Searching for Rhythm and Freedom

Abstract

In his introduction to The Dialectics of Our America: Genealogy, Cultural Critique, and Literary History, José David Saldívar highlights a configuration of America first suggested by José Martí. A Cuban poet and long-standing supporter of Cuba’s independence from Spain, Martí organized the revolution while living in New York and posited the existence of two distinct Americas that he labeled “Nuestra América” and “European America.” While this organization of the continent addresses the linguistic trend to reduce America to the United States, it is more important a response to the political history shared by the United States and Latin America as well as a move to frame this history as oppressive and problematic.

[Carnival] discloses the potentiality of an entirely different world, of another order, another way of life. It leads man out of the confines of the apparent (false) unity, of the indisputable and stable.

—Mikhail Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World

If you want to mirror reality, get a camera. If you want to make someone understand reality … You have to distort things … Tell it as it is for you and you alone.

— Touré, “Solomon’s Big Day”