Walt Whitman and His Caribbean Interlocutors: José Martí, C. L. R. James, and Pedro Mir: Song and Countersong

Walt Whitman and His Caribbean Interlocutors: José Martí, C.L.R. James, and Pedro Mir explores the writings of Whitman and of three Caribbean authors who engaged with them: the Cuban writer and revolutionary José Martí; Trinidadian activist, historian and cultural critic C.L.R. James, and Dominican poet Pedro Mir. ‎Contents 7 ‎Introduction 9 ‎Chapter 1. Marx and the ‘Transformation of History into World History’ 13 ‎Chapter 2. ‘Within Me Latitude Widens, Longitude Lengthens’: Whitman and the World Created by Capital 19 ‎Chapter 3. ‘In Paths Untrodden’: Whitman, Nature, Democracy and the ‘Average Man of To-day’ 45 ‎Chapter 4. The ‘Emptiness’ of the Present: Marx, the ‘Bourgeois Viewpoint’ and Its ‘Romantic Antithesis’ 60 ‎Chapter 5. ‘This All-Devouring Modern Word’: Whitman’s Critique of Business 79 ‎Chapter 6. From Brooklyn Ferry to Brooklyn Bridge: José Martí and the ‘Modern Multiple Life’ 110 ‎Chapter 7. ‘The final Culmination of This Vast and Varied Republic’: Whitman’s Failed Transcendence of the Present 144 ‎Chapter 8. Whitman: Inconsistent Democrat, Yet More Than a Democrat 163 ‎Chapter 9. A ‘Damaged and Alien Civilization’: Martí’s Search for an Alternative Modernity 191 ‎Chapter 10. C.L.R. James’s Notes on American Civilization, or the Song of the C.I.O. 226 ‎Chapter 11. ‘Now Has Come the Hour of the Countersong’: Pedro Mir and Walt Whitman 258 ‎References 281 ‎Index 294 "Walt Whitman and His Caribbean Interlocutors: José Martí, C.L.R. James, and Pedro Mir explores the writings of Whitman (1819-1892) and of three Caribbean authors who engaged with them: the Cuban poet, essayist and revolutionary José Martí (1853-1895); the Trinidadian activist, historian and cultural critic C.L.R. James (1901-1989), and the Dominican poet Pedro Mir (1913-2000). Whitman and his Caribbean interlocutors are discussed against the background of the contradictions of capitalist modernity, as exemplified by the United States between the 1840s and the 1940s. Marx's exploration of the liberating and oppressive dimensions of capitalist expansion frames the discussion of each author and of Marti's, James's and Mir's responses to Whitman and, more generally, to North American capitalist and industrial civilization and its imperial projections"-- Provided by publisher Walt Whitman and His Caribbean Interlocutors: José Martí, C.L.R. James, and Pedro Mir explores the writings of Whitman (1819-1892) and of three Caribbean authors who engaged with them: the Cuban poet, essayist and revolutionary José Martí (1853-1895); the Trinidadian activist, historian and cultural critic C.L.R. James (1901-1989), and the Dominican poet Pedro Mir (1913-2000). Whitman and his Caribbean interlocutors are discussed against the background of the contradictions of capitalist modernity, as exemplified by the United States between the 1840s and the 1940s. Marx's exploration of the liberating and oppressive dimensions of capitalist expansion frames the discussion of each author and of Martí's, James's and Mir's responses to Whitman and, more generally, to North American capitalist and industrial civilisation and its imperial projections. __Walt Whitman and His Caribbean Interlocutors: José Martí, C.L.R. James, and Pedro Mir__