Call for Abstracts: The Radical Sixties: Aesthetics, Politics and Histories of Solidarity Conference, Brighton, UK

“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 below

Submission Guidelines

• Please send proposals for individual papers/ and or panels by 28 September 2018 to: Radical60s@brighton.ac.uk
• Individual paper proposals should include: name of presenter and contact information; proposed paper title; abstract (250 words); short biography (50 words).
• Panel proposals should be pre-formed and include: title and short rationale for the panel (100 words) with 3-4 corresponding individual paper proposals (as per above-guidelines).
• Accepted proposals will be notified by November.
• There is limited bursary support available to cover the conference fee for speakers: if you wish to apply, please send a paragraph explaining your need for support, together with your abstract. Decisions will be made on the basis of both abstract and need.