Fwd: [csaa-forum] the sixties

[Vera Mackie]

Hi Stephen,
take a look at:
Performance Paradigm, No 2, 2006, <http://www.performanceparadigm.net>
and the published collection:
Edward Scheer and Peter Eckersall (eds) The Ends of the 60s: 
Performance, Media and Contemporary Culture, Sydney: Faculty of Arts 
and Social Sciences and Performance Paradigm, 2006.
My own interests are in 1960s Japanese visual culture and in women's 
liberation movements.
Vera


Begin forwarded message:

> From: Stephen Muecke <Stephen.Muecke at uts.edu.au>
> Date: 4 June 2007 9:18:13 AM
> To: CSAA discussion list <csaa-forum at lists.cdu.edu.au>
> Subject: [csaa-forum] the sixties
>
> The Sixties Revisited
>
> There are many reasons for a renewed interest in the sixties. The 
> worst reason is, of course, for superannuated baby-boomers to indulge 
> in nostalgia, the best is for people born, say in the eighties, to 
> analyse a period where there were real and effective languages of 
> political contestation, which could be taken even to a national scale 
> (Mai '68, the Cultural Revolution in China, student movements toppling 
> the governments of Sth Korea and Thailand, national liberation 
> movements against colonialism).
>
> In terms of culture there were radical forms of experimentation in 
> everyday life, the birth of ecological movements, homosexuality was 
> legalised, a stunning new visual style emerged in in iconography, 
> fashion, fine arts and cinema. Popular music came of age in the USA 
> and the UK, and there was a new cosmopolitanism of youth movements. In 
> science and industry plastics emerged, the transistor made electronics 
> portable, Man walked on the Moon, nuclear met counter-nuclear...
>
> Today, in repudiation of the sixties, the world seems engulfed by a 
> neo-liberal market-driven culture which has narrowed the language of 
> political analysis. Conservative opinion-makers are busy 
> characterising the sixties as a time of looney left excess, a 
> smokescreen perhaps for the excesses of global corporate capitalism 
> today.
>
> Are the current forms of political and cultural activism derived from 
> the sixties? Community-based localist or micro-activisms, autonomists, 
> hackers and bloggers, ferals and sub-cultural communities?
>
> Serious research should determine how cultural and political analysis 
> of this four-decade-old history can sort out continuities and 
> discontinuities. Most world leaders grew up in the sixties, so the 
> period still has a hold on their unconscious: Can they let it go? Can 
> people in their twenties and thirties teach them to look at the 
> present more clearly?
>
> The question I’d like to put to the List, perhaps with a view to a 
> seminar, is who in Australia is working on the sixties (really the 
> late 50s to the early 70s)? Who is prepared to work up a topic? There 
> is the potential for interesting Asian links—see Inter-Asia Cultural 
> Studies issue of December last year, ‘The Asian Sixties’.
>
> Stephen Muecke
> Director, Transforming Cultures Centre
> Humanities and Social Sciences
> University of Technology, Sydney
> Box 123 BROADWAY NSW 2007 Australia
> Ph: +61 2 9514 1960
> Fx: +612 9514 4344
> mb 042 5261 232
> http://www.transforming.cultures.uts.edu.au/
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