Cultural and Political Activism of the 1960s and 1970s Research Papers (original) (raw)

Ideological divides and a lack of collaboration have characterized diasporic Coptic activism over the last five decades. Fragmentation among Coptic organizations with competing narratives and strategies has hindered alliance-building, grassroots mobilization, fundraising, and policy impact. Despite these challenges, the so-called Aqbāt al-mahjar remain attuned to and invested in Egyptian concerns, offering a compelling counter-narrative to dominant representations inside Egypt that paint them as traitors to the national cause and party to foreign intervention.

- by and +1
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- Middle East Studies, Human Rights, Coptic Studies, Diaspora and transnationalism

La «politica dei sacrifici» del governo Andreotti e la proposta dell’«austerità» avanzata da Berlinguer furono il principale bersaglio del movimento del 1977. Sacrifici e austerità erano ritenuti due programmi convergenti, finalizzati – secondo i contestatori – non solo a fronteggiare la crisi economica ma a prefigurare un modello di sviluppo basato sulla riduzione dei livelli di benessere per le classi subalterne. Attacchi molto duri furono indirizzati al Partito comunista. Ebbe così luogo, quell’anno, la prima contrapposizione esplicita e frontale in Italia fra il principale partito della sinistra e un movimento sociale. Il movimento considerava infatti il Pci collocato a difesa del capitalismo e lontano da ogni progetto di trasformazione della società. Si trattò non solo di uno scontro politico e ideologico, ma anche di una contrapposizione tra diversi universi culturali, sistemi di valori, modelli esistenziali, che traducevano modi diversi di interpretare e vivere le trasformazioni della società italiana (la raggiunta maturità della società del benessere, la diffusione dei consumi, la ricerca del soddisfacimento di bisogni individuali). Il movimento fu di fatto anche un’espressione di quei cambiamenti, cui diede corpo con nuove forme di politicizzazione e un rapporto tra militanza e privato diverso dal passato. Quei fermenti, tuttavia, attraversarono anche il corpo del Pci, nonostante le rigide posizioni del gruppo dirigente.

- by Alessio Gagliardi
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- Social Movements, Modern Italian History, Italy 1970s, Italian 1977 Movement

This article helps to account for the radicalization of vast sectors of the Latin American youth in the Sixties by studying the social and emotional lives of young Chilean communists. Scholars point to the increasing dominance of ideology when studying youth radicalization, ignoring the strong emotions underpinning left-wing activism. I show that ideology was embedded in a web of social and emotional relationships and argue that the appeal of the left among the youth of the era cannot be understood without recourse to feelings of friendship and love. Young people from all walks of life made friendly contacts with young activists that led them to commit further, and, once active in youth political organizations, they forged strong emotional bonds that provided them with a sense of belonging and a shared identity. Love played a crucial role in bringing new people into the ranks of the left and strengthening their political commitment. Young activists felt an intense need to date and marry those who shared their ideas in order to have a fulfilling life.

- by Alfonso Salgado Muñoz
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- Latin American Studies, History Of Emotions, Communism, History of Chile

Authored, listed alphabetically, by R. Cahill, R. Connell, B. Freeman, T. Irving, B. Scribner, this is the founding manifesto of what became the innovative and radical Free University (Free U), Sydney, 1967-1972. The Sydney Free U initially operated out of rented premises in Redfern (Sydney) before moving to premises in nearby suburbs. The first Free U courses commenced in December 1967, and early in the new year involved 150 people. At its peak, during the summer of 1968-1969, over 300 people were involved in courses. The Sydney experiment stimulated others to attempt something similar in Adelaide, Armidale, Brisbane, Hobart, and Melbourne, although the Sydney experiment seems to have been the most successful. This foundation document is included in C. Turney (editor), 'Sources in the History of Australian Education 1788-1970' [Angus & Robertson, Sydney, 1975].

- by Rowan J Cahill and +1
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- History, Intellectual History, Education, Higher Education
- by Christopher Wright
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- American History, U.S. history, 1960s (U.S. history), Liberalism
- by Elizabeth Toohey
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- Women's Studies, Women's History, 1960s (U.S. history), Women's Rights

From 1963–65, Greenwich Village’s most progressive ministry, Judson Memorial Church, hosted a group of young dancers—alongside poets, painters, community activists, and its parishioners—who did appear to be uniquely of their time. The Museum of Modern Art’s exhibition Judson Dance Theater: The Work is Never Done is centrally an invocation of the zeitgeist of that historical moment and the artists who helped shape it. Written into the show’s title as well as the curation as a whole, the exhibition’s implicit inquiry is: how do we look back from where we are; what does that time tell us about our times? And for those who accept the invitation: what might the creative action of that fertile and contentious era ask us of being and acting in our own?

- by Abigail Levine
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- Performing Arts, Dance Studies, Performance Studies, Performance Art

Für Amerikaner und Westeuropäer war der Kalte Krieg nur am Rande ein bewaffneter Konflikt und mehr als eine reine Auseinandersetzung zwischen den zwei großen Ideologien Kommunismus und liberaler Kapitalismus. Er beeinflusste Gesellschaft, Wissenschaft und Kultur in den westlichen Staaten in ganz erheblichem Maße: Der Rüstungswettlauf war einerseits Projektionsfläche tiefgreifender Ängste vor einem atomaren Holocaust. Andererseits sollte diese Angst durch Planung und Verwissenschaftlichung in kollektive Sicherheit transformiert werden. In diesem Sinne versteht der vorliegende Band den Kalten Krieg als ‚Krieg der Imaginationen‘ (Mary Kaldor). Er führt Beiträge von Militär-, Sozial- und Ideenhistorikern in einer sozialen Ideengeschichte zusammen und bereichert unser Wissen über eines der am tiefsten einschneidenden Phänomene des 20. Jahrhunderts um wichtige, bislang aber vernachlässigte Facetten.

- by Patrick Bernhard
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- Military History, Cultural History, History of Education, Cold War and Culture

Interviews I conducted with Max Roach and Marion Brown in the 1990s regarding the relationship between jazz and politics.

- by Anna Mollow
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- Feminism, 1970s Culture, Feminist history, Gay and Lesbian History

11i fan ci weeru mee atum 1973, kilifay Senegaal yëgle faatug Omar Bolondeŋ Jóob, mu doonoon ndaw, doonoon ab bañkat (résistant) ak ab ma-pasin (un artiste), amoon 26i at, ñu téye woon ko ca kaso ba ca Gore. Daanaka am na xaaju xarnu (demi-siècle) boobu ba tay, li Càmm gi (l'État) wax te mooy dafa xaru, ñu bari weddi loolu ne ñoom dañu koo yong (assassiner). "Dellusiwaat ci jaar-jaari Bolondeŋ Jóob ci jamono ju ñuy wut a jàllarbi (révolutionner) li fi nekkoon ci Senegaal".

- by Florian Bobin
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- African History, Senegal, Neo-colonialism, Decolonisation
- by Martin Wiklund
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- Historical Consciousness, Counter Culture, Narrative Analysis, Swedish History

Maya Smuckler's book reviewed

- by Betsy A McLane
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- Film Studies, Exploitation Cinema, Film History, 1970s Culture

This article explores the meaning of “resistance” and suggests a new path for “resistance studies,” which is an emerging and interdisciplinary field of the social sciences that is still relatively fragmented and heterogeneous. Resistance has often been connected with antisocial attitudes, destructiveness, reactionary or revolutionary ideologies, unusual and sudden explosions of violence, and emotional outbursts. However, we wish to add to this conceptualization by arguing that resistance also has the potential to be productive, plural and fluid, and integrated into everyday social life. The first major part of the article is devoted to discuss existing understandings of resistance with the aim of seeking to capture distinctive features and boundaries of this social phenomenon. Among other things, we will explore resistance in relation to other key concepts and related research fields. We then, in the article’s second major part, propose a number of analytical categories and possible entrances aiming at inspire more in-depth studies of resistance.

- by mikael baaz and +1
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- Cultural Studies, Social Movements, Cultural Sociology, Social Networks

from Ten Years that Shook the City: San Francisco, 1968-1978, edited by Chris Carlsson (City Lights Press, 2011)

- by Alexander H Schwan
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- Cultural Studies, Art History, Performing Arts, Theatre Studies

In this article, I argue that "The Irishman" and "Once Upon a Time in Hollywood" are two of the most suitable films of the Trump presidency, because they provide an otherwise-unattainable closure to various aspects of American history. In Martin Scorsese's epic, we are invited to see the inner circle of the real decision makers of the American Century, as we follow Robert De Niro's Frank Sheeran rise through the mafia, becoming involved with everything from the Bay of Pigs to the murder of Joey Gallo. Scorsese finally "solves" the mystery over who killed Gallo, and what caused Jimmy Hoffa (Al Pacino) to disappear, and so gives a gloss of closure which was especially attractive during the Trump years. Tarantino's alternative tale of the Manson murders, meanwhile, invites us to imagine a perpetual 1960s existence. By saving Sharon Tate, Leonardo DiCaprio's Rick Dalton also saves his career, and on a wider level, saves America from the paranoia, instability, and economic catastrophe of the 1970s. Referring to Joan Didion's article on the end of the 1960s, I argue that by allowing us to imagine that the Manson murders on Cielo Drive had not happened, Tarantino implies that the 1960s, and all of the attendant cultural attachments, would have continued endlessly.

- by Ciarán Leinster
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- American History, Cultural History, American Studies, Film Studies
- by Rabab Abdulhadi
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- Gender Studies, Middle East Studies, Middle East & North Africa, Gender History

This article examines the activism of a specific subset of Chilean communist women – those whose loved ones were abducted and who mobilised to demand justice – against the Pinochet dictatorship. It focuses on a well-organised and well-publicised hunger strike inside the United Nations headquarters in Santiago, Chile, which denounced the dictatorship’s use of forced disappearance. It argues that these women’s prior political experience and contacts enabled them to organise demonstrations and make successful human rights claims in a changing global environment. In so doing, this article expands and re-politicises the cast of protagonists of the human rights revolution of the 1970s.
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The Version of Record of this manuscript has been published and is available in Cold War History, vol. 18, no. 2, pp. 169-186 - http://www.tandfonline.com/10.1080/14682745.2017.1404988

- by Alfonso Salgado Muñoz
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- Women's History, Human Rights, Cold War, United Nations

Doshisha American Studies (March 2010)

- by Ramzi Fawaz
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- Cultural Studies, Social Movements, American Studies, Queer Studies

This text examines three early writings by LeRoi Jones/Amiri Baraka, a radical Black intellectual whose stance toward the role of African Americans within American society underwent a significant change in the early 1960s. He belongs to a generation of Black authors who began to publicly advocate the use of violence in the struggle for an overall improvement of the socioeconomic status of African Americans. Heavily influenced early on by the Beat Generation and liberalism of Greenwich Village, Baraka emerged in the sixties as perhaps the most powerful literary voice of Black intellectual circles in the United States. In particular three of his early texts – Blues People: Negro Music in White America, Dutchman and The System of Dante’s Hell – reflect his views of the African American situation in the context of the 1960s and are therefore analyzed in this paper in terms of the intellectual transformation of Baraka from a mere advocate of Black culture to a militant Black Nationalist advocating an revolution against white supremacy.

The underground magazines of the seventies were innovative, provocative and often made with limited resources. In the second half of the 20th century, they represented a fertile laboratory for experimenting. They came about in the wake of the 1968 protests, fostered by the common drive for a sort of revolt, and seemed to anticipate some of the trends that would fully develop with the advent of the digital era: from an innovative definition of the boundaries of the public sphere to a more original structure of hierarchies between producers and consumers.
A rich and multifaceted array of experiences paying particular attention to the renovation called for by a number of social stakeholders – from the fierce, second-generation feminism to the most extreme fringes of extra-parliamentary political action – is here explored by scholars from different fields of study through the analysis of the single cases and/or specific genres.
Such an array has inevitably drawn the renewed attention of periodical studies: indeed, while it should be said that such a period was short lived, the results it produced, the traces and the problematic legacy it left are now to be found in the ambitious, perhaps utopian project of a shared, polyphonic culture, fuelled by constant dialectics between the one and the many.

- by Andrea Chiurato
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- History, Comparative Literature, French Literature, Music

Il volume ripercorre le molte analisi e interpretazioni del Settantasette, per ricostruire la complessità e le molteplici sfaccettature di quell’evento e inserirlo in una più ampia prospettiva storica. Si confronta con le difficoltà di una definizione generale del movimento (la sua collocazione tra i movimenti sociali, la composizione e le diverse concezioni del conflitto che lo attraversarono) così come con i temi e le questioni che hanno animato quell’esperienza di mobilitazione e conflitto (l’enfasi sui desideri, la crisi del lavoro come fattore di identità, la violenza realizzata e subita, le elaborazioni culturali ed espressive). Si interroga inoltre sui rapporti tra il Settantasette e la società italiana del periodo, sui lasciti del movimento e sulle memorie che intorno a esso si sono prodotte.

- by Jon Piccini
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- History, History of Childhood and Youth, Political History, Transnational History

The Quest for Socialist Utopia looks at the Ethiopian student uprising of the 1960s and early 1970s from both a national and global context using an interdisciplinary approach to present a complex analysis of Ethiopian politics, culture... more

Entre la fin des années 1950 et le début des années 1970, le dominicain Albert-Marie Besnard va publier une série de livres et d’articles dans lesquelles il analyse l’évolution de la spiritualité qu’il l’observe chez les jeunes catholiques français. Progressivement, il glisse de la position d’observateur à celle de témoin engagé en faveur de la mue du christianisme à laquelle aspire ces jeunes. Leur foi est caractérisée par un fort christocentrisme et une exaltation de la vie ordinaire comme espace privilégié d’accès à Dieu et d’accomplissement de sa volonté. Les spiritualités qui reposent sur une mise à distance du « monde » comme condition d’accès à Dieu se trouve disqualifiées comme des formes de dualisme à dépasser. Cette évolution des attentes spirituelles manifeste une intramondanisation de l’horizon de l’ascèse chrétienne. A ce titre, les analyses d’Albert-Marie Besnard offrent un éclairage très pertinent pour penser les mouvements de fond qui vont jouer sur la réception du concile Vatican 2, le rapport à la pratique de la messe ou à l’engagement politique, et préparer ce qui va devenir la "crise catholique".

- by Kathryn M . Syssoyeva
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- Theatre Studies, Theatre History, Performance Studies, 1960s (U.S. history)

Ecotopia is a quasi-ethnographic novel influenced by anthropology. Some of its fictional practices have been adopted in the actual world since publication in 1975. Set two decades after Green secessionists achieve national independence for the U.S. Northwest, an American journalist-fieldworker describes Ecotopians’ strange new ecological customs. Author Callenbach constructively criticized and influenced his un- sustainable culture by comparing it to an invented alternative. The case illustrates that a dialectic between cultural fact and fiction drives innovation.

- by Roger I Lohmann
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- Anthropology, Comparative Politics, Creativity, Ecological Anthropology
- by Victor Pereira
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- Tourism Studies, Revolutions, Cultural Tourism, 1970s Culture

Les mouvements sociaux de la fin des années 1960 au Japon font partie des tournants majeurs de l’histoire contemporaine du pays. Pourtant, leur héritage est aujourd’hui contesté et leurs représentations littéraires, visuelles ou graphiques évoquent généralement ces événements sous l’angle du combat tragique, perdu d’avance, radical et violent. À travers deux mangas qui s’intéressent au sujet en le reliant au terrorisme rouge, nous essayons, dans cet article, de définir les particularités du regard de ce médium sur ce moment d’histoire. Publiés au milieu des années 2000, alors que l’historiographie de Mai 68 évolue considérablement, Red et Unlucky Youngmen, les deux mangas dont nous traitons, mettent en avant des récits individuels, évacuant ainsi les aspects idéologiques, pourtant fondamentaux à l’époque.

Seit 1968 und den Konflikten um die Studentenbewegung wurde der Zivildienst mehr und mehr zum Politikum. Auf ihrem "langen Marsch durch die Institutionen" machte die APO die Kriegsdienstverweigerung zum politischen Kampfinstrument und zwang die sozialliberale Koalition unter Willy Brandt zu weitreichenden Reformen. Patrick Bernhard schildert nicht nur die Diskussion um die "Demokratisierung des Dienstes" und die Abschaffung des "inquisitorischen" Prüfungsverfahrens, die Öffentlichkeit und Parlament erregte. Als wichtiger Beitrag zur jüngeren Gesellschaftsgeschichte der Bundesrepublik bilanziert die Studie auch, wie die Reformen den Sozialstaat langfristig veränderten.

- by Jelena Stojković
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- Photography, Landscape Theory, History of Japanese Photography, Landscape
- by Pascal Delwit
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- European History, Political Sociology, European Studies, Comparative Politics

Published at H-Socialisms.

- by Christopher Wright
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- American History, 1960s (U.S. history), New York history, Black Power

This article examines the role of Jimi Hendrix in the late 1960s as a vessel of the Black Atlantic, what Paul Gilroy describes as the counterculture to modernity. Placed against the backdrop of The Dick Cavett Show, a newly created talk show in 1969 hosted by the white liberal Dick Cavett, this article explores the dialogue between host and guitarist in an attempt to trace the longue durée assumptions and ideological patterns of modernity and its late 1960s repercussions at the end of the American Civil Rights movement. Using the theories of Gilroy, James Baldwin, Raymond Williams, and Jacques Attali, I outline how the two visits of Hendrix on The Dick Cavett Show were analogous to larger patterns coursing through American society as popular institutions such as television and film formed important bulwarks against not only the countercultural ideas of the 1960s, but the more radical sets of ideas that increasingly took aim at the institutional nature of US racial capitalism and modernity itself. While The Dick Cavett Show embodied the assimilation of aspects of cultural radicalism, the show also offered lessons on how institutions such as television used cultural radicalism as both a point of sale and a reflective other in rehabilitating the frayed edges of American truth-constructing processes. As a guest, Hendrix often provided answers to Cavett’s questions which frequently opened doors to implicitly anti-systemic – or anti-modern – discussions. As a host, Cavett’s reactions can be read as parrying these blows, using comedy and his persona as a Midwestern straight white man as the blunting instrument.

- by Daniel R McClure
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- Political Economy, Television Studies, 1960s (U.S. history), Modernity

This article critically examines existing queer theoretical takes on punk and same-sex passion, highlighting the politically troubling implications of retrospectively romanticising punk's transgressions. Drawing on a range of examples including the fashion designs of Vivienne Westwood and Malcolm McLaren, the punk subcultural nucleus of the Bromley Contingent and the work of the Buzzcocks, it argues that a new approach is needed: one that provides an accurate historical portrayal of the complex and varied relations between British punk, sexual politics and identities and the conjuncture of the late 1970s. Such analysis makes possible an assessment of the ways in which these relations might inform crucial issues faced by LGBTQ people and countercultural forces in the present. What resources of hope might punk offer, and how might we learn from its missteps and dead ends, which, to be fair, are always easier to see in hindsight?

- by David Wilkinson
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- Cultural Studies, Queer Studies, Queer Theory, Gender and Sexuality