the history of the genre and these two critiques of confession, anarchist autobiography could be read as providing the sort of public transparency of Godwin’s utopia, or as subverting traditional, external authorities as in Bakunin’s text. The appeal of moving beyond confession for anarchists is that autobiography envisions a different understanding of the individual and her authority. A more transparent iteration of Bakunin’s confession to the Tsar would be Kropotkin’s account of life in tsarist Russia in his written Memoirs of a Revolutionist, not to appease any authority but to reckon with the conditions of the state that bore on the author’s upbringing. The autobiographical genre concerns itself with a form of authorization unlike the confession, invested in both the individual and her community. A second appeal of autobiography for anarchism is the genre’s ability to represent individuals outside state institutions. A constitutive element of anarchism’s critique of the state is its suspicion of representative institutions. In his 1870 Illusion of Universal Suffrage,” “The Bakunin critiqued the notion that a government and a legislature emerging out of a popular “that election must or even can represent the real will of the people.” As I discuss below, Goldman’s critique of suffrage as the of feminist movements in the United States focused on those “fetish” movements’ overlooking the severity of economic conditions at home and the inefficiency of the vote abroad. And yet largely because of this principled opposition to political representation, American anarchists in the late 19th century found themselves consistently at the mercy of judges, juries and lawyers that had few qualms making defendants the movement’s martyrs. Various autobiographies responded to these trials as a way of circumventing the narrow ideology and audience of court testimony, including the and Autobiographies of the Haymarket Martyrs Alexander Berkman’s These texts not only sought to Prison Memoirs of an Anarchist.
the history of the genre and these two critiques of confession, anarchist autobiography could be read as providing the sort of public transparency of Godwin’s utopia, or as subverting traditional, external authorities as in Bakunin’s text. The appeal of moving beyond confession for anarchists is that autobiography envisions a different understanding of the individual and her authority. A more transparent iteration of Bakunin’s confession to the Tsar would be Kropotkin’s account of life in tsarist Russia in his Memoirs of a Revolutionist, written not to appease any authority but to reckon with the conditions of the state that bore on the author’s upbringing. The autobiographical genre concerns itself with a form of authorization unlike the confession, invested in both the individual and her community. A second appeal of autobiography for anarchism is the genre’s ability to represent individuals outside state institutions. A constitutive element of anarchism’s critique of the state is its suspicion of representative institutions. In his 1870 “The Illusion of Universal Suffrage,” Bakunin critiqued the notion that “that a government and a legislature emerging out of a popular election must or even can represent the real will of the people.” As I discuss below, Goldman’s critique of suffrage as the “fetish” of feminist movements in the United States focused on those movements’ overlooking the severity of economic conditions at home and the inefficiency of the vote abroad. And yet largely because of this principled opposition to political representation, American anarchists in the late 19th century found themselves consistently at the mercy of judges, juries and lawyers that had few qualms making defendants the movement’s martyrs. Various autobiographies responded to these trials as a way of circumventing the narrow ideology and audience of court testimony, including the Autobiographies of the Haymarket Martyrs and Alexander Berkman’s Prison Memoirs of an Anarchist. These texts not only sought to
WPSA%202014%20-%20Nolan%20Bennett,%20Attentat%20and%20Autobiography.docx