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A Review of The Sixties : A Journal of History, Politics and Culture,
vol. 1, no. 1 (June 2008). Frequency : 2 issues per year. New York &
London : Routledge, Taylor & Francis Group, 124pp. ISSN : 1754-1336
(electronic) 1754-1328 (paper).
Ads in our local dailies/weeklies inviting both the young and not so
young to be coached dance steps ; regular radio/TV features :
Memories, Magic Moments, Eclats de Vie reviving retro music and
lyrics, thus tripping us down memory lane ; karaoke sessions
hopefully fostering intergenerational links in times when soaring
prices, increasing socio-economic disparities, and indifference are
exacerbated by self-satisfied, liberal hyper affluence ; these are
some of the marked contrasting features of both local and global
societies in the first decade of this century.
Frankly, I had thought of titling this review alternately Low brow,
high brow : where to draw the line ?, Mainstream v/s sub and
countercultures, but finally staked out on Academia and the "long
Sixties" … Perusal of this scholarly journal - accessed online -
mandated, right from the start, a definition of the concept of the
"long Sixties". As posited and illustrated by the editors and
contributors, it is understood not simply as a decade but as an
"era", a historical period that includes part of the 50s and the 70s.
Roughly, its timeframe spans the period in between the 1954 US
Supreme Court decision in Brown v. Board of Education which set the
stage for a new phase of integration struggles, the Geneva Accords of
1954, which ended French colonial rule in Vietnam (previously
Indochina) and paved the way for greater US involvement in the
region, and, at the other end, President Nixon's demise in 1974
through the Watergate scandal and the fall of Saigon in 1975.
Indeed across the globe, no era in the twentieth century has been as
celebrated, contested, and scrutinized as the 1960s. As we are
frequently reminded - in a seemingly endless parade of books,
articles, films, television programmes and special editions of
magazines - that decade continues to illuminate the ensuing ones, and
is pertinent to the present time. Appositely, forty years after many
of the main events of the 1960s, this new journal is devoted to
grappling with that era's complicated legacy, beyond its familiar
sights, sounds and nostalgic/traumatic memories : the American Civil
Rights Movement, the Beatles, May 68 in France, the Vietnam War, the
student massacre of Tlateloco in Mexico…
Energies and passion for change
That era triggered such hopes, unleashed such energies, and spawned
such a passion for change which ranged widely, affecting governance,
legal and political rights, and the distribution of wealth and power
among and within regions, nations, races, ethnicities, and classes.
It also encompassed more intimate and abstract realms, calling into
question the meaning and identity of the family, education, sex and
sexuality, adolescence and adulthood, work, pleasure, art, nature,
divinity, the psyche, and the cognitive and sensory frames by which
we apprehend "reality".
No recent decade has been as powerfully transformative in much of the
world as have the Sixties, in both temporal and spatial terms. The
era's social movements - from civil rights to feminism, student and
youth protest, environmentalism, and nascent conservatism -
dramatically changed the political culture in the developed West and
beyond. Decolonization struggles, cresting in the 1960s, emancipated
whole peoples and altered the balance of global power. In communist
Europe, incipient democracy movements set the stage for full-scale
revolutions that ended the Cold War. The quintessentially
"international" year, 1968, really "rocked the world" and established
the Sixties as the threshold to a contemporary experience of
globalization. The broadly cultural domain witnessed the massive
relaxation of social mores, irrevocably altering sense and
sensibilities, the basic texture of everyday life. In addition, a new
commercial, technological, and media apparatus emerged, ushering in
the myriad dislocations of the postmodern.
Yet, with the benefit of hindsight and current informed observation,
it would be naive to entertain an unqualified optimistic view in
respect of the full realisation of these revolutionary aspirations.
If there are countless signs of a rearranged world : outright
colonialism is a thing of the past, a mixed-race candidate (and until
recently a woman) is seriously challenging for the American
Presidency, and at least a tepid form of environmentalism is now a
mainstream value, we are nonetheless confronted with an aggressively
global capitalism. Thus, by a trick of vision, the world can also
strangely appear again what it had been. By this deadly repetition,
the Iraq war is the new Vietnam, the response to Hurricane Katrina
confirms American racism, and corporations exert still greater power
over public and private life, no matter the assault on them in the
Sixties. Virtually any society could furnish equivalent examples. As
a further instance of the contradictions we highlighted at the
beginning, one consequence of the commercial ethos of the long 60s is
the establishment of eternal youth and individual self-expression as
near-universal objects of consumer desire, with the counterculture
offering endless fodder for corporate branding. Also, despite the
fact that the political Left is usually singled out as the era's
great protagonist, we note that in large parts of the world during
the Sixties, the political Right was quietly but insistently
marshalling strength and bidding its time for political and cultural
triumphs in the 1980s and beyond.
The journal addresses these contradictory realities and modes of
perception in a postmodernist perspective, and makes a plea for a
more sober treatment of these phenomena. It posits that " a more
circumspect language of repetition with variation or change " would
more appropriately characterize the period's transformations - in
part or as a whole - " than a vocabulary of watershed, rupture, or
epistemic shift ". It initiates an open-ended dialogue with the
Sixties, in which past and present each pose questions to the other.
It stakes out three broad areas of inquiry : the Sixties themselves,
their impact, and their construction in memory. The Sixties is edited
by Jeremy Varon (Drew University), Michael S. Foley (City University
of New York) and John McMillian (Harvard University), and supported
by a distinguished international editorial board comprising no less
than 15 peers.
Sharing the sixties
Varon, Foley, and McMillian point out, in their shared editorial,
that knowledge about and interest in the Sixties surely extend far
beyond scholars. Hence their invitation to journalists, public
intellectuals, political activists and people active in the arts to
avail themselves of the space provided, so as to explore further the
meaning of the Sixties. " No one owns the Sixties, so we all share
the Sixties, and we see the journal as shared property as well. " (p. 6)
The editors claim to be driven by an ethic : " a life of service,
care, and commitment to justice and social betterment ", which
informs their conception of the Sixties as not just a historical era
but a set of ideals and values. It should be pointed out that they
themselves are not baby boomers. They write : " Nostalgia, in its
most primitive form, entails the indiscriminate love of a particular
past because it is one's own. This journal springs from a more
discerning kind of affection for a past that is not properly our own
but with which we nonetheless feel a powerful, if complicated
affinity. Ourselves born between 1964 and 1970, we were too young to
have been fully in the thrall of the Sixties, but just old enough to
know that we mostly missed something big. Burdened with the sense of
having arrived late, we spent much of our early lives nourishing
ourselves in the era's afterglow and trying to affirm, in ways
political and personal, what we saw as its best values and impulses.
Our professional lives as scholars and teachers have been
substantially devoted to developing greater understanding of a time
that continues to intrigue, inspire, confound, amuse, tempt, repel,
and capture us… " (p. 1)
Finally, in reaching out to generations both younger and older, and
making common cause with others who feel similarly called, they have
resisted the temptation to pit history against memory and try to
rescue the Sixties as a period, accessed through careful research,
from the Sixties as a popular mythology spun largely by mass
entertainments, middlebrow commentary, commercial bromides, and
pedagogic clichés. " Though we certainly champion rigorous inquiry,
this is a temptation worth at least partially resisting. Above all,
it is neither easy nor even advisable to separate history
categorically from myth, let alone the past from its representation.
Far more fruitful is to explore their dialectic - the means by which
history converts to myth, as well as how the past itself may resist
certain forms of mythmaking… " (p. 4)
The inaugural issue of The Sixties contains 3 research essays :
What's in a name ? The Black Panthers in Israel (by Oz Frankel), pp.
9-26 ; Barnett Newman, abstraction, and the politics of 1968 (by
Patricia Kelly), pp. 27-47 ; and The heart of Chicano history (by
Lorena Oropeza), pp. 49-67, 8 book reviews, pp. 91-109, a review
essay : The (forgotten) Sixties in Mexico (by Jaime Pensado), pp.
83-90, an exhibition review : Infinity goes up on trial : the
questioning of psychedelic art at the Whitney Museum (by Michael J.
Kramer), pp. 77-81, a movie review : Long live Lennon ! Lennon is
dead ! The affirmative character of post-Sixties idealism (by Jeremy
Varon), pp. 69-75, which discusses the legacy of the
Beatles'repertoire as portrayed in Julia Taymor's 2007 film Across
the universe, and an interview conducted with Father Daniel Berrigan,
S.J., and Frida Berrigan (by Michael S. Foley), pp. 111-124.
While rooted in historical inquiry the journal encourages work in a
great array of disciplines, and which combines the approach of
multiple fields. It will appeal to baby boomers, Sixties-veterans,
contemporary activists as well as writers and teachers.
George Lewis Easton
gleaston@intnet.mu
.
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