‘Good night and good-bye’: temporal and spatial rhythms in piecing together Emma Goldman’s auto/biographical fragments

Fragments of autobiography are everywhere, particularly when you work in archives with letters, diaries and journals. There is always something missing, either because not everything found a place in an archive, because of serendipity, because of intentional selections and deselections as well as because of specific rules of taxonomy and classification that allow certain documents of life to be preserved and others to become obscure and marginalized. Discontinuous and interrupted as they are, auto/biographical fragments create their own rhythms of archival existence and it is on specific spatial and temporal rhythms that this paper focuses, particularly looking into actual and virtual space/time blocks within which auto/biographical fragments emerge and unfold, thus offering analytical trails for the researcher to follow. In doing this I will draw on archival resaerch with Emma Goldman’s papers at the University of California Berkeley.