Abstract
As 2018 is the 50th anniversary of the 1968 social movements, the editors of the Journal of Communication Inquiry invited a few scholars to share their thoughts on the movements of 1968 with an eye to the present. The movements of 1968 comprised an escalation of social conflicts in different parts of the world that were principally characterized by popular rebellions against bureaucratic and military regimes. The origins of the 1968 protests and activism were led by anti-colonialist, black liberationist, anti-psychiatry, feminist, anti-war, student democracy, and environmental movements. After five decades, there seems to be a resurgence of—or a renewed public debate on—some of these movements. Therefore, in this special section titled “1968 Movements and Activism,” four scholars critically reflect on one or more of these movements with the following questions:
What particularly interesting roles did intellectuals play in the movements of 1968? How was this role effective or an interesting failure? What does the intervention of intellectuals in the movements of 1968 have to teach us about how intellectuals might effectively intervene in the movements of today? What are some ways that intellectuals utilized media to spread their ideas? How did the events of 1968 influence the thinking of a key figure (or figures) in critical theory? What problems identified by critical theorists in 1968 remain relevant today? What are some interesting ways that critical theory is being used to intervene in political struggle today?
In the first essay, titled “Honoring the Paradox of Education,” Laura Meadows concentrates on James Baldwin’s role as a public intellectual in the civil rights movement of the 1960s to suggest that academics leverage popular media in order to communicate “truthfully, but provocatively.” Meadows highlights the importance of visibility to Baldwin as he delivered public speeches and spoke to journalists. Consequently, Baldwin’s ideas captured audiences previously unaware of his rhetorical prowess and the issues he cared about. Meadows further describes how Baldwin’s uncompromising writing and resolute speech meant that he communicated truth provocatively. Through citing examples of how Baldwin immersed himself within African American communities in an effort to understand the lived realities of Black people in America, Meadows calls contemporary academics to do more publicly engaged research. While acknowledging the constraints that the higher education system places on academics, Meadows nonetheless invites them to engage with social issues. “As Baldwin’s experiences as a Black man, essayist, and intellectual gave him the standing to speak for and with civil rights activists, our disciplinary expertise allows us to act in direct, tangible ways.”
In “U.S. Feminism, 1968 and Mediated Collective Intellectuality,” Jack Z. Bratich explores 1968 “feminist intellectuality’s” relation to academia, its media production, and its prefiguration of contemporary decentralized knowledge production. Bratich distances himself from modern-day “networked technologies” to trace the “collective intelligence” within 1968 movements, structured through media ecologies, which used academia as a site and resource while extending beyond it. Bratich notes that today’s intellectual legacies—such as feminist social media and the #metoo movement—signal the return of feminism as a circulating form of political association, where the “analogical meets the digital.” Although contemporary feminist intellectual production has been intensified and extended by technical affordances, Bratich argues that its “strength is in the long genealogy of analysis, dialogue, experience-naming, witnessing, and story sharing.” He notes that this revival of intellectual work can also be assessed in relation to academia as resource and terrain, where academics try to figure out how to be allies, even accomplices, in a broader intellectual project of liberation and justice. Thus, the present feminist intellectualism is, in a sense, a continuation of the “Long 1968.”
Similarly, Sarah Hill’s essay “Un Naw Chwech Wyth” (“Nineteen Sixty Eight”) considers the year 1968 not as a “focal point” in history but as a moment in a long and continuous process of activism and identity politics. Hill focuses on the relationship between political activism and popular music in Wales. Specifically, she examines the role of popular music in providing a fillip to the campaigns for the survival of Welsh language and against the investiture of the Prince of Wales. Hill notes that the assertion of a marginalized cultural identity was radical in the 1960s, and one of the principal vehicles for the expression of that identity was popular Welsh music, which was inspired by politically oriented American popular music. According to Hill, the struggle for the Welsh language was seen as a struggle for civil rights and therefore Welsh activists adopted the music of the Civil Rights movement in the United States. Hill finally notes that although minority language politics is unlikely to be at the forefront of public debates today, particularly in the post-Brexit climate, the campaigns and popular music of the 1960s continue to channel the survival of the Welsh language.
Finally, in “Art at the Music Festival: Blueprints and the Chronotope,” Rebekka Kill studies how novel modes of visual art, fashion, and graphic design that emerged and accompanied festival events of the 1960s catalyzed—and subsequently promulgated—new intellectual, critical, and creative energies. Kill argues that although institutions such as universities are places where new knowledge, ideas, and modes of practice are shaped, alternate sites such as the “music art colocated with music, design, writing, film, and other practices form a particular kind of discursive space,” which binds together communities with different specialisms to create new collaborations and knowledge.