Global Sixties Research Articles

The Visual Culture of the Revolutionary Processes of Latin America in the Islamic Revolution of Iran: The Street and the Studio

Abstract This article delves into the artistic production of a group of Iranian painters whose work is considered revolutionary art. It shows how the murals and canvases painted during the early revolution of 1978–1979 in Iran were influenced by the visual culture of the revolutionary movements in Latin America. The study brings to light an overlooked aspect of the Global South revolutions during the Long Global Sixties. It supports the idea that the 1978–1979 “Islamic” revolution was chiefly a revolution against a dictatorship also driven by groups inspired by leftist ideology and iconography. These groups, consisting mainly of younger revolutionaries, were motivated by ideals like solidarity, anti-imperialism, anti-capitalism, internationalism, and Third World relations.

Political Struggle in the Long Global Sixties: Latin America and Beyond

Political Struggle in the Long Global Sixties: Latin America and Beyond

Red Internationalism: Anti-Imperialism and Human Rights in the Global Sixties and Seventies. Salar Mohandesi

Red Internationalism: Anti-Imperialism and Human Rights in the Global Sixties and Seventies. Salar Mohandesi

Abstract States: Modernism in Lebanon, Syria, and Turkey

Abstract A decade after modernist art history's tentative embrace of postcolonial modernisms, a new crop of books are leveraging this disciplinary acceptance to examine hitherto shrouded aspects of the field. Anneka Lenssen's, Beautiful Agitation: Modern Painting and Politics in Syria (2020), Zeina Maasri's, Cosmopolitan Radicalism: The Visual Politics of Beirut's Global Sixties (2020) and Sarah-Neel Smith's, Metrics of Modernity: Art and Development in Postwar Turkey, (2022) offer candid appraisals of postcolonial modernism's exposure to colonial and nationalist institutions, Cold War cultural networks, and the hierarchical effects of canonical modernism. Reviewed together in this article, these books reveal the distinctive orientations of modernism in contiguous Syria, Lebanon and Turkey along with the methodological value of formalist methods to assert artistic agency. Through refractive readings of artworks and other materials, Lenssen, Maasri and Smith invert disciplinary anxieties about postcolonial art's political subjection, making a case for postcolonial art's perceptiveness to the instability and abstraction of the institutional forces to which they are subject.

Competing nationalisms, tactical alliances: The Communist Party of the Philippines’ stance on the Bangsamoro struggle during the anti-Marcos resistance

ABSTRACT Focusing on hostile relations between Muslims and Christians, most accounts of secessionism in the southern Philippine island of Mindanao leave out the revolutionary solidarity expressed by a non-Muslim force, the Filipino communist movement, toward the Bangsamoro struggle. Despite their common beginnings during the upsurge of radical struggles during the Global Sixties, historical narratives of the two armed groups are usually discussed separately in the historiography of the martial law period in the Philippines (1972–1986). Using Communist Party of the Philippines (CPP) documents from the University of the Philippines Main Library’s Philippine Radical Papers archive, this article interrogates the CPP’s stance on the Bangsamoro struggle as led in the main by the Moro National Liberation Front (MNLF) during the years of the anti-dictatorship resistance. Despite embracing competing nationalisms based on opposed understandings of the character of the Bangsamoro struggle, the CPP endeavored to build tactical alliances in the face of a common enemy in the Marcos dictatorship. Amid the persistence of neocolonial conditions in much of the Global South and rise of neofascist nationalisms today, this vision of solidarity offers important lessons for contemporary struggles on the limits and potentials of “Third World” nationalisms that emerged during the Global Sixties.

“Undesirable” Travelers: U.S. Radicals, Mexican Security, and the Cold War Summer of 1968

ABSTRACT Two groups of U.S. travelers attempted but failed to reach Cuba in the summer of 1968. Traveling via Mexico City during the height of the Mexican student movement and in anticipation of the Olympics, both groups were detained by Mexican authorities and eventually deported back to the United States. Using oral histories and archival sources, this article explores the interaction between the New Left radicals and intelligence agencies in the U.S. and Mexico. Both sides sought to interpret and contextualize the other to fit and shape their own expectations of Cold War politics during the global Sixties. While there is a vast scholarship on 1968, at both a national and international scale, this story contributes to our understanding of the formulation of radical imaginaries of Cold War international surveillance and solidarity, as well as the construction of the transnational “outside agitator” narratives at the end of the decade.

The utopian homeland: new left internationalism, diasporic Chinese nationalism, and anarchism in Hong Kong, 1969–1973

ABSTRACT Focusing on Ng Chung-yin’s (1946–1994) anarchism in early 1970s Hong Kong, this study explores the interplay between New Left internationalism and national experiences. Contrary to the existing scholarship, which holds that New Left internationalism requires nationalization for implementation, this study illustrates the opposite, showing how national experiences are reinterpreted, reshaped, and rearticulated through the lens of New Left internationalism. The analysis begins by debunking the diverse imaginings of China during the 1950s and 1960s as offered by New Left internationalism and diasporic Chinese nationalism. This multiplicity of China’s representations contributed to the emergence of the anarchist movement in early 1970s Hong Kong. This study also undertakes a critical reading of Ng’s revolutionary proposal, “The Third Revolution.” This proposal envisions the ancestral national homeland as a futuristic internationalist utopia, demonstrating how diasporic Chinese nationalism is rearticulated using the language of internationalism. Concluding with David Scott’s notion of “futures past,” the study argues that New Left internationalism offers powerful utopian expectations of the future, based on which diverse national pasts are subject to revision. By examining the ideological backbones and politics of the anarchist movement in early 1970s Hong Kong, the study aims to contribute to understanding the dynamics between New Left internationalist politics and national experiences during the global Sixties.

Ideological movements that inspire the possibility of a radically different future

Historical research on the Global 1960s has flourished in the last decade. 'The Routledge Global 1960s and 1970s Book Series' produced books like The Global 1960s: Convention, Contest and Counterculture, and also launched the re-named Global Sixties Journal which have provided us with a deeper and more nuanced understanding of this important historical decade in the twentieth century. The focus of much of this new research has shifted towards the Third World, now commonly referred to as the Global South. For much of the Global South, the 1960s marked a period of significant turbulence and transformation. People in Asia, Africa, the Caribbean, and Latin America were guided by new ideological movements that inspired the possibility of a radically different future. A feeling of transnational solidarity buttressed this moment of optimism. Young people across the world, including those in Africa, were often the conceivers and drivers of such change.

Review: Saigon at War: South Vietnam and the Global Sixties, by Heather Marie Stur

Review: <i>Saigon at War: South Vietnam and the Global Sixties</i>, by Heather Marie Stur

Scott Rutherford. Canada’s Other Red Scare: Indigenous Protests and Colonial Encounters during the Global Sixties

Scott Rutherford. <i>Canada’s Other Red Scare: Indigenous Protests and Colonial Encounters during the Global Sixties</i>

Special issue: the global sixties in the Global South

ABSTRACT This Introduction provides a conceptual framework and preview of the five articles contained in the Special Issue, ”Global Sixties in the Global South.” The articles derive from a two-day, interdisciplinary conference held at Stony Brook University in Spring 2022 and reflect scholarship by both younger and more established scholars who explore diverse topics from African, Asian, and Latin American perspectives. After a brief historiographic overview and discussion of the semantic relationship between ”Global Sixties” and ”Global South,” the Introduction makes the case for the importance of interdisciplinary dialogue as the basis for Global Sixties scholarship. The Introduction further argues how the articles that make up the Special Issue reveal the contradictions inherent to solidarities across disparate lands, the cultural valence of place, the continued if refracted operation of imperialisms, the messiness of ideological schisms, and the corruption inherent to power dynamics that suffused revolutionary consciousness and Third World ambitions alike. Ultimately, we argue that ”Global Sixties in the Global South” provides a framework that reveals a world deeply entangled across geopolitics, political economy, and culture in ways that account for both the meta-narratives of revolution and ideology and the micro-histories of personal intimacy and affective relations.

Teaching the global sixties: a perspective from Latin America

ABSTRACT This article draws attention to some of the contributions that Mohandesi makes in his essay while critiquing one of his central arguments. I primarily approach this response from my teaching position as a scholar of modern Latin American history. From this perspective, I do not feel that we have reached a roadblock in our studies of the Global Sixties, but rather that we have yet to explore many of its meanings.

Response to Salar Mohandesi’s “thinking the Global Sixties”

ABSTRACT My response to Salar Mohandesi offers appreciation for his efforts to define the core and future directions of the study of the Global Studies. Nevertheless, I question whether drawing boundaries regarding the political orientation and periodization of this era might be unnecessarily restrictive.

X and X: on the containment and liberation of Cold War histories

ABSTRACT This short essay provides a response to Salar Mohandesi’s intervention “Thinking the Global Sixties.” Utilizing the symbolic examples of George F. Kennan and Malcolm X, it argues that the historiography of the Cold War has been shaped by competing approaches of “containment” and “liberation” which reflect two understandings of the world at the time. The essay concludes by suggesting that the 1960s have come to represent not simply a time period, but an accretion of attitudes and perspectives resulting in a vantage point, whose intrinsic elusive qualities must be appreciated.

Thinking the Global Sixties

ABSTRACT Recent scholarship has radically expanded the object of inquiry, timeline, and geographic scope of the Global Sixties. Although significantly enriching our knowledge of the 1960s and 1970s, this turn has had the unintended consequence of inflating the category of the Global Sixties to such a degree that it now encompasses virtually everything that happened anywhere on the planet from the 1950s to the 1980s. While we have more studies on the Sixties than ever before, this expanded category of the Global Sixties has become an obstacle to explaining how all these pieces fit together. This essay suggests ways to refine the category of the Global Sixties in order to produce a more nuanced working model of how “everything linked.”

Author Response

Author Response

The Last Good Neighbor: Mexico in the Global Sixties

The Last Good Neighbor: Mexico in the Global Sixties

The Last Good Neighbor: Mexico in the Global Sixties

The Last Good Neighbor: Mexico in the Global Sixties

Canada's Other Red Scare: Indigenous Protest and Colonial Encounters during the Global Sixties by Scott Rutherford

Canada's Other Red Scare: Indigenous Protest and Colonial Encounters during the Global Sixties by Scott Rutherford

The Nazas-Aguanaval Group: Radical Priests, Catholic Networks, and Maoist Politics in Northern Mexico

AbstractThis article deals with the emergence of the Nazas-Aguanaval group of priests in the northern region of La Laguna, in northern Mexico, after the Second Vatican Council and the 1968 Medellín Conference of the Latin American Episcopal Council (CELAM). I argue that both the reformism of the Second Vatican council and the push for a “preferential option for the poor” provided the space for an alliance between the progressive priests of the Nazas-Aguanaval group and the Maoist activists of Política Popular (People's Politics, PP). In this context, it was the Nazas-Aguanaval priests who introduced Política Popular's Maoism in La Laguna and Chiapas among peasants and students. At the same time, the radical tradition and economic conditions of La Laguna made it possible for local left-wing activists to connect with transnational currents such as the Movement of Priests for the Third World and Christians for Socialism. Based on a broad array of sources—including oral histories, Maoist pamphlets, local newspapers, Mexican security archives, and documentation from Mexican and Latin American priests’ organizations—this article brings together the regional history of protest in La Laguna, the historiography of the Global Sixties, and the history of the progressive factions of the Catholic Church in Latin America.