The Fury Archives: Female Citizenship, Human Rights, and the International Avant-Gardes (Modernist Latitudes)

ISBN: 0231197101

Author: Richards, Juno Jill

Condition: New

Product DescriptionIn the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, radical womens movements and the avant-gardes were often in contact with one another, brought together through the socialist internationals. Juno Jill Richards argues that these movements were not just socially linked but also deeply interconnected. Each offered the other an experimental language that could move beyond the nation-states rights of man and citizen, suggesting an alternative conceptual vocabulary for womens rights.Rather than focus on the demand for the vote, The Fury Archives turns to the daily practices and social worlds of feminist action. It offers an alternative history of womens rights, practiced by female arsonists, suffragette rioters, industrial saboteurs, self-named terrorists, lesbian criminals, and queer resistance cells. Richards also examines the criminal proceedings that emerged in the wake of womens actions, tracing the way that citizen and human emerged as linked categories for women on the fringes of an international campaign for suffrage.Recovering a transatlantic print archive, Richards brings together a wide range of activists and artists, including Lumina Sophie, Ina Césaire, Rosa Luxemburg, Rebecca West, Angelina Weld Grimké, Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, Hannah Hch, Claude Cahun, Paulette Nardal, and Leonora Carrington. An expansive and methodologically innovative book, The Fury Archives argues that the relationship of womens rights movements and the avant-gardes offers a radical alternative to liberal discourses of human rights in formation at the same historical moment.ReviewThe Fury Archives is a tour-de-force study of modernist womens struggles for citizenship and human rights across transnational geographies. Richards reminds us of the variegated sites and everydayness of politics-from the sphere of reproductive labor to the quotidian committee meeting-and offers a compelling genealogy of the intersections between womens rights and human rights. It is one of the most nuanced accounts of politics as praxis I have ever read. -- Janice Ho, author of Nation and Citizenship in the Twentieth-Century British NovelJill Richardss exploration of the daily life of feminist action brilliantly trains our attention on aspects of revolutionary work-routines and tactics, protocols and cycles-too often obscured in later histories. Traversing disciplines, genres, and oceans in unprecedented ways, it requires us to reconsider many of our most cherished assumptions about the relation between avant-garde art and political aspiration. -- Douglas Mao, author of Fateful Beauty: Aesthetic Environments, Juvenile Development, and Literature 1860-1960Jill Richardss book is masterful in its range of inquiries, beautifully written, and elegantly argued. The research supporting the books radical and provocative arguments is also exceptionally thorough and meticulously engaged; it synthesizes and builds upon a number of comprehensive historical and theoretical debates. -- Elizabeth S. Anker, Cornell UniversityThe range of objects in The Fury Archives is truly impressive, and Richards tackles every object and text that she has excavated for analysis with great skill . . . Richards presents life stories that are not recorded in mainstream history and the unearthing of which creates a more inclusive, accurate, and complete picture of history. - ASAP/JournalThe sense of this being a history of the present is hard to ignore . . . That strategies such as the occupation of public spaces as an act of protest, strikes to try to accelerate governmental action or the naming of names as an act of acknowledgement and remembrance remain familiar and continue to be employed make many of the decades-old archives seem eerily contemporary. - ArtReview AsiaTraversing the boundary between the intimate and the public, Richards shows us how to look anew at female citizenship . . . [The Fury Archives] offers important methodological insigh