The Department of American and Canadian Studies presents this talk from Dr J Michelle Coghlan, University of Manchester, examining the Paris Commune as a sensation and a lived practice of counter-remembrance in the long nineteenth century.
Tracing the ways annual festivals and celebrations of the Commune united an array of U.S. radicals, the talk shows how these performances of memory drew on the “audacious internationalism” of the Commune to create both a counter-calendar and a counter-memory of the Commune’s failure. Reading Lucy Parsons, Voltairine de Cleyre and Emma Goldman’s writings on the Commune alongside and against both this cycle of leftist remembrance, and the cycle of anxious reprinting these festivals received in mainstream U.S. newspapers, makes more visible and audible the remarkably vibrant and radically internationalist cultures of leftist memory in the long nineteenth century. As a result, we hear beyond the limits of print as an archive of radical memory and lived feeling.
Free, all welcome. Please register online.