Less Than Civil:Jose Marti's Immigration Chronicles

While Jose Marti’s impassioned and incisive criticism of U.S.imperialism in the late nineteenth century is well in evidence, his articles on the impact of immigration on U.S. civil society have not received sufficient... [ view full abstract ]

While Jose Marti’s impassioned and incisive criticism of U.S.imperialism in the late nineteenth century is well in evidence, his articles on the impact of immigration on U.S. civil society have not received sufficient critical attention. Immigrants fleeing economic precarity in Europe, by and large, seemed to him a vulgar, belligerent, and clannish sort, in short, ill-suited for North American citizenship and democracy.  Given the bleak view he had of the prospects for democracy in Gilded Age America, Marti’s comments about what he thought were unassimilable new arrivals reveal as much about the refracted prejudices of his own immigrant status as they also articulate an otherwise sound critique of a society increasingly defined by less-than civil practices of monopoly capitalism, imperial expansion and their corollary symptoms.  This paper reads Marti’s journalism on immigration through a biopolitical lens, drawing on Italian philosopher RobertoEsposito’s work on the dialectical relation between community and immunity and the function immigration plays in that particular double articulation.