The Radical Sixties: Aesthetics, Politics and Histories of Solidarity

“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:

• Theorisations of radical forms of New and/or Third World Left solidarity (politics/ aesthetics/ global scope/ tactics/subjectivities)
• Histories of solidarity with, and within, the Third World (South–South and/or North-South linkages, networks and movements)
• Arts, cultures and aesthetics of solidarity (design, film, print, literature, poetry, music, visual and material culture broadly construed)
• Solidarity in circulation (objects, ideas and images on the move)
• Mobility of activists, intellectuals and artists
• Nodal cities/spaces of encounter
• Solidarity in public spaces of protest
• Memories, legacies and futures
• Leftist internationalism, transnationalism, cosmopolitanism from belowOpening public roundtable on the evening of 27 June 2019Speakers to be confirmedConference keynote speakers:
  Vijay Prashad, Tricontinental Institute for Social Research. Cynthia Young, Pennsylvania State University.

Friday 28 June | Morning Session I

Panel 1 | Memory and Forgetting in the Northern Ireland Civil Rights MovementChair: C. Reynolds (convenor) | Room: M2

Students and Memories of 1968 in Northern Ireland Ø Sarah Campbell, Newcastle University

Dealing with Northern Ireland’s Contested Past: 1968 and Agonistic Remembering Ø Chris Reynolds, Nottingham Trent University

‘I would have nearly walked in that march, and then the Republicans took it over with the Tricolours.’ Northern Irish Protestant working class perspectives on 1968

Connal Parr, Northumbria University

Panel 2 | Visual Cultures of Solidarity Chair: Mary Ikoniadou | Room: G4

A Vietnam in the field of culture: histories of solidarity, fight and artistic activism during the Global sixties.

Paula Barreiro López, Université Grenoble-Alpes
Images of Solidarity: 1968, Global Movement and Forgotten Alliances

Antigoni Memou, University of East London

The Panther and the Bulldog: The Visual and Material Culture of Solidarity in New Haven, Connecticut

Laura A. Macaluso

Friday 28 June | Morning Session II

Panel 3 | Recovered Histories: Palestine in the Global Sixties Chair: Francesca Burke | Room: M2

‘That keening trajectory’: Nakba genealogies, archival representation, and the Dr. Constantine Zurayk Collection.

Jamila Ghaddar, University Toronto
Athazagoraphobia: The Impact of the 1967 War on Palestinian Thought

Manar Makhoul
Palestine and Tricontinental Solidarity: Mapping the Practice of Anticolonial Internationalism.

Sorcha Thomson, Roskilde University

Panel 4 | Literary Radicalism

Chair: Cathy Bergin | Room: G4

Souffles and Morocco’s 1968: From Radical Poetry, to Tricontinentalism, to Maoism – and Back. Ø Andy Stafford, University of Leeds

Writing in revolutionary times?: Rodolfo Walsh as “operating writer” and “organic intellectual” Ø Alejandro Pedregal, Aalto University

Solidarity as an Absence
Patricia McManus, University of Brighton

Friday 28 June | Afternoon Session III

Panel 5 | South-South: Student Protests

Chair: Manar Makhoul | Room: M2

“Brilliant Sun of Revolt” – popular upsurge of students and workers in 1960s Pakistan. Ø Talat Ahmed, University of Edinburgh

Lebanon’s 1968: The role of the Lebanese University Ø Helen Murray, University of Sussex

Practices of Solidarity in Egypt’s 1970s Student Movement Ø Reem Abou-El-Fadl, SOAS

Panel 6 | Third Cinema Chair: Arjab Roy | Room: G4

Exemplary Experiences: Third Cinema and the Emergence of The Mexican Front of Cultural Workers

Miguel Errazu, Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México

Constructing the Counter-history in the Bengali Political Cinema of the 1970s: An Indian Response to the Long-1960s

Sanghita Sen, University of St Andrews
Solidarity: Activating Palestine in the Prism of Pakistani Popular Culture, Lollywood 1969

Sabah Haider, Concordia University

Panel 7 | North-South Connections

Chair: Zoe Sutherland | Room: G62

Internationalisms From Below. Left-Wing Italian and Greek Activists (1967-1974) Ø Antonino Scalia, University of Catania

Greece in the Third World. The aesthetics of solidarity in Pyrsos magazine Ø Mary Ikoniadou, University of Central Lancashire

The French Anticolonial Solidarity Movement and the Liberation of Guinea Bissau Ø Víctor Barros, NOVA University of Lisbon

Friday 28 June | Afternoon Session IV

Panel 8 | North–South: Solidarities in Britain

Chair: Patricia McManus | Room: M2

‘Don’t Play with Apartheid’: Anti-racist solidarity in Britain with South African sports during the radical 1960s

Christian Høgsbjerg, University of Brighton

The Gulf Committee and the People’s Front for the Liberation of Oman: origins, development and relationship with the radical sixties

Helen Lackner, SOAS

Palestinian students in the UK: Navigating the ‘long sixties’ Ø Francesca Burke, University of Brighton

Panel 9 | Arts of Solidarity in Maoist China

Chair: Paula Barreiro López | Room: G4

Red Guard art and the aesthetics of participation in Maoist China Ø Christine I. Ho, University of Massachusetts Amherst

Our Friends in the South: Performing Sino-Vietnamese Solidarity in the Global 1960s. Ø Benjamin Kindler, Columbia University

“They love battle array, not silks and satins”: Images of militia women, international solidarity and femininities in Maoist China.

Juliane Noth, Heidelberg University

Panel 10 | Cold War Contestations

Chair: Péter Apor | Room: G62

The ‘long 1968’ in Hungary
Adrian George Matus, European University Institute Florence

Labour activism in Iran’s Authoritarian Long 1960s: The Case of Oil Workers
Maral Jefroudi, International Institute of Research and Education in Amsterdam

Free Jazz in Finland: Decolonial Struggles in Art Against The Geography of Cold War Ø Taneli Viitahuhta, University of Jyväskylä

KEYNOTE ‘Imperialism and the Death of Hope’
Professor Vijay Prashad, Tricontinental Inst. for Social Research)

Chaired by Professor Bob Brecher, U. Brighton, CAPPE

Saturday 29 June | Morning Session V

Panel 11 | Solidarity and Socialist Internationalism: Artistic and Political

Alliances between the Second and Third Worlds

Chair: B. Hock (convenor) | Room: M2

Global Revolution and Domestic Criticism: The Multivalent Use of Solidarity in Late Socialist Eastern Europe

Péter Apor, Hungarian Academy of Sciences
Gender regimes and equality claims-making in the international women’s movement

Beata Hock, GWZO, Leipzig
Networks of artistic solidarity in Latin America and Eastern Europe

Klara Kemp-Welch, The Courtauld Institute of Art

Transregional links during the Cold War: The case of the Museum of Solidarity (Salvador Allende)

Caterina Preda, University of Bucharest

Panel 12 | Border-Crossings: Intellectuals, Migrants and Militants Chair: Benjamin Feldman

The Seventh Man has a Different Hunger – Migrant workers, anti-colonial revolt, and the political imaginaries of the global 1968

Matthew Myers, University of Oxford

Feminist Radical Left Internationalism and Border Crossings to Cuba: The Vexing Politics of Race, Gender, Sexuality, and Political Solidarities, 1960-1985

Karen Tice, University of Kentucky

Contact in Montevideo. Transits and encounters between transnational revolutionaries, guerrillas and exiles during the key juncture of 1964 and their influence on the formation of the Uruguayan armed left (Tupamaros).

Marina Cardozo, Universidad de la República, Uruguay KEYNOTE Room M2 11:30–12:45

‘Re/thinking the U.S. Third World Left Today’ Professor Cynthia Young, Penn State
Chaired by Professor Jeremy Aynsley, U. Brighton, CDH

Saturday 29 June | Afternoon Session VI

Panel 13 | Third World Left

Chair: Talat Ahmed | Room: M2

Mapping Solidarities and Subjectivities through Left Radical Politics in India Ø Arjab Roy, English and Foreign Languages University, Hyderabad

“In Search of the Socialist Subject: Radical Political Economy and the Study of Moral Incentives in China and Cuba”

Benjamin Feldman, Georgetown University
Anti-Colonial Solidarity and Ideological Innovation: The Case of Mahdi Amil

Hicham Safieddine, King’s College, University of London

Panel 14 | Radical Art and Design Chair: Megha Rajguru

Lessons from the ‘Crouch End Commune’: The Occupation of Hornsey College of Art, London, May-June 1968

Richard Hudson-Miles, Kingston School of Art

The Collective Production of Radical Politics in Print: Libertarian Culture and Publishing in the 1970s

Guglielmo Rossi

Work in Fluxus: Remediating the Sixties Claire M. Holdsworth

Saturday 29 June | Afternoon Session VII

Panel 15 | North-South Solidarities Chair: Christian Høgsbjerg

The American Committee on Africa and the International Solidarity with the Portuguese Colonies

Aurora Almada e Santos, Universidade Nova de Lisboa Contra Pax Americana: Nuremberg, Vietnam and the Russell Tribunal

Kevin Reynolds, University of Brighton

From Mississippi to the Mekong: Recovering Black Radical Anti-imperialism during the era of Global ‘68

Robyn C. Spencer, Brooklyn College, CUNY

Panel 16 | Islamic Articulations

Chair: Andy Stafford | Room: G4

The Long 1960s and Muslim Activism: Radical Transregional Solidarities Ø Claudia Derichs, Humboldt University Berlin

Shariati and al-e Ahmad: Islamo-Marxist Revolutionary Discourse in 1960s Iran.

Kate C. Hashemi, Middle East Consultancy Services

Return to Karbala: Art and Politics in 1960s Iraq Elizabeth Rauh, University of Michigan