Labour Activists’ Archival Assemblages and Resistibility in Memory Work: Emma Goldman, Jean Désirée, and Rose Pesotta

Abstract

Centring the lives and traces of three women labour activists contributes to labour history by showing how archival form becomes a terrain of struggle where questions of work, visibility, and historical legitimacy remain unsettled. In this article I examine the archival afterlives of Jean Désirée, Emma Goldman, and Rose Pesotta to develop the concept of archival assemblages and introduce resistibility as a critical method for engaging the politics of historical visibility in labour history. Each was embedded in distinct traditions of socialist, anarchist, and trade union struggle, and left behind a fragmented or overdetermined archival presence. By tracing the unstable configurations through which their memory circulates I argue that the archive functions as a volatile field of meaning, shaped by material contingencies, affective investments, and epistemic tensions. The article intervenes in feminist memory studies and archival theory by foregrounding resistibility as a condition of the archive itself: its capacity to delay closure, generate friction, and open space for alternative temporalities and political imaginaries. This approach reframes the archive as an active and contested assemblage, where acts of remembering are entangled with acts of refusal, erasure, and reconfiguration. Archival assemblages, I suggest, not only preserve but also unsettle memory, offering new ways of understanding how histories of political labour are made, disrupted, and made again.