Again, on Martí’s antisettler indigenism: Jose O. Fernandez, ‘US print culture and José Martí’s Crónicas on US-Indigenous peoples’ rights’, Latino Studies, 2024 | settler colonial studies blog

Again, on Martí’s antisettler indigenism: Jose O. Fernandez, ‘US print culture and José Martí’s Crónicas on US-Indigenous peoples’ rights’, Latino Studies, 2024

28Oct24

Abstract: This essay argues for the centrality and increasing influence of late nineteenth-century US print culture, in the form of printed books, mass-circulation newspapers, and literary magazines, on José Martí’s US-based crónicas (chronicles) that reflect his gradual critical interpretation related to the violence and land dispossession of Indigenous people in the US and their lack of basic rights. Martí’s interest in and writings about US-Indigenous people are connected to the increased advocacy for Native peoples’ rights in US print culture by white reformers, particularly Helen Hunt Jackson. My analysis builds on the works of scholars who have studied Martí’s writings on US-Indigenous people, including his 1887 translation of Jackson’s reform novel, Ramona (2002 [1884]), and draws from Indigenous and Indigeneity scholars’ emphasis on settler colonialism and Indigenous sovereignty. While Martí initially concurred with reformers who advocated for the passing of the Dawes Act of 1887, which offered US citizenship to Native groups who accepted allotment, he came to question US jurisdiction over US-Indigenous populations in part through his realization that Indigenous people and Black people in the South have shared a history of racialization, violence, and disenfranchisement within the confines of the US nation-state.

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