Sunday, 11 January 2026: 12:00 PM-1:15 PM
605 (MTCC)
The final decades of the nineteenth century were marked by unprecedented levels of labor unrest, agitation, and organization in the United States, as well as by the emergence of an extraordinary number of radical periodicals. Ernest Longa’s Anarchist Periodicals in English Published in the United States, 1833–1955 (Scarecrow, 2010) surveys nearly a hundred of the most prominent English-language anarchist periodicals from this period, while more recent work by historian Kenyon Zimmer has drawn attention to hundreds more published in a variety of languages. Over the past decade, scholars such as Susan Hinely, Kathy E. Ferguson, and Rachel Hui-Chi Hsu have underscored the important role these journals played in building international solidarity networks, shaping alternate political imaginaries, and shifting wider cultural views on feminism, sexual autonomy, and global freedom struggles. But despite increasing critical interest—as evidenced by the 2018 Radical Americas special issue “Reading the Radical American Periodical”—very little work has been done on the form these journals took and the editorial choices that shaped the radical worlds they opened for readers through the political and literary content they published.
This proposed special session on “Editing as Art and Activism: Rethinking Turn-of-the-Century US Radical Periodicals” takes inspiration from Kathy Ferguson’s Letterpress Revolution: The Politics of Anarchist Print Culture (Duke 2023), which calls for further attention to the aesthetic “dynamite” within anarchist journals, as well as the recent turn in Periodical Studies—spearheaded by Jim Casey, Sarah H. Salter, and Lauren Klein—to attend to what Sarah Blackwood aptly describes as the “often invisible” work of editing. In reconsidering the radical periodical, we aim to rethink both the role such journals played in shaping the canon of thinkers and literature that turn-of-the-century radical readers read, and the too-often overlooked collaborative, multilingual editorial labor that undergirded their aesthetic and political projects. Where much critical work on radical movements has focused on splinter points—particularly the irresolvable divide between Socialist and Anarchist circles—our conversation uncovers interlinkages and the porous boundaries of US radical print cultural circuits.
To maximize conversation among panelists and substantive dialogue with the audience, the session is structured around four 12-minute papers followed by 5–6 minutes of synthesis and discussion among panelists and our presider. This format will allow for at least fifteen minutes of engaged audience exchange during the Q&A.
Kelley Kreitz opens our discussion by examining the role of radical publishing and editorship in the late nineteenth-century Spanish-language press in New York City. Focusing on the anarchist newspaper El Despertar, this paper contextualizes editorship alongside other forms of activism, including public speaking, protesting, and archiving suppressed histories. It illuminates how editors Luis Barcia, José Cayetano Campos, and Pedro Esteve bridged print, education, and movement-building to make El Despertar a vehicle for literary innovation that resisted market-driven genres.
J. Michelle Coghlan turns our attention to the editorial persona that African American anarchist activist and publisher Lucy Parsons crafts (and adapts) across her many editing projects. Focusing on Parsons’s work as editor of the short-lived IWW paper The Liberator (1905–6), Coghlan shows how Parsons’ break with conventional techniques—in particular, her resolute “showing of the seams” and emphasis on editing as collective rather than heroic individual labor—helps us recover editing work as a key site of activist practice and aesthetic experimentation.
Anna Elena Torres explores the crucial role of translation in the Yiddish anarchist press and its editorial activism. Taking as a case study the work Yiddish periodicals in New York and London did to serialize and popularize Kropotkin’s 1902 essay collection Mutual Aid, Torres examines how editors and translators highlighted and reframed the ecological aspects of Kropotkin's work to broaden the ecological imagination of anarchist politics.
John Funchion concludes our panel by re-situating the importance of US radical periodicals and editorial practice in the explosive growth of a leftist intellectual culture and unionization drives. Turning to Upton Sinclair’s anthology The Cry for Justice (1915), Funchion explores how Sinclair responds to the violent suppression of industrial action and cultivates a radical editorial approach in his transnational assemblage of texts by foregrounding collective authorship and emphasizing how many selections emerged from the radical periodicals he read.
This proposed special session on “Editing as Art and Activism: Rethinking Turn-of-the-Century US Radical Periodicals” takes inspiration from Kathy Ferguson’s Letterpress Revolution: The Politics of Anarchist Print Culture (Duke 2023), which calls for further attention to the aesthetic “dynamite” within anarchist journals, as well as the recent turn in Periodical Studies—spearheaded by Jim Casey, Sarah H. Salter, and Lauren Klein—to attend to what Sarah Blackwood aptly describes as the “often invisible” work of editing. In reconsidering the radical periodical, we aim to rethink both the role such journals played in shaping the canon of thinkers and literature that turn-of-the-century radical readers read, and the too-often overlooked collaborative, multilingual editorial labor that undergirded their aesthetic and political projects. Where much critical work on radical movements has focused on splinter points—particularly the irresolvable divide between Socialist and Anarchist circles—our conversation uncovers interlinkages and the porous boundaries of US radical print cultural circuits.
To maximize conversation among panelists and substantive dialogue with the audience, the session is structured around four 12-minute papers followed by 5–6 minutes of synthesis and discussion among panelists and our presider. This format will allow for at least fifteen minutes of engaged audience exchange during the Q&A.
Kelley Kreitz opens our discussion by examining the role of radical publishing and editorship in the late nineteenth-century Spanish-language press in New York City. Focusing on the anarchist newspaper El Despertar, this paper contextualizes editorship alongside other forms of activism, including public speaking, protesting, and archiving suppressed histories. It illuminates how editors Luis Barcia, José Cayetano Campos, and Pedro Esteve bridged print, education, and movement-building to make El Despertar a vehicle for literary innovation that resisted market-driven genres.
J. Michelle Coghlan turns our attention to the editorial persona that African American anarchist activist and publisher Lucy Parsons crafts (and adapts) across her many editing projects. Focusing on Parsons’s work as editor of the short-lived IWW paper The Liberator (1905–6), Coghlan shows how Parsons’ break with conventional techniques—in particular, her resolute “showing of the seams” and emphasis on editing as collective rather than heroic individual labor—helps us recover editing work as a key site of activist practice and aesthetic experimentation.
Anna Elena Torres explores the crucial role of translation in the Yiddish anarchist press and its editorial activism. Taking as a case study the work Yiddish periodicals in New York and London did to serialize and popularize Kropotkin’s 1902 essay collection Mutual Aid, Torres examines how editors and translators highlighted and reframed the ecological aspects of Kropotkin's work to broaden the ecological imagination of anarchist politics.
John Funchion concludes our panel by re-situating the importance of US radical periodicals and editorial practice in the explosive growth of a leftist intellectual culture and unionization drives. Turning to Upton Sinclair’s anthology The Cry for Justice (1915), Funchion explores how Sinclair responds to the violent suppression of industrial action and cultivates a radical editorial approach in his transnational assemblage of texts by foregrounding collective authorship and emphasizing how many selections emerged from the radical periodicals he read.
This panel brings together a diverse group of scholars across academic rank (Assistant Professor, Associate Professor, Teaching Professor and Senior Lecturer), institutional location (including US- and internationally based faculty), and research perspective. Both the panel's composition and its content foreground inclusive, transnational and multilingual approaches to radical periodical culture.
Organizer:
J. Michelle Coghlan
Presider:
Sarah Salter
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