Overcoming the Other America: José Martí's Immanent Critique of the Unionist Paradigm

Abstract This article offers a new interpretation of the Cuban intellectual José Martí's international political thought. It argues that analysis early US imperialism and call for Spanish American unity are best understood as an immanent critique “unionist paradigm,” tradition thought originated in independence movements. Martí recognized impediments racism had placed way both efforts to stabilize hemisphere's republics by uniting them under regional institutions. He argued that, his own time, Anglo-Saxon supremacism deprived US-led Pan-Americanism all legitimacy, causing crisis order Americas. In context this crisis, he developed revised, antiracist unionism argued, would free America's from imperial aggression interstate conflicts, making region global model stable inclusive self-rule.