This second of a three-volume set documenting Emma Goldman's life and work in the United States covers the years from 1902 through the end of 1909, from the 1901 assassination of President McKinley by a Polish-American anarchist through Goldman's participation in a wider political sphere that began with her launch of the anarchist magazine Mother Earth.
More than an account of Emma Goldman's legendary career as a political activist, this biography offers an intimate look into her tumultuous affair with Chicago activist and red-light-district gynecologist Ben Reitman. As it charts her twin passions for Reitman and for social reform, it provides new insights into a brilliant, complex woman.
Emma Goldman has often been read for her colorful life story, her lively if troubled sex life, and her wide-ranging political activism. Few have taken her seriously as a political thinker, even though in her lifetime she was a vigorous public intellectual within a global network of progressive politics. Engaging Goldman as a political thinker allows us to rethink the common dualism between theory and practice, scrutinize stereotypes of anarchism by placing Goldman within a fuller historical context, recognize the remarkable contributions of anarchism in creating public life, and open up contemporary politics to the possibilities of transformative feminism.
In Considering Emma Goldman Clare Hemmings examines the significance of the anarchist activist and thinker for contemporary feminist politics. Rather than attempting to resolve the tensions and problems that Goldman's thinking about race, gender, and sexuality pose for feminist thought, Hemmings embraces them, finding them to be helpful in formulating a new queer feminist praxis. Mining three overlapping archives—Goldman's own writings, her historical and theoretical legacy, and an imaginative archive that responds creatively to gaps in those archives —Hemmings shows how serious engagement with Goldman's political ambivalences opens up larger questions surrounding feminist historiography, affect, fantasy, and knowledge production. Moreover, she explores her personal affinity for Goldman to illuminate the role that affective investment plays in shaping feminist storytelling. By considering Goldman in all her contradictions and complexity, Hemmings presents a queer feminist response to the ambivalences that also saturate contemporary queer feminist race theories.
While the stock image of the anarchist as a masked bomber or brick thrower prevails in the public eye, a more representative figure should be a printer at a printing press. In Letterpress Revolution, Kathy E. Ferguson explores the importance of printers, whose materials galvanized anarchist movements across the United States and Great Britain from the late nineteenth century to the 1940s. Ferguson shows how printers—whether working at presses in homes, offices, or community centers—arranged text, ink, images, graphic markers, and blank space within the architecture of the page. Printers' extensive correspondence with fellow anarchists and the radical ideas they published created dynamic and entangled networks that brought the decentralized anarchist movements together. Printers and presses did more than report on the movement; they were constitutive of it, and their vitality in anarchist communities helps explain anarchism’s remarkable persistence in the face of continuous harassment, arrest, assault, deportation, and exile. By inquiring into the political, material, and aesthetic practices of anarchist print culture, Ferguson points to possible methods for cultivating contemporary political resistance.
A bold recovery of Yiddish anarchist history and literature Spanning the last two centuries, this fascinating work combines archival research on the radical press and close readings of Yiddish poetry to offer an original literary study of the Jewish anarchist movement. The narrative unfolds through a cast of historical characters, from the well known—such as Emma Goldman—to the more obscure, including an anarchist rabbi who translated the Talmud and a feminist doctor who organized for women’s suffrage and against national borders. Its literary scope includes the Soviet epic poemas of Peretz Markish, the journalism and modernist poetry of Anna Margolin, and the early radical prose of Malka Heifetz Tussman. Anna Elena Torres examines Yiddish anarchist aesthetics from the nineteenth-century Russian proletarian immigrant poets through the modernist avant-gardes of Warsaw, Chicago, and London to contemporary antifascist composers. The book also traces Jewish anarchist strategies for negotiating surveillance, censorship, detention, and deportation, revealing the connection between Yiddish modernism and struggles for free speech, women’s bodily autonomy, and the transnational circulation of avant-garde literature. Rather than focusing on narratives of assimilation, Torres intervenes in earlier models of Jewish literature by centering refugee critique of the border. Jewish deportees, immigrants, and refugees opposed citizenship as the primary guarantor of human rights. Instead, they cultivated stateless imaginations, elaborated through literature.
Finalist for the 2016 Foreword INDIES Book of the Year Award in the Women's Studies category Winner of the 2017 Everett Lee Hunt Award presented by the Eastern Communication Association“br/> Silver Medalist, 2017 Independent Publisher Book Awards in the Women's Issues Category In this book, Donna M. Kowal examines the speeches and writings of the "Most Dangerous Woman in the World" within the context of shifting gender roles in early twentieth-century America. As the notorious leader of the American anarchist movement, Emma Goldman captured newspaper headlines across the country as she urged audiences to reject authority and aspire for individual autonomy. A public woman in a time when to be public and a woman was a paradox, Goldman spoke and wrote openly about distinctly private matters, including sexuality, free love, and birth control. Recognizing women's bodies as a site of struggle for autonomy, she created a discursive space for women to engage in the public sphere and act as sexual agents. In turn, her ideas contributed to the rise of a feminist consciousness that recognized the personal as political and rejected dualistic notions of gender and sex.
Eugene T. Kingsley led an extraordinary life. Born in mid-nineteenth-century New York,y 1890 he was a railway brakeman in Montana. An accident left him a double amputee and politically radicalized, and his socialist activism that followed took him north of the border where he eventually was considered by the government to be “one of the most dangerous men in Canada”. Able to Lead traces Kingsley’s political journey from soapbox speaker in San Francisco to prominence in the Socialist Party of Canada. Ravi Malhotra and Benjamin Isitt illuminate a figure who shaped a generation of Canadian leftists during a time when it was uncommon for disabled men to lead. They examine Kingsley’s endeavours for justice against the Northern Pacific Railway, and how Kingsley’s life intersected with immigration law and free-speech rights. Able to Lead brings a turbulent period in North American history to life, highlighting Kingsley’s profound legacy for the twenty-first-century political left.
