José Martí: Images of Memory and Mourning

This book is a critical study of visual representations of José Martí The National Hero of Cuba, and the discourses of power that make it possible for Martí’s images to be perceived as icons today. It argues that an observer of Martí’s icons who is immersed in the Cuban national narrative experiences a retrospective reconstruction of those images by means of ideologically formed national discourses of power. Also, the obsessive reproduction of Martí’s icons signals a melancholia for the loss of the martyr-hero. But instead of attempting to ＂forget Martí,＂ the book concludes that the utopian impulse of his memory should serve to resist melancholia and to visualize new forms of creative re-significations of Martí and, by extension, the nation.

Emilio Bejel is a distinguished professor of Latin American Studies in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese at University of California at Davis. A poet, critic, and narrator, he was born in Cuba and has been a US citizen since the 1960s. He is the author of several books, including Gay Cuban Nation and Jose Lezama Lima, Poet of the Image, as well as several poetry collections and an autobiographical narrative: The Write Way Home. A Cuban-American Story (translated into English by Professor Stephen Clark).＂