Writing Revolution: Hispanic Anarchism in the United States ed. by Christopher J. Castañeda and Montse Feu (review)

Writing Revolution: Hispanic Anarchism in the United States illuminates an intricate and often overlooked legacy of Hispanophone anarchism that for the most part is absent from critical discussions in mainstream nineteenth-century periodical studies. Editors Christopher J. Castañeda and Montse Feu have brought together some of the most active scholars in Hispanophone anarchism to produce Writing Revolution. The volume's fifteen chapters are divided into five parts that give the collection a sense of historical, textual, and philosophical linearity and cohesion. Featuring scholars of Hispanophone print culture, anarchist history, communications, peninsular literature, and syndicalism, with institutional affiliations in Mexico, Spain, and the U. S., Writing Revolution features a diversity of scholarly voices mirroring the transnational networks that are the book's focus. This volume offers a variety of terms and methods for historians, critics, and educators to better understand transnational anarchist networks in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

The chapters in Writing Revolution illustrate how late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century transnational anarchist movements were forged and sustained through the press. The anarchist press created networks across political lines and between dissident communities. For instance, in Chapter 1 (Part 1), "Spanish Republicanism and the Press," Sergio Sánchez Collante analyzes the circulation of Spanish freethinking newspapers in mostly Hispanophone anarchist communities in the United States. Collante demonstrates that freethinking newspapers like the Madrid-based Las Dominicales del Libre Pensamiento (The Sunday Supplement of Free Thought) were read in the U. S., where they contributed to heterodox standpoints across the political spectrum. Collante makes the point that Las Dominicales is often overlooked in studies of the politicization of anarchist workers because of the paper's self-proclaimed affiliation with Spanish republicanism. By looking beyond Las Dominicales' political association, Collante shows how Las Dominicales erected a network that linked all Spanish-speaking readers "who opposed the influence of the Catholic church and other traditional powers in Spanish society and culture" (18). Collante's piece, like many that follow in the volume, presents the anarchist press as an architect of networks and imagined communities.

An important take-away from this collection is that for anarchist networks to work, they had to be sustained. Alejandro De La Torre's meticulous recovery work of V. Bardají, José Cayetano Campos, and Vicente García in Chapter 2, "Globetrotters and Rebels," demonstrates the vital role newspaper correspondence played in the formation of the Spanish anarchist press between 1886 and 1918. De La Torre posits that long-lasting networks between transnational anarchist communities were made possible through little-known correspondents "who gave account of the social panorama and the struggles of the oppressed in various regions of the globe" (37). Correspondence between the U. S. and Spain helped to build and sustain a global liberation community that became the "emergence of a powerful transnational print culture" (36).

Complementing De La Torre's chapter on anarchist correspondents, the following chapter, "Anarchism and the End of Empire" by Christopher J. Castañeda, focuses on the Cuban anarchist José Cayetano Campos. Campos's writing in the 1880s and 1890s often emphasized the complex relationships between Cuban- and Spanish-born anarchists. Combing through newspaper archives of La Questíon Social (The Social Question), El Productor (The Producer), El Despertar (The Awakening), El Rebelde (The Rebel) and others, Castañeda argues that "Campos sought to unify their divergent ideological perspectives by focusing attention on the plight of labor rather than divisive and highly politicized disputes and antagonisms" (53). In other words, by emphasizing labor and labor rights, these anarchist newspapers unified Cuban separatists, peninsular proletariats, and anarcho-syndicalists. In Chapter 5 (Part 2), "Spanish-Speaking Anarchists in the United States," Susana Sueiro Seoane argues for what she calls a "print culture from below," that is, an anarchist print network that "served as a tool of propaganda and education for workers, many of whom became anarchists...