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Walt Whitman and His Caribbean Interlocutors: José Martí, C.L.R. James, and Pedro Mir
Song and Countersong
Series: - Historical Materialism Book Series, Volume: 230
Author:
Walt Whitman and His Caribbean Interlocutors: José Martí, C.L.R. James, and Pedro Mir explores the writings of Whitman (1819-1892) and of three Caribbean authors who engaged with them: the Cuban poet, essayist and revolutionary José Martí (1853-1895); the Trinidadian activist, historian and cultural critic C.L.R. James (1901-1989), and the Dominican poet Pedro Mir (1913-2000). Whitman and his Caribbean interlocutors are discussed against the background of the contradictions of capitalist modernity, as exemplified by the United States between the 1840s and the 1940s. Marx's exploration of the liberating and oppressive dimensions of capitalist expansion frames the discussion of each author and of Martí's, James's and Mir's responses to Whitman and, more generally, to North American capitalist and industrial civilisation and its imperial projections.
Rafael Bernabe, Ph.D. (1989), State University of New York, is professor at the University of Puerto Rico. His many publications on Puerto Rico include, (with César J. Ayala) Puerto Rico in the American Century (University of North Carolina Press, 2006).
Introduction
1 Marx and the ‘Transformation of History into World History’
2 ‘Within Me Latitude Widens, Longitude Lengthens’: Whitman and the World Created by Capital
3 ‘In Paths Untrodden’: Whitman, Nature, Democracy and the ‘Average Man of To-day’
4 The ‘Emptiness’ of the Present: Marx, the ‘Bourgeois Viewpoint’ and Its ‘Romantic Antithesis’
5 ‘This All-Devouring Modern Word’: Whitman’s Critique of Business
6 From Brooklyn Ferry to Brooklyn Bridge: José Martí and the ‘Modern Multiple Life’
7 ‘The Final Culmination of This Vast and Varied Republic’: Whitman’s Failed Transcendence of the Present
8 Whitman: Inconsistent Democrat, Yet More Than a Democrat
9 A ‘Damaged and Alien Civilization’: Martí’s Search for an Alternative Modernity
10 C.L.R. James’s Notes on American Civilization, or the Song of the C.I.O.
11 ‘Now Has Come the Hour of the Countersong’: Pedro Mir and Walt Whitman
References
Index
1 Marx and the ‘Transformation of History into World History’
2 ‘Within Me Latitude Widens, Longitude Lengthens’: Whitman and the World Created by Capital
3 ‘In Paths Untrodden’: Whitman, Nature, Democracy and the ‘Average Man of To-day’
4 The ‘Emptiness’ of the Present: Marx, the ‘Bourgeois Viewpoint’ and Its ‘Romantic Antithesis’
5 ‘This All-Devouring Modern Word’: Whitman’s Critique of Business
6 From Brooklyn Ferry to Brooklyn Bridge: José Martí and the ‘Modern Multiple Life’
7 ‘The Final Culmination of This Vast and Varied Republic’: Whitman’s Failed Transcendence of the Present
8 Whitman: Inconsistent Democrat, Yet More Than a Democrat
9 A ‘Damaged and Alien Civilization’: Martí’s Search for an Alternative Modernity
10 C.L.R. James’s Notes on American Civilization, or the Song of the C.I.O.
11 ‘Now Has Come the Hour of the Countersong’: Pedro Mir and Walt Whitman
References
Index
All interested in the poetry of Walt Whitman, writings of José Martí, C.L.R James, and Pedro Mir, U.S. history of the 1800s, the conflict leading to the Civil War and Reconstruction, Caribbean and Latin American literature, as well as Marxist analysis of culture and literature.