Dissertation
José Martí and the global dimensions of late nineteenth-century Cuban nation building
Washington State University
Doctor of Philosophy (PhD), Washington State University
12/2006
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.7273/000005591
Abstract
This transnational study of the nation building efforts of the late nineteenth-century Cuban independence leader Jos Mart (1853-1895) argues that the Cuban anticolonial struggle had significant, yet overlooked global dimensions. In five chapters, it demonstrates that, in his work to free Cuba from Spain and in raising Cuban national awareness and Latin American consciousness, Mart transmitted political, ethical, and spiritual values aimed at resisting oppressive ruling systems and at building a democratic society in his biographies on U.S. luminaries and Civil War figures, primarily of Ulysses S. Grant (1822-1885), and in the world history narratives of his children's magazine, The Golden Years (La Edad de Oro). It also reveals that, to inspire and promote Cuban nation building, Mart employed subjects from world history such as Hindu ideas in the Bhagavad-Gita. This dissertation reconceptualizes commonly-held perceptions of the 1895 Cuban independence movement by engaging notions of gender and demonstrating that, although highly nationalistic, it transcended national and regional boundaries. The dissertation also reveals that the didactic historical writings surveyed provide a means to decipher Mart 's visions for the independent Cuba he did not live to see.; By disclosing how Mart engaged the world to promote progressive notions of race, gender, and the value of non-European cultures in an age of rising racism and "High" Imperialism, this dissertation also provides a basis for an interpretation of the patterns of globally oriented Latin American revolutions as having their genesis in the nineteenth- and not the twentieth-century. Through Mart 's "globalism," the 1895 Cuban revolution thus marks a divergence in Latin America from the Atlantic-oriented revolutions of the late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-centuries (e.g. the Haitian & Sim n Bol var's uprisings in northern South America) to the globally-charged ones of the twentieth-century (e.g. the 1910s Mexican Revolution), an understanding facilitated by the global approach of this study.
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Details
- Title
- José Martí and the global dimensions of late nineteenth-century Cuban nation building
- Creators
- Armand Garcia
- Contributors
- John E. Kicza (Chair)
- Awarding Institution
- Washington State University
- Academic Unit
- Department of History
- Theses and Dissertations
- Doctor of Philosophy (PhD), Washington State University
- Publisher
- Washington State University
- Number of pages
- 241
- Identifiers
- 99901054532201842
- Language
- English
- Resource Type
- Dissertation