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CALL FOR PAPERS
The Radical Sixties: Aesthetics, Politics and Histories of Solidarity
28–29 June 2019, University of Brighton, UK
An international interdisciplinary conference jointly organized by the University of Brighton’s Centre for Applied Philosophy, Politics and Ethics (CAPPE); Centre
for Design History (CDH) and Centre for Memory, Narrative and Histories (CMNH).
Deadline for abstracts:
28 September 2018
“The Sixties” continue to engage scholars from many disciplines in debates over what exactly changed; and, indeed, whether the various protest movements were
in fact radical at all in their political demands. Both nostalgically celebrated as a revolutionary heyday and lamented as a failed political project, the decade continues to haunt veterans and preoccupy scholars fifty years on.
However, these long-held evaluations remain parochially centred on European and North American experiences in a handful of cities in this tumultuous decade.
Crucially, a Third Worldist perspective, despite its centrality for activists in the 1960s, is conspicuously marginalized in today’s scholarship. It has been argued—and demonstrated—that decolonisation struggles and anti-imperialist resistance spanning the
three continents of the Global South, from Cuba to Algeria and all the way to Vietnam, both politically informed a new generation of contestation and offered a new radical horizon of Leftist internationalism. And yet “The Sixties” continues to be universalised
on the basis of myopically “Western” speculations about what makes radical politics possible.
This conference thus seeks to decentre the established loci of “The Sixties”. It builds on recent efforts to expand and complicate the spatiality and temporality
of the global sixties and calls for new analyses of this critical historical conjuncture from the standpoint of solidarity. For today we seem to know very little about how solidarity constituted a nodal theme for radical Leftist politics in the 1960s; its
intellectual frameworks and transnational politics, associated aesthetics and cultures of circulation. How was solidarity conceived, imagined and radically enacted in the border-crossings, both spatial and intellectual, of revolutionaries in the “long” 1960s?
We invite contributions from any discipline that explore notions and manifestations of solidarity as articulated in the interstices that, more than 50 years
ago, opened up shared spaces of political struggle and prefigured radical horizons of possibility. In particular, we seek explorations of solidarity as expressed in new aesthetic modes of transnational dissent and carried through the circulatory practices
of radical cultures and associated flow of new revolutionary subjectivities.
Topics:
Opening public roundtable on the evening of 27 June 2019 (Speakers
to be confirmed)
Conference keynote speakers:
Vijay Prashad, Tricontinental
Institute for Social Research.
Cynthia Young, Pennsylvania
State University.
Submission Guidelines
Organizing Committee
Zeina Maasri (convener); Cathy Bergin; Francesca Burke; Andrea Garcia Gonzalez; Garikoitz Gomez Alfaro; Megha Rajguru; Zoe Sutherland.
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Dr Zeina Maasri
Lecturer in Critical History and Politics
School of Humanities, University of Brighton
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