Wednesday Talk: Nov. 27, 2024, 10am-12pm – hybrid

Speaker: Franca Iacovetta, History, U of T, and Cynthia Wright, School of Gender, Sexuality and Women’s Studies, York U

Title: “Remembering Emma Goldman in Toronto, 1920s-2020s”

Abstract: Emma Goldman – the Russian-born and US–naturalized anarchist deported from the United States at the height of the First Red Scare in 1919 – is arguably one of the world’s best-known revolutionary women. She spent twenty percent of her exile years (1919-1940) enacting her feminist, anti-fascist, and anarchist politics in Toronto before her death in that city in 1940. Our book-in-progress explores how Goldman has been remembered inter-generationally in the city’s official and popular memory by comrades who outlived her as well as by subsequent generations of feminists, cultural workers, and Toronto’s anarchists. It also explores how her experience as a political deportee, the subject of the first political denaturalization in the US, shaped her anti-fascist, anti-nationalist and internationalist poltics. This talk highlights how comrades, including one-time young proteges, Italians Attilio Bortolotti (1903-1985) and Marie Tiboldo (1905-2005), helped to keep alive Goldman’s legacy. Goldman’s interwar Jewish, Italian, and other immigrant working-class anarchists differ markedly from the middle-class youth who promoted anarchism through various movements from the 1960s onward. But key figures, among them Bortolotti and Tiboldo, acted as bridges between the generations and Bortolotti supported anarchism in Canada and abroad by funding projects, publishing a journal, and maintaining a Toronto anarchist circle.

Bios: Franca Iacovetta is Professor Emerita, University of Toronto and co-editor, Studies in Gender and History, University of Toronto Press. An historian of Canadian and transnational women’s/gender, migration, labour, and radical history, she has published a dozen books. These include, most recently, Before Official Multiculturalism: Women’s Pluralism in Toronto, 1950s-1970s (University of Toronto Press, 2022) and, with Susana Miranda, Cleaning Up: Portuguese Women’s Fight for Labour Rights in Toronto (Between the Lines, 2023).

Cynthia Wright is Associate Professor in the School of Gender, Sexuality, and Women’s Studies at York University. Trained as an historian, she has published on diverse themes including migration and the historical production of “illegality” as well as migrant justice and no borders movements. She is co-editor of Other Diplomacies, Other Ties: Canada and Cuba in the Shadow of the U.S. (University of Toronto Press, 2018). Other projects include an edited volume, with Bridget Anderson and Nandita Sharma, on resistance to immigration controls and citizenship regimes (currently under contract with Duke University Press), and a book on other diplomacies, solidarity, and the Fair Play for Cuba Committees in Cold War Canada.

The link to register is https://forms.office.com/r/XDvuHKszux

The deadline to register is the Monday before the event at noon.  The Zoom link will be sent to registrants only.