Hot fun in the summertime: micro and macrocosmic views on the Summer of Love

Abstract

This keynote address delivered at the “Revisiting the Summer of Love, Rethinking the Counterculture” conference in July 2017 argues that we can better remember, historicize, and understand the “Summer of Love” by glimpsing its oscillations between micro and macrocosmic perspectives. Trying for what Sly and the Family Stone would eventually call “hot fun in the summertime,” participants reoriented scales of temporal and spatial perception as they also probed the vexing links between innocence and experience in pursuit of radically pluralistic, democratic modes of selfhood, community, and citizenship in the modern world.