Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Illustrations
- Acknowledgments
- Series Editors’ Preface
- Introduction: Revolutionary Preoccupations: Or, Transatlantic Feeling in a Radical Sense
- 1 Framing the Pétroleuse: Postbellum Poetry and the Visual Culture of Gender Panic
- 2 Becoming Americans in Paris: The Commune as Frontier in Turn-of-the-Century Adventure Fiction
- 3 Radical Calendars: The Commune Rising in Postbellum Internationalism
- 4 Tasting Space: Sights of the Commune in Henry James's Paris
- 5 Restaging Horror: Insurgent Memories of the Commune in the 1930s
- Epilogue: Barricades Revisited – The Commune on Campus from FSM to SDS
- Notes
- Bibliography
- Index
5 - Restaging Horror: Insurgent Memories of the Commune in the 1930s
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Illustrations
- Acknowledgments
- Series Editors’ Preface
- Introduction: Revolutionary Preoccupations: Or, Transatlantic Feeling in a Radical Sense
- 1 Framing the Pétroleuse: Postbellum Poetry and the Visual Culture of Gender Panic
- 2 Becoming Americans in Paris: The Commune as Frontier in Turn-of-the-Century Adventure Fiction
- 3 Radical Calendars: The Commune Rising in Postbellum Internationalism
- 4 Tasting Space: Sights of the Commune in Henry James's Paris
- 5 Restaging Horror: Insurgent Memories of the Commune in the 1930s
- Epilogue: Barricades Revisited – The Commune on Campus from FSM to SDS
- Notes
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
The Paris lying so superficially quiet beneath its warm blanket of July days and nights was like a volcano about to vomit up the future.
Herbert Gorman, Jonathan BishopUtopia's deepest subject, and the source of all that is most vibrantly political about it, is precisely our inability to conceive it, our incapacity to produce it as a vision, our failure to project the Other of what is, a failure that, as fireworks dissolving in a night sky, must once again leave us alone with this history.
Fredric Jameson, Ideologies of TheoryOn March 15, 1925, the Worker's Party of America, together with the Young Communist League, staged a lavish celebration at Madison Square Garden to commemorate the fifty-fourth anniversary of the Paris Commune. The Boston Globe estimated that some 13,000 people attended the event, while The New York Times noted that “from the cover of the program to the draperies of the platform, women's blouses and men's boutonnieres, the color scheme in the historic Garden was red.” The festivities were opened by Julia Stuart Poyntz, longtime labor advocate and founding member of the Communist Party of the United States (CPUSA), who quipped that “We are now going to overthrow the United States government, so be prepared for the worst,” presumably for the benefit of the many policemen waiting in the wings to disband the gala. But the highlight of the evening was Alexander Arkatov's The Paris Commune, a pageant that represented various scenes from the 1871 uprising and featured a cast of several hundred. Two days later, the Times acidly observed of the dancing that followed: “Apparently, the ‘proletariat’ of New York City has not been reduced to the hapless condition where it is incapable of response to the appeal of a good jazz band.” But as the dancing and the size of the cast help to highlight, Arkatov's worker theater production aimed both to retell the story of the Commune and to find a new theatrical mode for doing so – incorporating humor, jazz, and outsized scale into its revolutionary repertoire. And the spectacle was hailed by The Daily Worker as “the first time in the history of the revolutionary movement [that] a fitting memorial has been arranged for the Paris Commune.”
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- Sensational InternationalismThe Paris Commune and the Remapping of American Memory in the Long Nineteenth Century, pp. 130 - 152Publisher: Edinburgh University PressPrint publication year: 2016