Editorial: Remembering The Radical Seventies

Abstract

In this issue, as we approach the hundredth issue and the fiftieth anniversary of History Workshop Journal, we are beginning a series of reflections on the decade in which both the movement and the Journal emerged with a mini-feature encompassing two memoirs of the radical Seventies as experienced by two historians in different parts of the world. The acclaimed historian Martin Duberman, now in his nineties, reflects on his participation in an obscure moment of antiwar activism in the Vietnam-era United States. Manas Ray follows on from his much-anthologized 2002 memoir ‘Growing Up Refugee: On Memory and Locality’ (HWJ 53) to explore his years at college in Calcutta/Kolkata in the midst of the Bangladeshi War. While the pieces are very different in tone and style, what unites them (beyond the decade on which they focus) is the light both shed on the subjective experience of periods of intense political change. Duberman’s account of a small group of (not quite openly) gay activists struggling to devise meaningful activism against the Vietnam war spotlights the ‘strange mixture of conviction and confusion’ that dogged all their efforts to raise awareness and forge coalitions. In the process he reflects on the tangled emotions that generate and accompany activism: fear, rage, grandiosity, self-aggrandizement, commitment, conviction, and exhilaration – feelings that (in words he quotes from Daniel Ellsberg) ‘can lead to naïve euphoria but also to a discovery of power’. Ray recounts his close-up and sometimes terrifying encounters with the Maoist Naxalite uprising in West Bengal, which the Indian government brutally repressed. In a series of beautifully drawn vignettes, sometimes comic, sometimes haunting, he illuminates ‘the fragmented interiorized experience that traditionally practised protocols of history-writing miss out’, the subtle ways that political upheavals formed the backdrop for his intellectual and sexual coming of age.