Voltairine De Cleyre’s Transnational Anarchism

This study of Voltairine de Cleyre’s transnational anarchism focuses on her work as pedagogue and translator to reveal the originality of her thought. Close reading of her writing, including personal correspondence, provides new insight into a key, unjustly neglected and altogether contemporary figure in American anarchist history. ‘We have never really understood her: even sympathetic writers have misrepresented Voltairine de Cleyre. Was she a self-denying martyr or a Nietzschean egoist? Mired in the nineteenth century, or in advance of her time? Rita Filanti takes on the challenge of this anarchist-feminist forerunner in all her complexity, situating her in transatlantic political networks. A frustrating, fascinating figure, de Cleyre has never been given such a full assessment.’Prof. Jesse Cohn, author of Underground Passages‘Focusing on de Cleyre’s work as translator, educator, and poet, Rita Filanti offers a rich new appreciation of her anarchism as grounded in the radical traditions of the American transcendentalists, Quakers, and early abolitionists. Filanti’s discussion of de Cleyre’s poetry is fresh and thrilling, showing how Voltairine’s engagement with language upends ‘the fetish of monolingualism’ to celebrate hybrid encounters between equals.’Prof. Kathy E Ferguson, author of Letterpress Revolution and Emma Goldman: Political thinking in the streetsVoltairine de Cleyre (1866-1912) remains little-known today, although Emma Goldman considered her ‘the greatest woman-Anarchist of America’. Based on extensive new research and archival discoveries, Rita Filanti follows the evolution of de Cleyre’s thought, from early conversion to untimely death. Focusing on her pedagogy and translations, and re-evaluating her poetry and prose, the book combines a close reading of de Cleyre’s writings with in-depth analysis of her transnational and translingual engagements — with the Modern School movement, American-Jewish life, the ‘Woman Question’, and the Mexican Revolution. Despite a growing interest in her life and work, Voltairine de Cleyre’s contribution to anarchist studies, women studies, and American literature is still mostly unacknowledged. Described by Emma Goldman as ‘the most gifted and brilliant anarchist woman America ever produced’, de Cleyre authored poems, prose sketches, lectures and translations which radiate with her vision of the world, meticulous use of language, and iconoclastic vigor. Drawing on her copious correspondence with family members, friends and comrades, this monograph provides novel insight into the most significant events of her life while investigating the aesthetic concern characterizing all of her writing. Constantly shifting across languages, she established cosmopolitan networks within immigrant communities at home and beyond the ocean, always believing, until her untimely death, in universal solidarity and the ultimate non-existence of national, ethnic and linguistic barriers.

Pagina's: 272, Hardcover, Manchester University Press (P648)