Sewing, Fighting and Writing: The Book Archive

The book is a Foucauldian genealogy of the Parisian seamstress and draws on a wide range of published and unpublished documents, many of them never having been translated in English. In looking at an assemblage of radical practices in work, politics and culture, the author explores the constitution of the self of the seamstress in the era of early industrialisation and revolutionary events and considers her contribution to the socio-political and cultural formations in modernity. The book combines extensive archival research with nuanced narrative analysis, informed by theoretical insights that bring together Michel Foucault’s approaches to the study of history, Hannah Arendt’s theorisation of political narratives and Alfred Whitehead’s notion of experience as process: it will thus become a useful theoretical resource as well as a methodological toolbox in an interdisciplinary field of inquiries in the social sciences and humanities.