To celebrate the publication of her book Considering Emma Goldman: Feminist Political Ambivalence and the Imaginative Archive (Duke UP: 2018) Clare Hemmings will talk about the importance for a contemporary audience of anarchist activist and theorist Emma Goldman's struggles to articulate her utopian vision of a transformed world.
While a life-long advocate of sexual freedom, women's emancipation and anti-nationalism, Goldman remained ambivalent about those commitments she was most passionate about. This talk animates the book's central theme: that it is politically productive (indeed imperative) to embrace and theorise uncertainty about the routes to freedom we hold most dear. The work proposes that for us, as for Goldman, attending to ambivalence as a political and affective reality is essential if we are to intervene in gendered, raced and sexual meanings to ameliorate the harms of their interwoven structural horror. So too, that attention suggests the importance of a creative political imagination at the heart of fantasies of redress and revolution, an approach that reshapes our relationship to the archive.
This talk will be followed by a reception, where there will be copies of the book available at a reduced price as well as drink and food!
Considering Emma Goldman (Duke UP: 2018)
https://www.dukeupress.edu/considering-emma-goldman