Search Results

In 1960s Egypt a group of writers exploded onto the literary scene, transforming the aesthetic landscape. Space in Modern Egyptian Fiction argues that this literary generation presents a marked shift in the representation of rural, urban, and exilic space, reflecting a disappointment in the project of the postcolonial nation-state in post-revolutionary Egypt. If the countryside ceased to be the idealized space of the nation, neither the Cairene metropolis nor the city of Alexandria took its place. Moreover, the transgression of borders to an exilic space served to unsettle categories of national and regional belonging. At the heart of this book is an argument about the disappearance of an idealized nation in the Egyptian novel. It provides a full examination of the emergence and establishment of a group of the most significant writers in modern Egyptian literature across six decades, while also attending to the social, economic, political, and aesthetic changes during a pivotal moment in Egypt’s contemporary history.

Reframing Irish Youth in the Sixties focuses on the position of youth in the Republic of Ireland at a time when the meaning of youth was changing internationally. It argues that the reformulation of youth as a social category was a key element of social change. While emigration was the key youth issue of the 1950s, in this period young people became a pivotal point around which a new national project of economic growth hinged. Transnational ideas and international models increasingly framed Irish attitudes to young people’s education, welfare and employment. At the same time Irish youths were participants in a transnational youth culture that appeared to challenge the status quo. This book examines the attitudes of those in government, the media, in civil society organisations and religious bodies to youth and young people, addressing new manifestations of youth culture and new developments in youth welfare work. In using youth as a lens, this book takes an innovative approach that enables a multi-faceted examination of the sixties, providing fresh perspectives on key social changes and cultural continuities.

Entering the 1960s, the University of Illinois typified “Middle America,” with its midwestern campus, middle-class enrollment, and midcentury quiescence—the unlikeliest of settings for protest, rebellion, and riots in the streets. But all of that came to pass. Born of free-speech issues in the Red Scare era and nourished by anger with an unpopular war, protests grew into a general antiestablishment frustration, climaxing in a student strike and days-long violent disturbances that shut down one of the nation’s largest land-grant universities. How could this happen, here? The story is one of self-important legislators, well-intentioned administrators, a conservative citizenry, and “outside agitators,” but mostly of a minority of confident, determined, somewhat naïve students. Virtually all white, relatively privileged, raised in a postwar economic boom, believers in and embodiment of American exceptionalism, they would confront moral questions around race, justice, war, life, and death that became existential as the body count rose in Vietnam. This is the story of how those Illini students responded. No one could have predicted rebellion would happen here. But it did. These young people helped bring down one president, shamed a second, and helped lead the nation to end a wretched war. By their agency they changed history. And if such a movement could happen in such an unlikely place, who is to say that another, equally unlikely, might not happen again?

Young Lives on the Left is a unique social history of the individual lives of men and women who came of age in radical left circles in the 1960s. Based on a rich collection of oral history interviews, the book follows in-depth approximately twenty individuals, tracing the experience of activist self-making from child to adulthood. Their voices tell a particular story about the shaping of the English post-war self. Championing the oppressed in struggle, the young activists who developed the personal politics of the early 1970s grew up in a post-war society which offered an ever-increasing range of possibilities for constructing and experiencing the self. Yet, for many of these men and women the inadequacy of the social, political and cultural constructions available for social identity propelled their journeys on the left. The creation of new left spaces represented the quest for a construction of self that could accommodate the range of contradictions concerning class, gender, religion, race and sexuality that young activists experienced growing up in the post-war landscape. An important contribution to the global histories of 1968, the book explores untold stories of English activist life, examining how political experiences, social attitudes and behaviour of this group of social actors (as teenagers, apprentices and undergraduates) were shaped in the changing social, educational and cultural landscape of post-war English society. The final chapters include attention to the social and emotional impact of Women’s Liberation on the left, as told from the perspective of women and men inside the early movement.

In 1968 a street and media-savvy democratization movement led by students emerged in Mexico City. The 68 Movement was targeted in a state-sponsored massacre at a massive new housing complex ten days before the city hosted the Olympic Games. Both the complex and the mega event were symbols of the country’s rapid modernization but also decades-long political disenfranchisement and urban redevelopment that rendered citizens “guests” of the government and its allies. In spite of institutional denial, censorship and impunity, the massacre remains a touchstone in contemporary public culture thanks to the public memory work of survivors and narrators among Mexico’s intelligentsia. Hotel Mexico asks: How was urban space—material but also literary and cinematic—harnessed as a recalcitrant archive of 1968 and continues to serve as a framework for de facto modes of justice. The 68 Movement’s imaginary and tactics are interwoven and compared with other efforts, both official and countercultural, to reevaluate or renew Mexico’s post-revolutionary modernity: in architecture, urbanism, literature, visual arts, and film—among them, Mario Pani’s housing complex Nonoalco-Tlatelolco (1958–64), kinetic environments created for the 1968 Olympics, and David Alfaro Siqueiros last major mural, The March of Humanity (1964–71).

This book looks at how the lives of everyday Americans changed because of the civil rights movement, the sexual revolution, the women’s movement, the counterculture and other “revolutionary” Sixties movements. Its chapters focus on the mainstreaming of new values and ideas through television, journalism, music, and clothing.

Against the backdrop of America’s urban rebellions in the 1960s, an unexpected cohort of New York radicals unleashed a series of urban guerrilla actions against the city’s racist policies and contempt for the poor. They occupied a hospital, took over a church, paralyzed traffic with uncollected garbage, tested children for lead poisoning, defended prisoners, fought the military police, and fed breakfast to poor children. Their dramatic flair, uncompromising vision for a new society, and skill in linking local problems to international crises riveted the media, alarmed New York’s political class, and challenged nationwide perceptions of civil rights and black power protest. The group called itself the Young Lords. Utilizing oral histories, archival records, and an enormous cache of police records released only after a decade-long Freedom of Information Law request and subsequent court battle, Johanna Fernández has written the definitive history of the Young Lords, from its roots as a Chicago street gang to its rise and fall as a political organization in New York. Led by working-class Puerto Rican youth and modelled after the Black Panther Party, the Young Lords confronted race and class inequality and questioned U.S. foreign policy. Their imaginative protests and media savvy tactics won reforms, popularized socialism, and exposed America’s imperial project in Puerto Rico. Fernández challenges what we think we know about the sixties. In riveting style, she demonstrates how the Young Lords redefined the character of protest, the color of politics, and the cadence of urban culture in the age of great dreams.

Reviled on it’s release, Peeping Tom all-but ended the career of celebrated director Michael Powell. The story of a murderous cameraman and his compulsion to record his killings, Powell’s film stunned the same critics who had acclaimed him for work he had made with Emeric Pressburger (as ‘The Archers’) in the years before. Luckily Peeping Tom was rediscovered and saved, largely due to the efforts of Martin Scorsese, and it is now considered a masterpiece of the Horror genre. In this Devil’s Advocate, published in the wake of the film’s 60^th Anniversary, Kiri Bloom Walden charts the origins, production, and devastating critical reception of Peeping Tom, comparing it to another key film released in 1960, Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho. The author has interviewed people close to Powell to gain new insight into how he approached making the films and reacted to the way it was initially rejected.

Like all transformative revolutions, Britain’s Sixties was an episode of highly influential myth-making. This book delves behind the mythology of inexorable ‘secularization’ to recover, for the first time, the cultural origins of Britain’s moral revolution. In a radical departure from conventional teleologies, it argues that British secularity is a specific cultural invention of the late 1950s and early 1960s, which was introduced most influentially by radical utopian Christians during this most desperate episode of the Cold War. In the 1950s, Britain’s predominantly Christian moral culture had marginalized ‘secular’ moral arguments by arguing that they created societies like the Soviet Union; but the rapid acceptance of ‘secularization’ teleologies in the early 1960s abruptly normalized ‘secular’ attitudes and behaviours, thus prompting the slow social revolution that unfolded during the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s. By tracing the evolving thought of radical Anglicans—uniquely positioned in the late 1950s and early 1960s as simultaneously moral radicals and authoritative moral insiders—this book reveals crucial and unexpected intellectual links between radical Christianity and the wider invention of Britain’s new secular morality, in areas as diverse as globalism, anti-authoritarianism, sexual liberation, and revolutionary egalitarianism. From the mid-1960s, British secularity began to be developed by a much wider range of groups, and radical Anglicans faded into the cultural background. Yet by disseminating the deeply ideological metanarrative of ‘secularization’ in the early 1960s, and by influentially discussing its implications, they had made crucial contributions to the nature and existence of Britain’s secular revolution.