In Print: A Posthumous History of José Martí
Publication Title
A Posthumous History of José Martí
Author
Publisher
Routledge
Publication Date
May 2024
About the Book (from the publisher)
A Posthumous History of José Martí: The Apostle and His Afterlife focuses on Martí’s posthumous legacy and his lasting influence on succeeding generations of Cubans on the island and abroad. Over 120 years after his death on a Cuban battlefield in 1895, Martí studies have long been the contested property of opposing sides in an ongoing ideological battle. Both the Cuban nation-state, which claims Martí as a crucial inspiration for its Marxist revolutionary government, and diasporic communities in the US who honor Martí as a figure of hope for the Cuban nation-in-exile, insist on the centrality of his words and image for their respective visions of Cuban nationhood. The book also explores more recent scholarship that has reassessed Martí’s literary, cultural, and ideological value, allowing us to read him beyond the Havana-Miami axis toward engagement with a broader historical and geographical tableau. Martí has thus begun to outgrow his mutually-reinforcing cults in Cuba and the diaspora, to assume his true significance as a hemispheric and global writer and thinker.
About the Author
Alfred J. López received his Ph.D. at the University of Iowa. He is the author of six books, including José Martí: A Revolutionary Life (University of Texas Press, 2014), the definitive biography of Cuba’s greatest national hero. His most recent book is The Routledge Companion to Literature and the Global South, co-edited with Ricardo Quintana-Vallejo (Routledge, 2023). Prof. López’s essays have appeared in American Literature, Comparative Literature, Cuban Studies, South Atlantic Quarterly, Modern Fiction Studies, and the Huffington Post, among many other journals and periodicals. He was also the founding editor of The Global South (Indiana University Press, 2007), the leading journal of globalization and global South studies. Prof. López is a proud first-generation college graduate.