<HTML><BODY style="word-wrap: break-word; -khtml-nbsp-mode: space; -khtml-line-break: after-white-space; ">Dear Stephen, CSAA list,<DIV><BR class="khtml-block-placeholder"></DIV><DIV><SPAN class="Apple-style-span">A number of us - Vera Mackie, myself and others in Australia internationally have been working in the 60s for a few years now - for me the 60s in japan, but I have also done some work on Australia (where the 60s begins late-more 1970s). I edited a special Japan: The ends of the 1960s issue of Performance Paradigm (<A href="http://www.performanceparadigm.net">www.performanceparadigm.net</A>) that includes essays by many of the leading scholars on 60s culture and Japan. I also published <I>T</I><I>heorizing the angura space: Avant-garde performance and politics in Japan 1960-2000 </I>(Brill 2006) that deals with the question of the new left and theatre and how things are reworked during and since the 1960s. </SPAN></DIV><DIV><BR class="khtml-block-placeholder"></DIV><DIV><SPAN class="Apple-style-span">What we have today as a politics is very much the smokescreen for corporate capitalism as you say but we need to theorise how this is as a much a creation of the 1970s left and the conflation of countercultural subjectivities with individualism and materialism as it is the post 1980s rise of right. </SPAN></DIV><DIV><BR class="khtml-block-placeholder"></DIV><DIV>This project has been around awhile and new contributions, ideas and most of all critiques that relate politics to action are necessary.</DIV><DIV><BR class="khtml-block-placeholder"></DIV><DIV><BR class="khtml-block-placeholder"></DIV><DIV>Peter Eckersall</DIV><DIV><BR class="khtml-block-placeholder"></DIV><DIV><BR class="khtml-block-placeholder"></DIV><DIV><BR><DIV><DIV>On 04/06/2007, at 9:18 AM, Stephen Muecke wrote:</DIV><BR class="Apple-interchange-newline"><BLOCKQUOTE type="cite"><DIV style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; "><FONT face="Helvetica" size="2" style="font: 10.0px Helvetica">The Sixties Revisited</FONT></DIV><DIV style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; font: normal normal normal 10px/normal Helvetica; min-height: 12px; "><BR></DIV><DIV style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; "><FONT face="Helvetica" size="2" style="font: 10.0px Helvetica">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).</FONT></DIV><DIV style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; font: normal normal normal 10px/normal Helvetica; min-height: 12px; "><BR></DIV><DIV style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; "><FONT face="Helvetica" size="2" style="font: 10.0px Helvetica">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...</FONT></DIV><DIV style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; font: normal normal normal 10px/normal Helvetica; min-height: 12px; "><BR></DIV><DIV style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; "><FONT face="Helvetica" size="2" style="font: 10.0px Helvetica">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.<SPAN class="Apple-converted-space"> </SPAN></FONT></DIV><DIV style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; font: normal normal normal 10px/normal Helvetica; min-height: 12px; "><BR></DIV><DIV style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; "><FONT face="Helvetica" size="2" style="font: 10.0px Helvetica">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?<SPAN class="Apple-converted-space"> </SPAN></FONT></DIV><DIV style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; font: normal normal normal 10px/normal Helvetica; min-height: 12px; "><BR></DIV><DIV style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; "><FONT face="Helvetica" size="2" style="font: 10.0px Helvetica">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?<SPAN class="Apple-converted-space"> </SPAN></FONT></DIV><DIV style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; font: normal normal normal 10px/normal Helvetica; min-height: 12px; "><BR></DIV><DIV style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; "><FONT face="Helvetica" size="2" style="font: 10.0px Helvetica">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> issue of December last year, ‘The Asian Sixties’.</FONT></DIV><DIV style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; font: normal normal normal 12px/normal Helvetica; min-height: 14px; "><BR></DIV><DIV style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; "><FONT face="Helvetica" size="2" style="font: 10.0px Helvetica">Stephen Muecke</FONT></DIV><DIV style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; "><FONT face="Helvetica" size="2" style="font: 10.0px Helvetica">Director, Transforming Cultures Centre</FONT></DIV><DIV style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; "><FONT face="Helvetica" size="2" style="font: 10.0px Helvetica">Humanities and Social Sciences</FONT></DIV><DIV style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; "><FONT face="Helvetica" size="2" style="font: 10.0px Helvetica">University of Technology, Sydney</FONT></DIV><DIV style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; "><FONT face="Helvetica" size="2" style="font: 10.0px Helvetica">Box 123 BROADWAY NSW 2007 Australia</FONT></DIV><DIV style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; "><FONT face="Helvetica" size="2" style="font: 10.0px Helvetica">Ph: +61 2 9514 1960</FONT></DIV><DIV style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; "><FONT face="Helvetica" size="2" style="font: 10.0px Helvetica">Fx: +612 9514 4344</FONT></DIV><DIV style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; "><FONT face="Helvetica" size="2" style="font: 10.0px Helvetica">mb 042 5261 232</FONT></DIV><DIV style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; "><FONT face="Helvetica" size="2" style="font: 10.0px Helvetica"><A href="http://www.transforming.cultures.uts.edu.au">http://www.transforming.cultures.uts.edu.au</A>/</FONT></DIV><DIV style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; ">_______________________________________</DIV><DIV style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; min-height: 14px; "><BR></DIV><DIV style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; ">csaa-forum</DIV><DIV style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; ">discussion list of the cultural studies association of australasia</DIV><DIV style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; min-height: 14px; "><BR></DIV><DIV style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; ">www.csaa.asn.au</DIV><DIV style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; min-height: 14px; "><BR></DIV><DIV style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; ">change your subscription details at <A href="http://lists.cdu.edu.au/mailman/listinfo/csaa-forum">http://lists.cdu.edu.au/mailman/listinfo/csaa-forum</A></DIV> </BLOCKQUOTE></DIV><BR><DIV> <SPAN class="Apple-style-span" style="border-collapse: separate; border-spacing: 0px 0px; color: rgb(0, 0, 0); font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 12px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; line-height: normal; text-align: auto; -khtml-text-decorations-in-effect: none; text-indent: 0px; -apple-text-size-adjust: auto; text-transform: none; orphans: 2; white-space: normal; widows: 2; word-spacing: 0px; "><SPAN class="Apple-style-span" style="border-collapse: separate; border-spacing: 0px 0px; color: rgb(0, 0, 0); font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 12px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; line-height: normal; text-align: auto; -khtml-text-decorations-in-effect: none; text-indent: 0px; -apple-text-size-adjust: auto; text-transform: none; orphans: 2; white-space: normal; widows: 2; word-spacing: 0px; "><SPAN class="Apple-style-span" style="border-collapse: separate; border-spacing: 0px 0px; color: rgb(0, 0, 0); font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 12px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; line-height: normal; text-align: auto; -khtml-text-decorations-in-effect: none; text-indent: 0px; -apple-text-size-adjust: auto; text-transform: none; orphans: 2; white-space: normal; widows: 2; word-spacing: 0px; "><SPAN class="Apple-style-span" style="border-collapse: separate; border-spacing: 0px 0px; color: rgb(0, 0, 0); font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 12px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; line-height: normal; text-align: auto; -khtml-text-decorations-in-effect: none; text-indent: 0px; -apple-text-size-adjust: auto; text-transform: none; orphans: 2; white-space: normal; widows: 2; word-spacing: 0px; "><P style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px"><FONT face="Helvetica" size="3" style="font: 12.0px Helvetica">Dr Peter Eckersall</FONT></P><P style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px"><FONT face="Helvetica" size="3" style="font: 12.0px Helvetica">Senior Lecturer in Theatre Studies</FONT></P><P style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px"><FONT face="Helvetica" size="3" style="font: 12.0px Helvetica">School of Culture and Communication</FONT></P><P style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px"><FONT face="Helvetica" size="3" style="font: 12.0px Helvetica">University of Melbourne</FONT></P><P style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px"><FONT face="Helvetica" size="3" style="font: 12.0px Helvetica">Australia<SPAN class="Apple-converted-space"> </SPAN></FONT></P><P style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px"><FONT face="Helvetica" size="3" style="font: 12.0px Helvetica">3010</FONT></P><P style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; 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