Antifascist Networks in the United States: Félix Martí Ibáñez’s Postmodern Hispanic Humanism

This paper will examine antifascist networks and the evolution of Hispanism in the United States during the 1930s and 1940s.  Fleeing political persecution during the Spanish Civil War (1936-39), anarchists and republicans sought refuge and throughout the Western Hemisphere, including in New York City.  Félix Martí Ibáñez (Cartagena 1911- NYC 1972) was one such exile.  This paper examines Martí Ibáñez’s uncollected literary journalism published in the Spanish Civil War exile newspaper España Libre (Free Spain, NYC 1939-1977) in the 1940s, as well as selections from his later fiction. Martí Ibáñez’s contributions to the newspaper marked his personal transformation from anarchist doctor in revolutionary Spain to author, editor, and professor in the United States. In Martí Ibáñez’s earlier works, the Spanish Civil War, messy and mythical, preoccupies the author. Later in his exile, Martí Ibáñez embraces a dialectic enquiry of reality that does not enforce uniformity or universality.

By studying Martí Ibáñez’s writings, we might gain insights into Spain’s anarchist exiles.  Recent research, by such scholars as Jacob Blumenfeld, Chiraa Bottici, Simon Critchley and others, has questioned the stereotypical representation of anarchist politics and culture as inconsequential, terrorist, irrational, or primitive.  Anarchism is now studied in all its complexity as thought, text, culture, and global network.  Martí Ibáñez’s thought illustrates the adaptation of Spanish antifascist and anarchist exiles to the United States.  Moreover, his numerous and wide-ranging publications—including his founding of a medical news journal and articles in Cosmopolitan, Gentry, Art and Architecture, Town and Country, and Esquire, and other venues—document connections between Hispanic, antifascist, exile, radical, and postmodern humanist thought in twentieth-century America. The transnational circulation of both publications testifies the global interest in a renewed definition of Hispanism after the Spanish Civil War.