The Sixties and the World Event (Volume 36)

by Christopher Connery, Hortense Spillers (Editor)

This special issue of boundary 2 revisits the 1960s through a global and multidisciplinary lens. It treats the decade as a global historical event, comprising decolonization, liberation, revolution, and movements against various establishments. Engaging questions of history and temporality, this issue illustrates that continued exploration and consideration of the 1960s around the world are crucial to a critical engagement with the present. Contributors to this issue represent a wide range of disciplines, from Latin American studies and sociology to political theory and literary criticism. They bring a global perspective to the social and political legacy of the 1960s, touching on the Caribbean, Latin America, the former USSR, China, and France, as well as the United States. One contributor presents a reexamination of Latin American armed struggles in the 1960s that foregrounds the relatively positive influence of these struggles on present-day Latin American society and politics. Another contributor translates a seminal essay on José Martí written by one of Cuba’s foremost intellectuals in the mid-1960s, when the course of the Cuban revolution was still uncertain. Yet another contributor considers the forces that have sought to neutralize the struggles and negate the gains of the African American liberation movement in the 1960s American South. Contributors . John Beverley, Anthony Bogues, Christopher Connery, Roberto Fernández Retamar, Wlad Godzich, Boris Kagarlitsky, Nina Power, Hortense Spillers, Silvia D. Spitta, Alberto Toscano

219 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2009

About the author

Christopher Connery is Professor of World Literature and Cultural Studies at the University of California Santa Cruz, and is currently Director of the University of California Education Abroad Program at Fudan University in Shanghai, China. His research is on global cultural studies, and his publications have been mostly in three areas: early imperial Chinese literary and intellectual history; the figure of the ocean in global and in capitalist thought; the social and cultural movements of the global 1960s. His books include Empire of the Text: Writing and Authority in Early Imperial China (1998), The Sixties and the World Event (co-edited), and The Worlding Project: Doing Cultural Studies in the Era of Globalization. He is currently working on several projects involving Shanghai and social space.