A Response to Shelley Streeby

Abstract

In her essay on labor, memory, and the boundaries of print culture, Shelley Streeby remarks provocatively on the possibilities and perils of print culture as a conduit for radicals aiming to remake in the future the labor struggles and revolutions that were repressed in the past. As the connections she draws from Haymarket back to the Civil War (and past that, the US-Mexico war) and forward to the Mexican Revolution insightfully suggest, these revolutionary reconstructions often reproduced the limits of the very battles their memory-makers evoked. This was especially true with respect to racial lines that fractured but also challenged labor radicalism domestically and transnationally in the late nineteenth century. When wage slavery was compared to chattel slavery or Mexican peonage by labor activists and radicals, the point was as often to lay claim to the upper rungs of a popular social Darwinian racial hierarchy as it was to level those categories in the name of an interracial, international solidarity of labor. Having plumbed with great nuance in her American Sensations: Class, Empire, and the Production of Popular Culture (2002) the complex class, racial, gendered, and urban dimensions making for such fractures in literary constructions of mid-century USMexican hostilities, Streeby shows us here how that colonial imaginary reverberated within the early twentieth-century revolutionary visions of even the most ardently internationalist labor radicals.