J. Michelle Coghlan's Sensational Internationalism: The Paris Commune and the Remapping of American Memory in the Long Nineteenth Century

J. Michelle Coghlan's Sensational Internationalism: The Paris Commune and the Remapping of American Memory in the Long Nineteenth Century

The failure of Western neoliberalism has had many deleterious effects, of which perhaps the most terrifying has been the resurgence of fascism, ethnonationalism, chauvinism, and other hateful facets of the extreme right wing. Their reintroduction into the mainstream of political discourse, however, has effectively reinvigorated a leftism that had grown docile during the impatient years of relative domestic stability in the West. J. Michelle Coghlan's Sensational Internationalism: The Paris Commune and the Remapping of American Memory in the Long Nineteenth Century could not have arrived at a better time. The book, which won the 2017 Arthur Miller Institute First Book Prize, deftly connects the memory of the Paris Commune and the profound effects it had on contemporary American literary and political discourse with the transatlantic state of affairs after Occupy Wall Street, Brexit, and the election of Trump. Coghlan begins with explicit reference to “recent events-in particular, scenes from Zuccotti park in the fall of 2011,” in order to approach the Paris Commune of 1871, a revolutionary government that was established by radical socialists following the fall of Paris during the Franco-Prussian War (1). Though the relation between the two events might not seem self-evident, Coghlan's research explores the curiously potent specter of the Paris Commune in leftist discourse and activism throughout the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. While she reads literary texts like the work of Henry James, she also analyzes popular fiction of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries (e.g. Edward King's Under the Red Flag, G. A. Henty's A Woman of the Commune, and The Werewolf of Paris by Guy Endore) and other forms of cultural production such as plays, periodical poems, tableaux vivants, and cycloramas. Coghlan's decision to broaden the scope of her investigation in this manner has produced an account of the reverberating impacts of the Paris Commune that is exhaustive, informative, and compelling.