Book Review: Considering Emma Goldman: Feminist Political Ambivalence and the Imaginative Archive, by Clare Hemmings

• DOI: 10.1177/0090591720934411
• Published date: 01 December 2020
• Date: 01 December 2020
• Subject Matter: Book Reviews

934411PTXXXX10.1177/0090591720934411Political TheoryBook Reviews
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Considering Emma Goldman: Feminist Political Ambivalence and the Imaginative Archive,
by Clare Hemmings. Durham: Duke University Press, 2018, 304 pp.
Reviewed by: Elena Gambino, Department of Political Science, Rutgers University,
New Brunswick, NJ, USA
DOI: 10.1177/0090591720934411
In a 1991 reflection in The Women’s Review of Books, Alix Kates Shulman
confesses to “bear[ing] some responsibility for the extrapolation” of Emma
Goldman’s oft-cited line “If I can’t dance, I don’t want to be in your revolu-
tion.” Goldman never actually uttered those words, Shulman admits, although
“the sentiment was pure Emma indeed.” Despite being apocrypha, Shulman
suggests that the line was simply too catchy not to warrant a shift “from
authentic text to familiar paraphrase,” if only because it looked “so lively” on
a T-shirt. Indeed, “history . . . exploded so quickly in those hungrily feminist
days,” Shulman writes, “that the slogan on the original shirt-run was soon
dispersed and copied and broadcast nationwide and abroad, underground and
above, sometimes absent a text to be checked against, changing along the
way like a child’s game of telephone . . .”1
Clare Hemmings’s Considering Emma Goldman begins where Shulman’s
admission leaves off. Rather than seeking to correct the record by reinterpret-
ing Goldman herself, Hemmings is invested in tracing how, and to what effect,
feminists have cultivated an intense desire for a straightforwardly feminist
Emma Goldman and in how they have enlisted Goldman’s presence as evi-
dence of a continuous, century-long feminist project even as they elide many
of Goldman’s actual ideas. Hemmings argues that attempts like Shulman’s to
“recover” Goldman for feminism, like all politically invested histories,
“emerge from a particular standpoint in the present,” and that “[their] invest-
ment in the subjects and objects of inquiry is likely to be hyperbolic, making
visible the stakes in the process but also potentially ignoring aspects of the
past that do not easily fit” (22). In other words, for Hemmings, Goldman
(“E.G.”)2 is a cipher of sorts; her appearances in the annals of political theory,
and especially feminist political theory, are “marked by intimacy—the desire

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for it, the belief one has in it—and the disappointments that go along with
investing too heavily in the significance of the other” (2). Thus, as much as it
is a book about Emma Goldman, Considering Emma Goldman is about the...