Wounded Galaxies 1968 examines the relationship between radical politics, radical aesthetics, radical culture, and the legacy of a watershed year for the world. Like the Surrealists before them, 1968's counterculture believed that changing the world (politics) and changing art (life, culture) were part of the same project.
This year saw violent protests and uprisings, including those at the National Democratic Convention in Chicago; the Prague Spring and subsequent Warsaw Pact invasion of Czechoslovakia; the Tlatelolco massacre of students in Mexico City; France's Mai 1968; and further uprisings across Europe, Africa, Asia, and South America. The Vietnam War was nearing its peak with the Tet Offensive and the Mai Lai massacre; Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert Kennedy were assassinated. Yet it was also the year of Rosemary's Baby and the Beatles' White Album; Apollo 8 became the first crewed spacecraft to orbit the Moon; and the first International Special Olympics Summer Games were held at Chicago's Soldier Field. Combining original contemporary documents with scholarly essays and memoirs, Wounded Galaxies 1968 asks readers to consider the geopolitical alongside the cultural, inviting us to make some of the same intellectual and emotional connections that contemporaries did back then.
An engaging cultural critique of a tumultuous year, Wounded Galaxies 1968 demonstrates that, while changing the world proved frustratingly difficult, changing life was largely successful with significant transformations across society, education, and the arts—changes whose impacts have continued to be felt in the United States and Western Europe well into the twenty-first century.
Table of Contents:
Introduction: Wounded Galaxies Volume One, by Joan Hawkins
Timelines
Part I: Geopolitics, Cinematic Form, and Memoir
1. Wounded Galaxies: Keynote Address at Indiana University, February 9, 2018, by Greil Marcus
2. Someone Else's '68, by Timothy S. Murphy
3. Northern Ireland and the Global Zeitgeist of "1968", by Chris Reynolds
4. Post-1968 Generation in Italy: Romanzo di una strage, by Anna Chichi
5. Autogestión and Autonomy: Mexicanism, Cinematic Form, and the Legacy of 1968, by Stephen Buttes
6. From 'Nam to Sweden to the East Village: Terry Whitmore's Cinematic Repatriation, by Christopher Sieving
7. More Is More: A Time to Stir (Produced, Directed, and Edited by Paul Cronin), by Scott MacDonald
8. That Was the Year That Was: Tariq Ali Talks to David Edgar, by Tariq Ali
9. "One Week in Paris" (June 29, 1968) and "Student Power and the Business of Intellectuals: An Interview with Danny the Red" (June 29, 1968)
10. CAW!: A Brief Introduction and CAW! Cuban Supplement, January 1969, by Joan Hawkins
Part II: Feminisms, Avant-Gardes, and Countercultures
11. When Sexism Became a Word: 1968 and Feminism, by Maria Bucur
12. La Beauté est dans la rue: Women Artists in France Before and After May '68, by Rakhee Balaram
13. The Sixties: Four Versions, by McKenzie Wark
14. Stefan Themerson on a Time-Chart, by David Andrews
15. Disembodied Communities: From the Whole Earth Catalog to Cyberspace, by Katharine Streip
16. Seven Surrealist Animals: Ecology in International Surrealism, by Kristoffer S. Noheden
17. Cutting Up the Virus Across the Wounded Galaxies: William S. Burroughs, Speculative Fiction, and Societies of Control After 1968, by Alex Wermer-Colan
18. Happening vs. Situation: How to Stop Consuming on the Spot, by Marielle Pelissero
19. Counter Cultures, Parallel Cultures: Trying to Change the System from Within, by Joan Hawkins
20. "The Siege of Columbia: A Report from the Inside" (June 15, 1968)
21. "Two, Three, Many Columbias" (June 15, 1968), by Tom Hayden
22. "Counter Culture", by Ward Shelley
23. "People's Park Protest", by William "bil" Paul
Part III: Pop and Performance
24. Revolution in Situ: Situationist Spatial Strategies and British Punk, by Elijah Pritchett
25. May 1968 in France and the Myth of the Fragile Wall: Revisiting Reprise du travail aux usine Wonder (1968), by Samuel Smucker
26. Monterey Pop and the Memorial Machine, by Laurel Westrup
27. We Shall Raise the Flag of Nothingness, by Seth Kim-Cohen
28. Piano Practice, by Annea Lockwood
29. "Paradise Now is How to Get There": Political Action, Acting, and the Stakes of Spontaneity, ca. 1968, by Matthew Hubbell
30. The Whole World is Watching: 1968 Chicago, Today, by Davis Schneiderman
31. "i.e. the end of an era": Elephant Steps, an Avant-Garde Addendum, by Eric Zobel
32. "Report from Olympic Village" (November 30, 1968), by Pete Hamill
Epilogue
33. Where Has All the Rage Gone?, by Tariq Ali
34. In 1968 I Thought It Would Always Be 1968, by Laurie Stone
Acknowledgments
Index
About the Author :
Joan Hawkins is Professor Emeritus of Cinema and Media Studies at Indiana University Bloomington. She is author of Cutting Edge: Art-Horror and the Horrific Avant-garde as well as editor (with Alex Wermer-Colan) of William S. Burroughs Cutting Up the Century.Joseph E. Roskos earned his master's degree in media arts and sciences from Indiana University. His research has appeared in Black Camera, Journal of Cinema and Media Studies, Human Communication Research, and Journalism. He is an educational assistant for the Willoughby-Eastlake School District in Ohio.Anthony L. Silvestri received his doctorate in media arts and sciences from Indiana University. His research has appeared in The Moving Image, The Historical Journal of Film, Radio, and Television, Porn Studies, and The Journal of Film and Video. He is the journals manager for the University of Minnesota Press.
Review :
"Wounded Galaxies 1968 explores 'the symbiotic relationship of the radical art, culture and politics of that time,' acknowledging the 'contentious . . . . conflicting, sometimes contradictory' nature of that period's radical discourses. At the same time, Hawkins acknowledges concerns that reforms dating back to 1968 are being eviscerated in the United States, thus necessitating their reexamination. Given current American politics, such concerns must now only be amplified but make this volume still more timely."—Robert C. Cottrell, author of The Activist 1960s: Striving for Political and Social Empowerment in America
"There are few critical histories quite like this one, and none that I am aware of that address this period in history. As such, as an edited collection it offers a significant contribution in the way it explicitly asks readers to think about intersections and overlaps across space, time, actions, and practices that most monographs or other collections don't or can't due to the scale such broad framing requires. The strength of this book is that it is a multidisciplinary collage, revealing new meanings to and in the history of this critical year."—Wyatt D. Philips, coeditor of Camp TV of the 1960s: Reassessing the Vast Wasteland
