Course Description
Civil Rights, the Vietnam War, Hippies, Women’s liberation: What is it about The Sixties? Why every other turn along the way, they seem to come back either to remind (the Iraq War) or to make us forget (the dismantling of affirmative action) the implications of today’s most crucial political decisions and acts? Why do we so easily find a relationship between music, protests, films, TV shows, and public policies of those years? How did it happen that their (re)formulations of old concepts and the new ones they introduced would so immediately enter our political vocabulary and define how we make sense of our everyday existence. By mapping the main sites of struggle characteristic of the 1960s -- racial subjection, imperialism, and domesticity -- this course looks at how The Sixties re-configured political concepts such as class and imperialism and how they placed social categories such as race, gender, sexuality, and culture itself at the center of the political stage.
Requirements
For each meeting, you should be prepared to discuss the guiding questions by consulting the materials assembled in the course website and introduced in class.
Schedule
April 16 – Introduction: The Sixties
April 29 – The Mountain Top: The Civil Rights Movement and the challenge of the US American Dream
May 6 - To the Streets: Black Power, the Vietnam War Protest and the critique of State Violence
May 13 - Bodies & Minds: Bras, Guitars and the privatization of the political
GUIDING QUESTIONS
We approach the 1960s as a determining moment, a few years that transformed the ways in which we think about and participate in political matters. Why? Three developments are of great importance. First, after a brief period, about 10 years following the Second World War, the two main global powers emerging from that conflict, the United States and the Soviet Union, engaged in the rhetorical and actual battles, which came under the umbrella of the Cold War. Second, European colonies in Africa and Southeast Asia engaged in struggles for emancipation, which revealed to many the limits of the ideal of freedom said to distinguish the winners of the Second World War, United States and Western European states.
Finally, after the celebration of the” American Dream” that prevailed in the 1950s, people of color in the United States and young people (mostly college students) across the globe – influenced by the previous two developments – took the streets not only to protest the ‘hot’ battlefields (e.g. the war in Southeast Asia) of the Cold War and to show support to the peoples fighting to overthrow colonialism, but also to demand the realization of universal freedom at home. When doing so, they radically transformed the concept of freedom and along with it they reconfigured the political stage, as racial and gender/sexual subjection would finally enter into consideration in scholarly and official settings. By the end of the decade, this transformation of the political had reached the most intimate spaces, as the body itself became signifier of freedom and one’s positioning in regard Western ideas and practices.
When consulting the materials assembled for this course, you should attempt to identify:
1 – The views of US American (and Western) society conveyed in the materials: What are the similarities and differences between those exposed by authorities and those articulated by the protestors?
2 – The kind of strategies the protestors use: How do they express their discontent? What are their grievances and demands, that is, what do they want to change in the world, the US society, and their personal life?
3 – The kind of society the protesters propose: What, they think, is necessary for the realization of freedom and/or equality?
4 – At least one contemporary form of protest you find similar to the one covered this week: What are the similarities and differences between them?