‘1968’ in reviews
How do creative writers respond to protest? The late 1960s and early 1970s saw unrest across European countries and beyond. For writers, journals and reviews offered a means of responding rapidly to what they were experiencing. From student uprisings in Paris to the rejection of segregation in the USA, from repression in Eastern Europe to the Troubles in Northern Ireland, ‘1968’ was more than a year of events, but rather a period of change with historical roots that extended back into the late 1950s beyond, and forward into the 1970s, with repercussions still today.
There has been much discussion of ‘1968’, its causes and its consequences, in different places and from various perspectives, with anniversaries offering new lenses through which to view events. This website is the online version of an exhibition taking place in Birmingham in September-October 2019, at Impact Hub, Digbeth, on 16 September, and subsequently on the Edgbaston campus at the University of Birmingham. The exhibition focuses on the literary and cultural review, and it brings together examples of reviews or journals from different countries and languages. The reviews on display are not representative of the places in which they appeared, but rather offer snapshots of what writers, editors, and sometimes artists thought was important.
With digital communications increasingly dominating cultural conversations today, these reviews remind us of the power, the potential, and perhaps the limitations of the printed form. Some reviews were distributed by established publishing houses, some were produced by editors familiar with fine art processes, and others are the result of a dedicated editor at home with a typewriter, or young activists with improvised printing presses. Reviews may be by their nature ephemeral, but they bring vividly to life the hopes and frustrations of a generation, and their material form endures.
The project is part of a series of activities generously supported by the British Academy and Leverhulme Trust. Photographs of reviews are supplied by the British Library, the University Library, Cambridge, the Cadbury Research Library, University of Birmingham, and the Archivio Luciano Caruso. Thanks are due to members of staff at these institutions and to Impact Hub, Birmingham. The photographs were printed by Streamline Imaging, Cambridge, and the information panels by Creative Media, University of Birmingham. The organiser is grateful for the assistance of the following individuals: Katie Blair, Peter Finch, Sara Jones, Abdellatif Laâbi, Rainer Langhans, Emanuela Patti, Ellen Pilsworth, Sonia Puccetti, Mererid Puw Davies, Chris Reynolds, Andy Stafford, Dean Sygrove, Lynn Wadding, and especially Niven Whatley, who undertook much of the research on the places described here.
The University of Birmingham
The project is particularly relevant to the University of Birmingham, where student protests took place in late 1968.
France
The economy and political efficacy of France were severely tested in May 1968, when student occupation protests against capitalism and hard-nosed consumerism sparked strikes in factories and across French industry.
Widespread and unruly protest activity led to huge general strikes and sometimes to confrontation and police and power figures within the country resorted to physical police action in their attempts to halt the revolutionary activity.
The civil movement and commentary around it became an international metaphor for social and cultural change around Western Europe and the world.
The more acute reactions to confrontational attempts at control resulted in President Charles De Gaulle fleeing the country temporarily and dissolving the National Assembly, before returning to renewed strength in subsequent elections.
Germany
The German student movement was both a reaction to concurrent worldwide student, civilian and labour protests and the beginning of a more universal leap to the left in West Germany.
Protests in Germany were in response to perceived authoritarianism in the purportedly anti-Soviet, anti-Nazi government and to global phenomena such as the Vietnam War and the rise of dictatorial capitalism.
Also called Die 68er-Bewegung, the German protesters faced police with batons and aimed to break the shackles of a conservative and dogmatic academic and social culture.
They were successful, both politically and in terms of bringing about a cultural paradigm shift in what Twark and Hildebrandt term the “ethical turn.” (Envisioning Social Justice in Contemporary German Culture, Camden House, New York, 2015)
Italy
As student and civil protest spread across western Europe in 1968, Italy saw the Sessantotto movement.
In reaction to traditional capitalism and patriarchy within society, both right- and left-wing students began to question society and less privileged students from previously uneducated family backgrounds began to use their newfound education and voice to push for change.
A series of smaller strikes and occupations by predominantly left-wing students and artists culminated in the occupation of the Palazzo della Triennale and the obstruction of an exhibition there.
Eventually a workers’ struggle was born in the Autunno Caldo of 1969-70 in Northern Italy, in which industry workers forged strikes and demanded increased pay and improved working conditions.
Czechoslovakia
From January to August 1968 in Central and Eastern Europe, echoing the Hungarian Revolt of 1956, restiveness and protest against Soviet domination was most prevalent in the Prague Spring.
In this instance, the Czechoslovak leader, Dubcek, proposed a loosening of state censorship and some element of social reforms, albeit without central Soviet agreement.
A brief period of more relaxed media output and an agreement to consider Czechs and Slovaks separately sat uncomfortably with the Russian Soviets, and after months of discussion, Soviet troops invaded to sporadic non-violent resistance and protest, as well as to Rumanian, Finnish and Albanian condemnation of the occupation.
United States of America
1968 in the USA saw a string of major civil, academic and political events and the crux point of the Black Rights and Civil Rights movements.
The military Tet Offensive in response to the January Khe San attack on US forces in North Vietnam fuelled the fight of conscientious objectors and peace protesters around America and the world and added to the controversy of the Vietnam War.
Articles in social science journals unknowingly predicted a rebellion amongst educators and a sea-change in the power balance of interpersonal relationships.
In February, beginning in Florida, teachers began striking and resigning their posts en masse, in reaction to perceived lack of government funding and support of education and academia.
Civil rights disturbances took place in Wisconsin and North Carolina and, as support and momentum behind the Martin Luther King rallies grew, he was assassinated on April 4th, fomenting mass riots around the country and adding incentive to the Black Panther movement.
Progressive presidential hopeful, Robert F. Kennedy was also assassinated, paving the way for less liberal politics to take hold in the White House.
Second-Wave Feminism emerged as an ideology to increase women’s rights and address equality issues and lasted as the predominant focus for greater gender equality and academic/ journalistic output for the subsequent two decades.
Mexico
In 1968 Mexico was being run as a pseudo-dictatorship by the controlling political tactics of the longstanding and supposedly democratic government of the PRI, which lasted from the late 1920s through to 1990.
Nevertheless, in October 1968, concurrent with the controversial hosting of the Olympic Games in Mexico, student protesters took to the streets during ‘el movimiento estudiantil’ and campaigned peacefully for their rights and freedom of expression, having been continuously subjected to propagandist labelling as communists and occasional meaningless assaults by soldiers in public spaces.
The protests of around 10,000 students from all schools and universities in the capital city on 2nd October 1968 were met with state brutality and political condemnation in the largely state-controlled press and a massacre ensued, in which over 350 students and civilians were killed.
Brazil
In Brazil in 1968, alongside political and anti-capitalist uprisings, revolts and protests in other parts of Latin America (Argentina, Uruguay, Mexico), unrest was felt amongst students, workers and rural residents.
New agrarian reforms based on policies of intensive economic development at all costs and a harsh military dictatorship which stifled freedom of speech and limited academic expression and political debate had protesters in public spaces, both within major cities and in rural regions, such as Pernambuco.
The protests were quelled by the hardening of the dictatorship, which went from claiming: “Everything in Brazil is free – but controlled” (Minister of Transportation, Mario Andreazza, 1967) to the December 1968 signing of the fifth Institutional Act, which gave full dictatorial powers to the newly-incumbent General Artur da Costa e Silva and allowed him to dissolve congress and instil total state censorship over the media.
China
1968 was a crucial year for the People’s Republic of China, in which the Cultural Revolution took a firm hold on the country.
Chairman Mao Tse-Tung, established as the Communist dictator of the now post-Imperial nation, aimed to urge his raft of extreme social and agrarian reforms forward, regardless of the enormously divisive impact it might have on the urban and rural civilian population.
In order to achieve a state of paranoiac adherence to his doctrine, Mao had overseen closure of academic institutions and established in 1966 a paramilitary student movement known as the Red Guards, to foment social obedience, introduce the fear of retributive violence or condemnation into any potential dissidents, erase the ‘4 olds’ of China’s imperialist past (old customs, old culture, old habits, old ideas) and spread the word about his thought (Maoism).
In 1968 the Cultural Revolution then progressed to the phase of destroying revisionism and ensuring that no contenders from without or within his party be afforded any stability to challenge, test or revise his cultural philosophy and political strategy.
The Cultural Revolution lasted between 1966 and 1976 and saw a prolonged period of social chaos, the loss and destruction of countless historic artefacts and the deaths of “at least 3 million people” (Mao, The Unknown Story, Chang and Halliday, Vintage, London. 2005).
Australia
Even in Australia the effects of rebellion and civil unrest from around the world did not go unnoticed.
Some journalists such as Simon Townsend, campaigned against their censuring imprisonment in Australia for their conscientious objection to military enlistment for the Vietnam War, whilst three others were themselves killed by the Viet Cong in Saigon.
These events, amongst growing public consensus against war, gave rise to anti-war protests outside the United States Consulate and contribute to the eventual granting of some exemptions to military service for conscientious objectors.
Worldwide
As well as in the countries listed separately, protests, strikes, unrest, rebellion and marches took place in and around 1968 in several other countries around the world and in several other ways:
In Japan there were protests against the presence of American troops staging onwards towards Vietnam;
In 1967, in Haight Ashbury, San Francisco, the Summer of Love saw ‘Hippies’ and believers in ‘Free Love’ converge to promote love, peace, art and ‘Flower Power’ as alternatives to war and consumerism;
Scandinavia and Northern Europe saw student protests against hydroelectric plants in Sweden and pollution resultant from capitalist economic development in Denmark and the Netherlands;
Campaigns in the late 1960s to stop discrimination against various political and religious factions in Northern Ireland led to riots in 1969 and the start of The Troubles;
Unrest in Poland was met with police repression and physicality as University of Warsaw protesters were beaten with sticks and clubs;
Environmentalism took root in 1968 with the forming of societies as direct results of anti-nuclear movements;
In Pakistan, student rebellion began against the military dictatorship of Ayub Khan. Workers joined then protests and caste and class differentiation dissipated temporarily as people united to force his resignation, despite mass shootings of the protesters;
In Spain, students protested Franco’s fascist policies and demanded education reform, trade unions and workers’ rights;
July saw UK occupations of art schools by British students;
Jamaica witnessed the Rodney Riots as Dr. Walter Rodney was banned from reclaiming his university post following his involvement in the Black Power movement;
Uruguay saw a period of student activism against conservative censorship in 1968;
In Argentina, Onganía had overseen violence against students and professors in 1966, as he had cancelled university autonomy, and through the 1968 period, left- and right-wing peronistas and students with cause for disillusionment protested the status quo.