Revolution's Afterlife: The Paris Commune in American Cultural Memory, 1871-1933

Abstract

<bold>Revolution's Afterlife: the Paris Commune in American Cultural Memory, 1871-1933</bold>

Revolution's Afterlife traces the uncanny persistence of the Paris Commune--as specter and spectacle--in the U.S. literary and cultural imaginary from the Gilded Age into the Modernist period. Despite, or perhaps because of, the spectacularly transnational traumas of the twentieth century, scholars and theorists have most often regarded cultural memory as a phenomenon of distinctly national (or intra-national) proportions, an ongoing cultural process of remembering or forgetting a nation's own past triumphs or crises. In turn, both the "culture of memory" and the critical turn to memory studies itself have been figured as distinctive to--or symptomatic of--our own historical moment. By contrast, my project uncovers the thoroughly international contours of American cultural memory in the nineteenth century. Recovering the ways Americans represented and consumed the revolution of 1871 across a variety of literary forms and mass-cultural mediums, from illustrated weeklies and touring panoramas to periodical poetry and the novels of Henry James, I argue that the Commune's American afterlife fundamentally shaped anxieties about the New Woman and burgeoning imperial ambitions in the U.S. even as it transformed the terrain of Paris--and what it meant to be an American there--in American memory.