Awards

• Winner of MSA Prize for a First Book, Modernist Studies Association 2021

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. 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.

Full Product Details

9780231197113

Table of Contents

Reviews

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, as it synthesizes and builds upon a number of comprehensive historical and theoretical debates. -- Elizabeth S. Anker, Cornell University

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, Cornell University 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, author of <i>Fateful Beauty: Aesthetic Environments, Juvenile Development, and Literature 1860-1960</i> 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, author of <i>Nation and Citizenship in the Twentieth-Century British Novel</i>

[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 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, Cornell University 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, author of <i>Fateful Beauty: Aesthetic Environments, Juvenile Development, and Literature 1860-1960</i> 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, author of <i>Nation and Citizenship in the Twentieth-Century British Novel</i>

Author Information

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).

Tab Content 6

Customer Reviews

Recent Reviews

Countries Available