Les séminaires A19 (L’Atelier Dix-neuvième) et W19 (Nineteenth-Century Worlds) s’associent pour une séance intitulée « Louise Michel en Amérique ».
J. Michelle Coghlan (University of Manchester) présentera un chapitre de son livre Louise Michel in America, à paraître chez Rutgers University Press.
Louise Michel journeyed far beyond France—enduring forced exile in New Caledonia and chosen exile in London; touring Europe in the early 1880s; and voyaging to Algeria in 1904, in the final months of her life. But unlike comrades such as Peter Kropotkin (and Mikhail Bakunin before him), she never visited America, as plans for her much-anticipated US lecture tour were scrapped in 1897 under intense US government pressure. Yet even from afar, this celebrated—and infamous—anarchist orator, educational activist, and former Communarde made her presence felt across the United States both during and long after her lifetime. Louise Michel in America uncovers her expansive influence on late-nineteenth-century American radicals—especially Emma Goldman, Voltairine de Cleyre, and Lucy Parsons—and her outsized presence in US culture at large. That Michel once mattered so much to so many reveals not only nineteenth-century US radicals’ internationalist circuits of affiliation, but also how national borders—and her demarcation as French—continue to obscure the importance of those cross-national ties, despite decades of transnational scholarship and recent work tracing the Commune’s global ripples. As historian Constance Bantman notes, virtually no work has explored Michel’s legacy outside France or the activist networks she helped build in exile. Louise Michel in America tells that riveting and untold story—and in doing so, helps us reframe both the Commune and nineteenth-century radicalism “on the move,” highlighting radicalism’s prominent place in US print culture and what Kristin Ross calls the Commune’s enduring “centrifugal effects.” The chapter I’ll present for A19/W19, “Epistolary Activism: Re-tracing Louise Michel’s US Radical Networks,” recovers Michel’s under-appreciated footprint in US radical periodicals and circles by way of her essays and speeches, reports on her lectures and radical experiments like the free International School she founded in London in 1891, and the letters she exchanged with US radicals. I argue this overlooked archive helps to adumbrate not just how US radicals heard or read about Michel, but how they came to think with and be moved by her.
Thomas Caubet (Université Paris Cité) sera discutant.
La séance est également accessible à distance. Merci de contacter Michaël Roy, Cécile Roudeau, Auréliane Narvaez ou Thomas Constantinesco pour obtenir le lien de connexion.