The Fury Archives

The Fury Archives is a tour-de-force study of modernist women’s struggles for citizenship and human rights across transnational geographies. Richards reminds us of the variegated sites and everydayness of politics—from the sphere of reproductive labor to the quotidian committee meeting—and offers a compelling genealogy of the intersections between women’s rights and human rights. It is one of the most nuanced accounts of politics as praxis I have ever read. -- Janice Ho, author of Nation and Citizenship in the Twentieth-Century British Novel
Jill Richards’s exploration of “the daily life of feminist action” brilliantly trains our attention on aspects of revolutionary work—routines and tactics, protocols and cycles—too often obscured in later histories. Traversing disciplines, genres, and oceans in unprecedented ways, it requires us to reconsider many of our most cherished assumptions about the relation between avant-garde art and political aspiration. -- Douglas Mao, author of Fateful Beauty: Aesthetic Environments, Juvenile Development, and Literature 1860-1960
Jill Richards’s book is masterful in its range of inquiries, beautifully written, and elegantly argued. The research supporting the book’s radical and provocative arguments is also exceptionally thorough and meticulously engaged; it synthesizes and builds upon a number of comprehensive historical and theoretical debates. -- Elizabeth S. Anker, Cornell University
The range of objects in The Fury Archives is truly impressive, and Richards tackles every object and text that she has excavated for analysis with great skill . . . Richards presents life stories that are not recorded in mainstream history and the unearthing of which creates a more inclusive, accurate, and complete picture of history. * ASAP/Journal *
The sense of this being a history of the present is hard to ignore . . . That strategies such as the occupation of public spaces as an act of protest, strikes to try to accelerate governmental action or the naming of names as an act of acknowledgement and remembrance remain familiar and continue to be employed make many of the decades-old archives seem eerily contemporary. * ArtReview Asia *
Traversing the boundary between the intimate and the public, Richards shows us how to look anew at female citizenship . . . [The Fury Archives] offers important methodological insights to human rights scholars concerned with the field's over-reliance on narrative history. * Human Rights Quarterly *
In addition to rewriting the history of the avant-garde . . . to reveal more complicated entanglements with female citizenship, The Fury Archives offers an energizing model for how we might study feminist activism, sustain ourselves through the long slog of collective action, and intervene in our own here and now. * Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society *