The Radical Sixties: Aesthetics, Politics and Histories of Solidarity
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).
“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.