Seeing settlers and their others (then and now): Anna Brickhouse, ‘Hemispheric Literary Networks and José Martíɴs Charleston Earthquake’, in Agnes Lugo-Ortiz, Graciela Montaldo (eds), The Routledge Hispanic Studies Companion to Nineteenth-Century Latin America, Routledge, 2024 | settler colonial studies blog

Seeing settlers and their others (then and now): Anna Brickhouse, ‘Hemispheric Literary Networks and José Martíɴs Charleston Earthquake’, in Agnes Lugo-Ortiz, Graciela Montaldo (eds), The Routledge Hispanic Studies Companion to Nineteenth-Century Latin America, Routledge, 2024

19Oct24

Abstract: This chapter considers how the most well-known hemispheric literary networks of the nineteenth century refract the Americas’ shared histories of settler colonialism. It does so through a close examination of José Martí’s 1886 “El Terremoto de Charleston” (The Charleston Earthquake)—a chronicle that troubles the boundaries of nineteenth-century Latin America as Martí would delineate them five years later in “Nuestra América” (1891). Martí’s chronicle on the earthquake portrays the event as the decimation of a US southern city while offering a wider meditation on multiple, overlapping southern spaces in the hemisphere. The chronicle’s focus on the Black population of Charleston and its detailed descriptions of diasporic religious practice call into question the fundamental opposition of the two Americas that Martí would later elaborate and offer a contemplation of racial violence throughout the hemisphere. Martí engages myriad Souths, positioning his chronicle within multiple literary networks beyond the US newspapers from which he derived his information about the earthquake. Ultimately, the chronicle elaborates an anti-secular mode of poetic apprehension that embraces the potential of the very “race war” that Martí denied was possible in Cuba, even while revealing unexpected links between Martí’s dissonant writings on Indigenous people in the hemisphere and his writings on the Black population of Charleston.

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