Suchergebnisse

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

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.

Two anarchist women from the late nineteenth to early twentieth centuries, Alexandra David-Néel and Lily Gair Wilkinson, combined their politics with radical engagement in walking. In both the literal sense, moving their bodies along the earth, and the figurative sense of calling on peripatetic tropes to express their ideas, they found walking to be a constitutive element of freedom. This paper brings the ideas of Whitehead and other process philosophers into conversation with material and semiotic dimensions of walking and with anarchist politics. In the political lives of Wilkinson and David-Néel, I see struggles to live anarchist lives, lives into which one could walk.

Feminist theory is not only about women; it is about the world, engaged through critical intersectional perspectives. Despite many significant differences, most feminist theory is reliably suspicious of dualistic thinking, generally oriented toward fluid processes of emergence rather than static entities in one-way relationships, and committed to being a political as well as an intellectual enterprise. It is rooted in and responsible to movements for equality, freedom, and justice. Three important contemporary questions within feminist theory concern (a) subjectivity, narrative, and materiality; (b) global neoliberal geopolitics; and (c) global ecologies. Feminist theorists employ the tools of intersectionality, interdisciplinarity, and the intertwinings of scholarship and activism to address these questions. While we labor to contribute to our academic fields, our primary responsibility is to contribute to positive social change.

Printers and presses were central to the physical and social reproduction of the classical anarchist movement from the Paris Commune to the Second World War. Anarchists produced an environment rich in printed words by creating and circulating hundreds of journals, books, and pamphlets in dozens of languages. While some scholars and activists have examined the content of these publications, little attention has been paid to the printing process, the physical infrastructure and bodily practices producing and circulating this remarkable outpouring of radical public speech. This paper brings the resources of the new materialism into conversation with the networks of anarchist printers and presses. Printers and presses operated as nodal points, horizontal linkages among the objects, persons, desires, and ideas constituting anarchist assemblages. In their publishing practices, anarchists may have implicitly identified a constitutive condition of possibility for the flourishing of radical political communities in our time as well as theirs.

Anarchists and homosexuals have periodically occupied similar positions in relation to US laws and policies: both have functioned as the needed outside against which the proper inside of political order can be established and maintained. Both have blurred the relation of words to deeds, speaking words that are forbidden because the words themselves are seen as dangerous deeds. Examining the deportation case of anarchist John Turner in 1903 and the 1993 Pentagon ban on homosexuals serving openly in the military, and utilizing the intellectual tools provided by Judith Butler in her analysis of speech acts, this article investigates the process of criminalizing an identity category as well as the political context from which that criminalization can be challenged. My goals are to make use of Butler's arguments about insurrectionary speech to understand anarchism's historical role in the American political imaginary, and to supplement Butler's analysis with greater attention to the histories of anarchist struggle. Adapted from the source document.