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<TITLE>Re: [csaa-forum] the sixties</TITLE>
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<FONT FACE="Verdana, Helvetica, Arial"><SPAN STYLE='font-size:12.0px'>Recently finished reading Norman Mailer’s ‘Armies of the night’. This October marks the 40th anniversary of the march and occupation of the Pentagon that Mailer documents and ‘novelises’.<BR>
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I’m interested in representation and symbolic protests/‘demonstrations’ and would like to work on that as a topic area. Lots of contemporary resonances: from David Marr’s ‘death of the demo’ coda to the Quarterly Essay excerpt in The Age on Saturday, to the use of symbolism around Hicks in Guantanamo Bay (Nigel Jamieson’s ‘Honour Bound’ as one example). The occupation of the Pentagon by protestors also opens up lines for contemporary demarcations/filiations.<BR>
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Mailer’s role as a ‘celebrity intellectual’ which he discusses in ‘Armies of the night’ certainly has relevance as an antidote to romantic notions of protest in the 60s (he and his intellectual mates connive to get arrested, processed and released as earlier possible so they can get back to their respective parties in New York... In the end it doesn’t work like that). The text too is rich with potential as part satire, part reportage, part argument with history. <BR>
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John Tebbutt<BR>
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On 4/6/07 9:18 AM, "Stephen Muecke" <Stephen.Muecke@uts.edu.au> wrote:<BR>
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</SPAN></FONT><BLOCKQUOTE><FONT FACE="Verdana, Helvetica, Arial"><FONT SIZE="2"><SPAN STYLE='font-size:10.0px'>The Sixties Revisited <BR>
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There are many reasons for a renewed interest in the sixties. The worst reason is, of course, for superannuated baby-boomers to indulge in nostalgia, the best is for people born, say in the eighties, to analyse a period where there were real and effective languages of political contestation, which could be taken even to a national scale (Mai '68, the Cultural Revolution in China, student movements toppling the governments of Sth Korea and Thailand, national liberation movements against colonialism). <BR>
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In terms of culture there were radical forms of experimentation in everyday life, the birth of ecological movements, homosexuality was legalised, a stunning new visual style emerged in in iconography, fashion, fine arts and cinema. Popular music came of age in the USA and the UK, and there was a new cosmopolitanism of youth movements. In science and industry plastics emerged, the transistor made electronics portable, Man walked on the Moon, nuclear met counter-nuclear... <BR>
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Today, in repudiation of the sixties, the world seems engulfed by a neo-liberal market-driven culture which has narrowed the language of political analysis. Conservative opinion-makers are busy characterising the sixties as a time of looney left excess, a smokescreen perhaps for the excesses of global corporate capitalism today. <BR>
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Are the current forms of political and cultural activism derived from the sixties? Community-based localist or micro-activisms, autonomists, hackers and bloggers, ferals and sub-cultural communities? <BR>
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Serious research should determine how cultural and political analysis of this four-decade-old history can sort out continuities and discontinuities. Most world leaders grew up in the sixties, so the period still has a hold on their unconscious: Can they let it go? Can people in their twenties and thirties teach them to look at the present more clearly? <BR>
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The question I’d like to put to the List, perhaps with a view to a seminar, is who in Australia is working on the sixties (really the late 50s to the early 70s)? Who is prepared to work up a topic? There is the potential for interesting Asian links—see I<I>nter-Asia Cultural Studies</I></SPAN></FONT><SPAN STYLE='font-size:12.0px'> issue of December last year, ‘The Asian Sixties’. <BR>
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</SPAN><FONT SIZE="2"><SPAN STYLE='font-size:10.0px'>Stephen Muecke <BR>
Director, Transforming Cultures Centre <BR>
Humanities and Social Sciences <BR>
University of Technology, Sydney <BR>
Box 123 BROADWAY NSW 2007 Australia <BR>
Ph: +61 2 9514 1960 <BR>
Fx: +612 9514 4344 <BR>
mb 042 5261 232 <BR>
<a href="http://www.transforming.cultures.uts.edu.au/">http://www.transforming.cultures.uts.edu.au/</a></SPAN></FONT><SPAN STYLE='font-size:12.0px'> <BR>
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