Legacies of 1968: Emergent Transnationalisms and Recurrent Crises

Session Submission Type: Paper Session: Traditional Format

Abstract

This panel examines 1968 as a past moment of transnational crisis and political resistance to consider its relevance for activist politics and culture today. It explores the cultural and epistemological legacies of 1968 as a site of political emergence, returning to internationalist connections and aspirations that shaped movements for liberation while critically examining their tactics and strategies. In the years since the uprisings, colonialism has given way to neoimperialism, actually existing communism has been replaced by an even more pervasive and pernicious capitalism, and globalization and neoliberalism have strengthened free market logic to intensify inequality and increase precarity on a global scale. Indeed, the current undisputed hegemony of capitalism seems to aver Francis Fukuyama’s end of history such that it has become increasingly difficult to imagine 1968 as anything other than a naïve utopian longing that was destined to fail. As a result, 1968 is at once remembered as both the height and limit of leftist opposition, with any subsequent oppositional movement remaining haunted by this past.

Rather than using the fiftieth anniversary to narrowly and nostalgically relive this history, this panel looks back at 1968 in order to forge a more productive connection between this past and the current state of crisis. This return to 1968 encompasses three broad goals. The first is to more fully understand the scope and shape of 1968 and thus recover ideas and movements lost as the history of this decade-long series of uprisings and insurgencies. Particularly, it takes up the connections between US radical movements and international liberation struggles around university occupations and Black Power to help reconsider the successes, failures, and untapped possibilities of ‘68’s legacy from a transnational perspective and to recover its global scope and historical significance.

Second, this panel revisits how the legacies of critical thought that survive from this era impact our orientation to the world today. Following the work of Kristen Ross, it is not necessarily concerned with the “lessons” of ’68, but rather the manifold and contradictory ways it continues to shape political, cultural, and social discourse around crisis and social change. At stake here are the ways that 1968 continues to inform our frameworks of cultural analysis and thus condition our understanding of the possibilities and processes of transformation and liberation. Specifically, we are interested in the creative rhetorical, media, and aesthetic strategies undertaken in the struggles under question and how they generated alternative forms of sense-making that have continued relevance.

Finally, this panel examines the stakes of this continued comparison to 1968 for contemporary oppositional movements and asks what, if any relevance 1968 carries for revolutionary strategy today. In doing so, the panel takes up 1968’s somewhat paradoxical connection to both the formation of the neoliberal present and our strategies of opposition to it. As such, it questions the assumed value of 1968 as a touchstone for contemporary resistance while at the same time keeping open the possibility of return as a way forward.

Sub Unit

• American Studies Association Annual Meeting

Chair

• Karin Aguilar-San Juan, Macalester College

Individual Presentations

• Rethinking the Internal Colony: Imperial Finance and the Anti-Colonial Imaginaries - Morgan Adamson, Macalester College

• The Cultural Politics of Transnational Black Power - Jane Rhodes, University of Illinois at Chicago

• The Long ‘68: African Universities, Decolonization, and the Emergence of a World University System - Isaac Kamola, Trinity College

• Political Cinema Post ‘68 and the Problem of Active Spectatorship - Sarah Hamblin, University of Massachusetts-Boston