Abstract
ABSTRACTThis article de-centres the moment, event and impact of 1968 and expands it temporally and spatially. Taking a longue durée approach charting a trajectory from the 1960s into the 1980s, we analyse statist and anti-statist dynamics through a comparison of the May 1968 Paris riots with the Nagriamel movement in Vanuatu and the phenomenon of Naparama in Mozambique. Such a horizontal triangulation and spatio-temporal expansion is undertaken to contribute to a more global understanding of what we term ‘the 1968 event’ entails. However, this comparative analysis also underlines how its impact should be measured as, first, an experimentation with and attack on political reality, second, how the intricate connections between Euro-American and other worlds were integral to its articulation and, third, how paradoxically 1968 and its response spawned the rise of an authoritarian form of nation-state – eclipsing the openings in the firmament of the political, social and the real afforded by the original event.
Highlights
The semi-centennial of the year 1968 has come and gone – yet our present day discourses are still reverberating with its key issues such as inequality, citizenship, dependency, gender, race and wealth
Such a horizontal triangulation and spatio-temporal expansion is undertaken to contribute to a more global understanding of what we term ‘the 1968 event’ entails. This comparative analysis underlines how its impact should be measured as, first, an experimentation with and attack on political reality, second, how the intricate connections between Euro-American and other worlds were integral to its articulation and, third, how paradoxically 1968 and its response spawned the rise of an authoritarian form of nation-state – eclipsing the openings in the firmament of the political, social and the real afforded by the original event
Rather than privileging or naturalizing the Euro-American experiences, this article follows Chakrabarty’s ([2000] 2008) call to provincialize Europe when approaching the 1968 event. This does not mean that we exclude or marginalize events animating socio-cultural and political dynamics in these regions of the world but that we refrain from instituting singular and unequivocal causal connections between, for instance, the May events in Paris in 1968 and the significant but largely unrecognized movements of Nagriamel and Naparama in Vanuatu and Mozambique respectively – which comprise our other two cases
Summary
The semi-centennial of the year 1968 has come and gone – yet our present day discourses are still reverberating with its key issues such as inequality, citizenship, dependency, gender, race and wealth. What we point out is, that the movements in Mozambique and Vanuatu created new, youthful and experimental horizons for their new utopian politics and nations, like in France, and that they, thereafter, became subject to similar forces of state reaction.
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