J. Michelle Coghlan's elegantly written Sensational Internationalism persuasively argues that the Paris Commune produced an “insurgent memory” that profoundly affected US politics and culture. While still examining work by William Dean Howells and Henry James, Sensational Internationalism shifts emphasis away from the exhaustively studied genres of realism, naturalism, and regionalism toward a network of popular forms that included illustrations, panoramas, US boys’ books, and pulp horror fiction. This book has an enviably broad appeal: those who study US culture, the long nineteenth century, world literatures, popular culture, and politics and literature should all read this book.
Coghlan's first chapter explosively examines representations of les pétroleuses (the Commune's women petroleum-throwers) whose radical female political subjectivity subverted republican motherhood. Although Harper's Weekly illustrations cast them as unsexed “red Indians” or unruly monsters, Coghlan recovers forgotten essays and poems about the Communarde that celebrated pétroleuses for defying the conventions of domestic womanhood. This literature imagined these women as reformers on public display, with arms outstretched in defiance of the parlor and the public square.
Two chapters both establish how the Commune informed writing about Americans travelling abroad. The second chapter tracks the imperializing journey of the popular boyhood adventure tale to Paris. In the 1890s, G. A. Henty, Edward King, Robert W. Chambers, and Eugene Savidge dramatized how boys became men in Paris by confronting the Commune and its revolutionary memory. In these narratives, Paris morphs into a frontier populated by Parisians and other revolutionary “non-American” primitives. These boys return from Paris as men certain of their nativist American identities and with the belief that the US Revolution stands out as exceptional and unrepeatable. Largely through Henry James's fiction, chapter 4 establishes how Paris became a contested mediascape for many American tourists. Meditations on post-Commune ruins surface throughout James's writing, “indexing ‘social space’” and grappling with these spaces’ contested histories (106).
“Radical Calendars” stands out as the most field-changing chapter. Opening with accounts of an 1891 pyrotechnic dramatization of the Commune staged on Coney Island, Coghlan outlines how this suppressed uprising became annually commemorated by radicals across multiple ethnic and immigrant groups. Assembling an impressive archive of advertisements, illustrations, and reports of annual Commune celebrations, she gives us a rare account of the culture of US radicalism in the nineteenth century. Rather than fostering left-wing melancholy for an unrealized uprising, these jubilant commemorations invigorated the commitments of attendees and inspired the growth of radical internationalism. Writing by Emma Goldman, Lucy Parsons, and Voltairine de Cleyre receive sustained attention for the way they integrate the memory of the Commune with the longue durée of radicalism, which includes the US Revolution and abolitionism. Coghlan provides a lucid and much-needed examination of US radicalism's international alternative to liberal cosmopolitanism.
The final chapter reads works such as George Spiro's Paris on the Barricades (1929), William Siegel's agitprop The Paris Commune: A Story in Pictures (1932) and Guy Endore's sensational work of horror fiction, The Werewolf of Paris (1933), to establish how “horror became the unlikely conduit for insurgent memory in the 1930s” (132). Spiro's and Siegel's works practice a Gothic aesthetics by drenching their depictions of the Commune in blood and sensational violence. Here horror becomes its own act of protest, according to Coghlan, by calling for revolution anew. By contrast, Endore's werewolf narrative functions as a Gothic lens capable of bringing Paris's revolutionary past into focus for its 1930s readership.
While Coghlan refrains from contemplating what her book may mean for the beleaguered future of cultural studies, her inspired monograph suggests that reports of its death are greatly exaggerated. Her book is its own object lesson in insurgent memory, recalling radical literary criticism's longer legacy, as exemplified in studies by Russ Castronovo, Michael Denning, Eric Lott, Walter Rideout, Kristin Ross, Shelley Streeby, and Alan Wald. Not accidently, she acknowledges previous scholarly contributions by underscoring what this work “reminds” us to do. Sensational Internationalism reanimates cultural studies in the best possible way. In the same manner that succeeding generations of radicals revisited the events of the Paris Commune of 1871, Coghlan sees intellectual possibilities where others mark literary criticism's limits. Now more than ever we need an insurgent literary studies in the mold of Sensational Internationalisms.
