Memories of 1968

The 1968 events were profoundly international in character, transcending any one national context and interacting with other movements across the world. Yet the way these events are remembered is often delimited by the national cultural or political experience and is cut off from its broader international dimension. The purpose of this volume is to examine the ‘memory’ of 1968 across different national settings, looking at the cases of France, Germany, Italy, the United States, Mexico and China. How has 1968 been (re)produced and/or contested within different national cultures and how do these processes reflect national preoccupations with order, political violence, individual freedom, youth culture and self-expression? How has the memory of 1968 been narrated, framed and interpreted in different places and in different disciplines? Is there a collective memory of 1968 and does this memory cross national boundaries? By juxtaposing representations of 1968 from across a range of national cultures and by examining the processes by which 1968 is remembered, this book aims to open up the memory of 1968 to a more diverse international perspective, one that more closely reflects the dynamics of the events themselves. The papers collected in this volume are selected from the proceedings of a conference entitled ‘Memories of 1968: International Perspectives’ that was held at the University of Leeds in 2008.

The Editors: Ingo Cornils is Senior Lecturer in German and Head of the Department of German, Russian and Slavonic Studies at the University of Leeds, UK. Among his publications are the volumes Hermann Hesse Today / Hermann Hesse Heute (with Osman Durrani, 2005), (Un-)erfüllte Wirklichkeit: Neue Studien zu Uwe Timms Werk (with Frank Finlay, 2006), Baader-Meinhof Returns: History and Cultural Memory of German Left-Wing Terrorism (with Gerrit-Jan Berendse, 2008) and A Companion to the Works of Hermann Hesse (2009). Sarah Waters is Senior Lecturer in French Studies at the University of Leeds and author of Social Movements in France. Towards a New Citizenship (2003). She has published widely on the theory and practice of French social movements and recent articles include ‘Situating Movements Historically. May 1968, Alain Touraine and New Social Movement Theory’, Mobilization (March 2008), and ‘Globalization, the Confédération paysanne and symbolic power’, French Politics, Culture and Society (forthcoming 2010). She is currently completing a monograph on globalisation, opposition and French identity.

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