Defence of the local thing in José Martí’s Nuestra América and Coney Island: the essay as a space for ideology in hispano-american roots

Abstract

José Martí proposes that for the proper development of the Republic in America it is essential to secure a government that has as the premises of its administration the natural categories of its origin. To evaluate the local characteristics Martí was thinking of I will carry out an analysis of two of his essays: Nuestra América (Martí, 1977) and Coney Island (Martí, 1881), in an attempt to unravel the polarisation strategy which supports his argument. Indeed, through a semantic axis the author places the concepts of nature and interiority over external and foreign, making a parallel between what he calls “natural men in America” and those who represent the “other”, the people of the United States. In this way, it will be possible to see how Martí will question the alleged hegemony of the northern country, claiming the primitive qualities of American indigenous peoples, to condition the problem of allocation of barbarism. The main theoretical framework to address this work is the use of the theories of discourse analysis of Teun van Dijk, which will serve me to develop and analyse the semantic axis that Martí creates in the works studied.