In The Action Image of Society: On Cultural Politicisation (1970), Alfred Willener defined the uprisings of 1968 as a “process” that unites jazz musicians, poets, painters and political dissenters, each expressing “a revolutionary desire for social emancipation … the emancipation of the non-formal.” This chapter takes off from Willener’s observations to explore how propositions emerging across mid-century American avant-gardes might potentialize new models of community. It focuses upon Ornette Coleman’s Free Jazz (1960), as a means of framing performativity as the subject of study and its means, standing as both metaphor and enactment. Such aesthetic experimentation implicitly swarms outward to underscore the techniques of the 1968 uprisings, which are removed from established Third International forms of resistance. Its participants, as a consequence, are positioned on the edge of becoming otherwise, threatening the stability of given social codes and producing vital new modes of sociability and encounter.

Chapter 4 reads Truffaut’s Stolen Kisses (1968) in the light of the historical crisis from which it arose. Mapping the film against selected material from earlier versions of the script, director’s notes, letters, and interviews, I interpret Stolen Kisses against the grain of its conventional reception as a romantic comedy. I show how, while sympathetic to the revolutionary cause, the film occupied a bystander position in relation to the political parties involved in the conflict. Against ideologies of fusional collectivity, Truffaut experiments with new forms of individuality, freedom, and communication. In striking resemblance to Plessner’s theory of tact, he shows how tactful behaviour can facilitate ways to come close to one another without meeting, and drift apart again without damaging one another through indifference. Counter to the widespread expectation that when relations are close, they are warm, and when they are warm, they are beneficial to all individuals involved, intimacies do not necessarily bring us closer together. On the contrary, inasmuch as they may infringe upon the singularity and dignity of the individual, they can have a deeply alienating effect.

Did 1968 – a major moment of political and cultural revolt when young people across the globe rallied under the banner of “international solidarity” to challenge the Cold War consensus as well as the authorities of governments, institutions, and ways of thought – spell the end of nationalism?1 The symbolic shorthand “1968,” perhaps more than any other event of the twentieth century, quickly became synonymous with the triumph of internationalism. “National frontiers mean less than generational frontiers nowadays,” the London Times noted with astonishment in May 1968.2 Since then, the notion that the international trumped the national in this era has only become more firmly established in assessments of 1968.

This chapter focuses on how Bolaño’s short novel Amulet (1998) approaches the tumultuous period of Mexico 1968, with its effervescent student movement and the subsequent violent governmental repression that led to the military occupation of the country’s most important university, UNAM, as well as the massacre at Tlatelolco on October 2nd. Through the narration of Auxilio, an Uruguayan poet who remained locked in a women’s bathroom at UNAM during the two week span of the university’s occupation, the novel reconstructs this period yet shies away from a linear, chronological narration with a transparent claim to truth. On the contrary, by intertwining historical facts with fiction, Amulet’s unreliable and anachronistic narrator works against closure, embracing political defeat as a means to propose listening as a form of continued engagement.

Although usually associated with events in Europe and North America, the events of the ‘global 1968’ were global in scope. This chapter shows how Tanzanian youths shared common ground with their contemporaries around the world in protesting against Cold War interventions in Vietnam and Czechoslovakia. In doing so, they drew inspiration from the landscape of radical ideas and texts of revolutionary Dar es Salaam. But in contrast to the dynamics of counter-hegemonic protest elsewhere, the Tanzanian government’s foreign policy meant that it could channel these radical critiques of superpower imperialism into its own nation-building project. The language of anti-imperialism could also be deployed against more immediate threats, as the case of Malawi’s claims to Tanzanian territory demonstrate. While recognising the significance of transnational Afro-Asian and Third Worldist solidarities in these movements, the chapter integrates these dynamics into a national story. The state circumscribed the autonomy of youth activism, especially when it risked upsetting Julius Nyerere’s carefully calculated foreign policy.

The year 1968 brought a powerful affirmation of West Germany’s uniquely stable economy and society, with ripple effects across Western and Eastern Europe. Chapter 6 opens by explaining how the Grand Coalition pursued reforms that reinforced West Germany’s commitment to price stability and economic growth. When youth protests escalated in 1967–68, driven in large part by anger over U.S. and West German policies toward Greece, Iran, and the war in Vietnam, German workers declined to join in – a stark contrast to the turmoil in neighboring France. Speculators rushed to sell French francs and buy up German marks, touching off a currency crisis. Western finance ministers converged in Bonn demanding that West Germany raise the mark’s parity value – yet Bonn refused, an unprecedented display of independence. Meanwhile, the “Prague Spring” raised hopes of West German credits for Czechoslovakia, perhaps via the Bundesbank; and German visitors poured in. When the Soviet bloc invaded, de Gaulle blamed the Bonn government for provoking it. Yet the main takeaway in Moscow was that West Germany, clearly Europe’s strongest economy, could become a significant economic partner.

Although usually associated with events in Europe and North America, the events of the ‘global 1968’ were global in scope. This chapter shows how Tanzanian youths shared common ground with their contemporaries around the world in protesting against Cold War interventions in Vietnam and Czechoslovakia. In doing so, they drew inspiration from the landscape of radical ideas and texts of revolutionary Dar es Salaam. But in contrast to the dynamics of counter-hegemonic protest elsewhere, the Tanzanian government’s foreign policy meant that it could channel these radical critiques of superpower imperialism into its own nation-building project. The language of anti-imperialism could also be deployed against more immediate threats, as the case of Malawi’s claims to Tanzanian territory demonstrate. While recognising the significance of transnational Afro-Asian and Third Worldist solidarities in these movements, the chapter integrates these dynamics into a national story. The state circumscribed the autonomy of youth activism, especially when it risked upsetting Julius Nyerere’s carefully calculated foreign policy.

The Arab-Israeli war of 1967 is another oft-cited turning point, but I want to emphasize generational shift instead. The mere mention of generation in this context brings 1968 to mind, and that’s correct so long as 1968 is understood in broad terms to include not just the events of May but something more encompassing: an era when the received truths of the postwar order were called into question and cut down to size. The era of ’68, so defined, was consequential for Holocaust consciousness in three respects. The first has to do with the fate of the epic stories, Gaullist and communist, that had once enjoyed pride of place in postwar public consciousness. Sixty-eighters, “mirror-breakers” that they were, set about detonating these grand narratives. They were aided in the task by that past-master of iconoclasm, the documentarist Marcel Ophuls, who released two classics of cinematic debunking in these years dealing the legacy of the war: Le Chagrin et la pitié (1969) and Memory of Justice (1976). As old stories were ushered out, a Jewish story entered in, thanks in part to savvy use of the media. Sixty-eighters were adept at staging events that concentrated the public’s attention, a tactic that militants of Jewish memory made a conscious and successful bid to imitate, none more so than the husband-and-wife team of Serge and Beate Klarsfeld. 1968 mattered in a third and final sense, having to do less with the May events proper than with their aftermath, that is, with the fading of Marxist enthusiasms once the Revolution so many sixty-eighters had hoped for failed to materialize. From left-wing disillusionment was born a turn to identity politics, and for young French Jews, coming to terms with what Jewishness meant in France entailed willy-nilly a coming to terms with France’s own role in the Final Solution. As that role was brought into focus, so too did a new memorial map take shape, a Jewish one with its own high places of memory: the Vél d’hiv bicycle stadium where Jews, rounded up by Vichy police in 1942, had been detained; the Drancy transit camp in the suburbs of Paris where they were held prior to deportation; and Izieu (near Lyon), the site of a Jewish children’s home whose teachers and students were sent to their deaths by the Lyon Gestapo chief, Klaus Barbie.

This chapter plots the rebellion(s) of the “long 1960s” across three “zones” of Europe in order to understand how Europe’s 1968 manifested under different political regimes. Exploring how border-crossing connections functioned around 1968, it emphasizes the importance of transnational exchanges alongside acts of the globalizing imagination in which activists joined metaphorical hands across borders, blocs, and continents. Emphasizing the eclecticism of 1960s radicalism, the chapter traces efforts to identify the revolutionary subject—the “who?” of the revolution—and the search for radical source material to answer the question of “how?” Highlighting the importance of key principles such as anti-authoritarianism and self-organization, it emphasizes the “total” vision of 1960s radicals. Motivated by the belief that all spheres of social existence could or should be political, they attempted to put that principle into practice, leading to the “proliferation of the political” that gave 1968 its all-embracing character.

The conclusion traces the evolution of blackness in Mexico—its spatial orientations, histories, and relationships to culture, society, and the black body—from 1968 to the National Institute of Statistics and Geography’s 2015 intercensal survey, the first state-sponsored recognition of the nation’s visible African-descended population for the first time since independence. It examines the competing diasporic authenticities that have developed in the Costa Chica of Guerrero and Oaxaca on the one hand and in the state of Veracruz on the other since the 1980s. In broad terms, the conclusion uses the transnational histories detailed throughout Finding Afro-Mexico to examine recent debates about the legacies of the long 1960s, ‘post-racial’ societies, Afro-diasporic methodologies, and the politics of racial comparison in Western Hemisphere.

The UN designated 1968 as the International Year for Human Rights, and this chapter is devoted to a detailed examination of the year-long voluntary campaign in Britain. The chapter begins with a discussion of the international situation in 1968, dominated above all by the war in Vietnam. The main part of the chapter looks at how the Year was organised in Britain, beginning with the National Committee, followed by the activities undertaken by NGOs and local committees. The chapter makes the argument that, while not a resounding success, the Year encouraged many organisations to think about their work in the context of human rights, thereby developing the idea of a ‘field of human rights‘. The chapter concludes with a section on Northern Ireland, where 1968 was associated with a far more radical campaign for civil rights, and an assessment of the Year’s legacy.

The introduction examines the way the 1960s, and 1968 in particular, have been interpreted, and argues that the explanation of the revolts of the 1960s has often remained trapped in recovering or puncturing the revolutionary mythology of the events. It argues instead that the most important implications of the student protests of 1968 may not be in their long-term consequences, but in the short-term possibilities they demonstrated.

Chapter 9 describes the revolt at the University Institute of Social Sciences at Trento. It demonstrates the importance of protest about Vietnam in the first closure of the Institute. I argue that in the course of the revolt, the students discovered themselves as passive subjects of the university system and sought to reinvent themselves as active subjects via protest. In the third occupation at the Faculty of Sociology at Trento, they developed a charter of demands that sought to create structural spaces within the university and perpetuate the student movement without integrating it within the university. The protest movement successfully paralysed the Institute of Sociology without managing to impose itself, until the contestation spread to the Catholic Church in the Anti-Lent of 1968 which, although it culminated in the successful transformation of the institute, nonetheless left the protest movement with a question of what direction it should take.

Chapter 10 describes the development of student protest at the university of Nanterre. The chapter demonstrates how the politics of space, in particular the university residences, provided the basis of conflict between the administration and the protest movement. The university administration perceived the struggle as a problem of order, while the protest movement increasingly understood it through a language of autonomy and democracy. Police intervention was the most important mobilising factor, and Vietnam provided the theme through which the movement escalated. The chapter traces the creation of the vacuum of authority at Nanterre through a dynamic of provocation and repression, culminating in the birth of the 22 March Movement in the occupation of the administrative tower at Nanterre.

Chapter 3 analyses the cultural politics of protest in the 1960s. It examines the transformed understanding of high culture created by a mass market for paperback books.The chapter challenges the idea that the protest movements of the 1960s had their origins in a particular set of intellectual texts – often summarised as Mao, Marx, Marcuse. It traces the history of mass-circulation books in the 1960s and their perceived challenge to the organisation of high culture. I argue that the protest movements of the 1960s first promoted open access to high culture, then attempted to recast the meaning of high culture and developed a critique of commodification. I argue that this transformation did not democratise knowledge as expected, but it did contribute to the desacralisation of high culture and an old regime of elite culture.

Chapter 5 describes the decline and apathy of student and youth politics in the mid-1960s in political and religious institutions. I argue that the protest movements of the late 1960s emerged in response to the attenuation of student politics and the decline of traditional organisations. The protest movements sought to make politics possible via a model of provocation and protest rather than debate, critique and compromise. In western Europe, fears of authoritarianism, disappointed hopes for democratisation and disillusion with electoral compromise provided the background for protest. In each location, a mix of socialism, anarchism and anti-authoritarianism marked the nascent protest movement, in particular the German Student Socialist League (SDS) in West Germany, the Movement of 22 March in France, and the Anti-Authoritarian Student Movement at Trento in Italy.

Chapter 1 analyses the meaning of higher education expansion in the 1960s. It describes how the university came to be perceived as an engine of economic growth, democratisation and social mobility. These aspirations proved disappointing. The underlying tension between technocratic, liberal and egalitarian rationales for university expansion transformed into an open conflict in the mid-1960s. I argue that, instead of understanding the student revolts of the late 1960s as a response to university overcrowding, the most important cause of revolt was the narrowing of the promise of educational reform.