'It was the circus, and I was the clown': Emma Goldman, popular and avant-garde cultures of American modernity, and the politics of (self-) performance

My doctoral dissertation examines the plurality of cultural roles performed by American anarchist and feminist Emma Goldman (1869--1940), and focuses upon how she established her iconic position within modern American popular and avant-garde cultures through specific and political strategies of self-representation. Goldman's forceful and unique personality has been the subject of dozens of critical studies, films, novels, and plays. Nevertheless, the full range of her public personae has not been adequately represented in critical studies, which typically focus solely upon the anarchist and feminist aspects of her life and politics. Furthermore, despite Goldman's direct statements concerning the personal politics of subjectivity, especially her controversial assertion that "it is more important to do political work with one's personality than with propaganda," most scholarship virtually ignores the broad range of political ideologies informing her public self-construction (qtd. in Wexler, 1984: 198). 1 Directly engaged with Goldman's critical analysis of the politics of subjectivity, my project examines the myriad of political, artistic, intellectual, and other public roles embodied by Goldman, as well as the various cultural stages upon which they were performed. In particular, I concentrate upon her most prominent roles within modern avant-garde and popular American cultures and consider the political and cultural work performed by her public and highly publicized acts of self-dramatization. Situating her theatrical self-performances within a European anarchist tradition of "propaganda by the deed," I argue that her rhetorical and embodied self-stagings, while grounded in anarchist ideologies and practices, were also directly inspired and influenced by avant-garde theories of self-production as well as by popular practices of (self-) performance within modern America. I consider the political functions and cultural implications of her theatrical self-performances in terms of avant-garde aesthetic, popular, feminist and legal contexts of modern American subjectivity, and assess her contributions to modern American cultures of the spectacle, performance, avant-gardism, and the popular.;1Emma Goldman, in a letter to Leon Maimed, April 7, 1906.