Gorsuch, Anne E.;
Koenker, Diane P.;
(2013)
Introduction: The Socialist Sixties in Global Perspective.
In: Gorsuch, AE and Koenker, DP, (eds.)
The Socialist Sixties: Crossing Borders in the Second World.
(pp. 1-21).
Indiana University Press: Bloomington (IN), USA.
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Abstract
The 1960s have reemerged in scholarly and popular culture as a protean moment of cultural revolution and social transformation, a generational shift through which age and seniority lost their authority, perhaps never to be regained. In Europe and the United States, civil rights, feminist, environmentalist, peace, and other movements drew in millions of participants. New media and cultural technologies emerged to circulate ideas and trends that provided the cultural substrata of these movements. The era also saw explosive urbanization in all parts of the globe that generated its own technological possibilities and spaces for cultural cross-fertilization, spurred by unprecedented human, technological, and cultural mobility. Revolution in Cuba and Cultural Revolution in China presented new models for transition and of the future. This was a time of world competition for the hegemony of two antagonistic systems – capitalism and socialism, but also of contest and competition within both systems. As a moment when decolonization created immense possibilities for political and social transformation throughout the world, the 1960s became the heyday of efforts from both the developed capitalist “First World” and the emerging socialist “Second World” for the allegiance and patronage over these newly liberated states and societies, the “Third World.”1 Against the backdrop of Cold War tension and the political violence that it spawned across the globe, the First and Second Worlds also engaged in peaceful contest to demonstrate the superiority of their systems and the certainty of their triumph. The 1960s, writ large, was a moment when the “orderedness” of these three worlds was arguably the most prominent in popular discourse and culture, and a moment when that order was contested and destabilized. The patterns that first emerged in the 1960s – cultural and political contest, identity politics, urbanization, youth movements, new patterns of mass consumption, the hegemony of popular over “high” culture as driven by new media – form the bases of today’s discussions of globalization.“
| Type: | Book chapter |
|---|---|
| Title: | Introduction: The Socialist Sixties in Global Perspective |
| ISBN-13: | 978-0-253-00937-1 |
| Open access status: | An open access version is available from UCL Discovery |
| Publisher version: | https://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt16gz7q4.4 |
| Language: | English |
| Additional information: | This version is the version of record. For information on re-use, please refer to the publisher's terms and conditions. |
| UCL classification: | UCL UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL SLASH > SSEES UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL SLASH |
| URI: | https://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/id/eprint/10144199 |
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