Martí, Edison y el fonógrafo

Abstract

In this essay, I analyze José Martí’s chronicles about Thomas Edison and the phonograph within the context of a cultural history of fin-de-siècle technology in Europe and the American hemisphere. According to such critics as Friedrich Kittler, Jeffrey Sconce and Pamela Thurschwell, phonography, amongst other new technologies of the period, produced a transformation in the notion of “presence”. In these chronicles, what does it mean to have, or to live with an electronic presence? What effect does this representation of spectrality have on Latin American readers? In addition, how do we read Martí’s and others’ representations of Thomas Edison as a master of the unsettling of past and present, tradition and modernity?