2019 NEH Summer Institute, The Center for José Martí Studies Affiliate at the University of Tampa: "José Martí as a U.S. Writer" with Esther Allen
Date
2019-06-26
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The University of Tampa
Abstract
In June of 2018, during a gala ceremony, José Martí was inaugurated, along with five other writers, living and dead, into the New York State Writers Hall of Fame. The event received no
attention from the Anglophone U.S. media, but was the subject of several articles in Spanish language
Cuban media on and off the island. Most of this coverage simply took note of the facts,
but an essay in the Cuban journal La Jiribilla by Luis Toledo Sande, author of a biography of Martí,
expressed certain tacit concerns, and wondered whether it was the case that “la iniciativa
neoyorquina se asume con perspectiva ni colonizante ni colonizada.” His question deserves
serious consideration. What happens when we think of Martí not simply as someone who
happened, through an unfortunate series of circumstances, to end up living in and writing about
the United States, but as a writer who—like Alexis de Tocqueville, or the 17th-century Dutch
lawyer Adriaen van der Donck, of New Amsterdam—deserves to be read as part of the U.S.
canon, alongside Walt Whitman, William Carlos Williams, and Gloria Anzaldúa?
Description
Please click on YouTube Video link above to stream the presentation.
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Keywords
Martí, José, 1853-1895, New York State Writers Hall of Fame