Radical Sensations

Radical Sensationstraces the persistent legacies of sentiment and sensation in U.S. literature, media, and visual culture from 1886, the year of the Haymarket riot in Chicago, until 1927, the year that Marcus Garvey was deported. This half-century witnessed the proliferation of rival world visions and internationalisms, as new media and visual technologies connected people across national boundaries. The significant transnational radical movements that emerged in the late nineteenth century and early twentieth included the International Working People's Association, the Partido Liberal Mexicano, the Socialist Party of America, the Industrial Workers of the World, and the Universal Negro Improvement Association. Focusing on transnational contexts and visual culture, Shelley Streeby suggests that after the 1860s and well into the 1920s, the cultures of sentiment and sensation continued to shape the radical movements of the era, remaining primary modes for envisioning alternative worlds and futures. In the late nineteenth century, sentiment and sensation moved beyond the literary into other cultural realms, including popular performances, songs, political speeches, journalism, and visual culture. Streeby assesses the significance of new forms of visual culture for radical world-movements that took up and transformed discourses of sentiment and sensation in response to violence and injustice in the period between the official end of slavery and the 1930s.