyzes the overdetermined causes of "Yankee" domination, but points out strategies to resist it. He believed that the first step for governing "our republics" is a thorough knowledge of the diverse elements that make up the Americas as a continent, for "the able governor in Our America is not the one who knows how to govern the Germans or the French; he must know the elements that compose his own country; and how to bring them together, using methods and institutions originating within the country...." (p. 86). Second, he contended that Our America must refrain from rewriting its narratives of government according to paradigms not their own—with laws, constitutions, discourses, and systems taken from totally different cultural contexts: "A decree by Hamilton does not halt the plainsman's horse" (p. 86). Leaders from Our America would have to account for the popular indigenous elements within each culture and recognize their inherent value.