The Fury Archives: Female Citizenship, Human Rights, and the International Avant-Gardes

by Juno Jill Richards

Overview

In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, radical women’s 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-state’s rights of man and citizen, suggesting an alternative conceptual vocabulary for women’s 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 women’s 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 women’s 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 Höch, Claude Cahun, Paulette Nardal, and Leonora Carrington. An expansive and methodologically innovative book, The Fury Archives argues that the relationship of women’s rights movements and the avant-gardes offers a radical alternative to liberal discourses of human rights in formation at the same historical moment.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780231197113
Publisher:	Columbia University Press
Publication date:	08/11/2020
Series:	Modernist Latitudes
Pages:	344
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x (d)

About the Author

Juno Jill Richards is assistant professor of English and affiliated faculty in the Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies Program at Yale University. They are a coauthor of The Ferrante Letters: An Experiment in Collective Criticism (Columbia, 2020).

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments vii

Introduction 1

Part I Sex and Citizenship in the Atlantic Archives

1 The Fury Archives: Afterlives of the Female Incendiary 31

2 The Long Middle: Militant Suffrage from Britain to South Africa 68

Part II The Reproductive Atlantic

3 The Art of Not Having Children: Birth Strike, Sabotage, and the Reproductive Atlantic 105

4 Rhineland Bastards, Queer Species: An Afro-German Case Study 144

Part III Convergences in Institutional Human Rights

5 Surrealisms Inhumanities: Chance Encounter, Lesbian Crime, Queer Resistance 185

6 The Committee Form: Negritude Women and the United Nations 230

Epilogue. Social Reproduction and the Midcentury Witch: Leonora Carrington in Mexico 254

Notes 271

Bibliography 297

Index 317

Editorial Reviews

The 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 Asia

The Fury Archives is a tour-de-force study of modernist women’s 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 women’s rights and human rights. It is one of the most nuanced accounts of politics as praxis I have ever read.

Janice Ho

[The Fury Archives] 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 . . . In Richards’s keen analysis of ordinary moments in the past we may find affinities with the ordinary moment we are experiencing here and now, as scholars, feminists, and citizens.

ASAP Journal

Jill Richards’s 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

Jill Richards’s book is masterful in its range of inquiries, beautifully written, and elegantly argued. The research supporting the book’s 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

Traversing the boundary between the intimate and the public, Richards shows us how to look anew at female citizenship . . . [The Fury Archives] offers important methodological insights to human rights scholars concerned with the field's over-reliance on narrative history.

Human Rights Quarterly

The 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/Journal

In addition to rewriting the history of the avant-garde . . . to reveal more complicated entanglements with female citizenship, The Fury Archives offers an energizing model for how we might study feminist activism, sustain ourselves through the long slog of collective action, and intervene in our own here and now.

Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society