The Global 1960s: Convention, Contest and Counterculture

THE GLOBAL 1960s

The Global 1960s presents compelling narratives from around the world in order to de-center the roles played by the United States and Europe in both scholarship on, and popular memories of, the sixties. Geographically and chronologically broad, this volume scrutinizes the concept of “the sixties” as defined in both Western and non-Western contexts. It provides scope for a set of analyses that together span the late 1950s to the early 1970s.Written by a diverse and international group of contributors, chapters address topics ranging from the socialist scramble for Africa, to the Naxalite movement in West Bengal, the Troubles in Northern Ireland, global media coverage of Israel, Cold War politics in Hong Kong cinema, sexual revolution in France, and cultural imperialism in Latin America. The Global 1960s explores the contest between convention and counter-culture that shaped this iconic decade, emphasizing that while the sixties are well-known for liberation, activism, and protest against the establishment, traditional hierarchies and social norms remained remarkably entrenched. Multi-faceted and transnational in approach, this book is valuable reading for all students and scholars of twentiethcentury global history. Tamara Chaplin is Associate Professor of Modern European History at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, USA. Her publications include Turning On the Mind: French Philosophers on Television (2007) and articles in the Journal of the History of Sexuality, the Journal of the History of Ideas, and French Historical Studies. Jadwiga E. Pieper Mooney is Associate Professor of Modern Latin American ­History and Chair of Gender and Women’s Studies at the University of Arizona, USA. Her publications include The Politics of Motherhood: Maternity and Women’s Rights in Twentieth-Century Chile (2009) and De-Centering Cold War History: Local and Global Change (2012, co-edited with Fabio Lanza).

DECADES IN GLOBAL HISTORY

This series takes a fresh view of decades in history, discussing each period from a truly global perspective and interrogating the traditional trope of a decade. In asking questions about what each decade actually represents throughout the wider world and exploring the transnational connections that shaped its course, this global approach allows the reader to see the great events of each decade as intricately bound into and moulded by international forces. A full list of titles in this series is available at: https://www.routledge.com/Decadesin-Global-History/book-series/DECADES Titles in the series: The Global 1920s Richard Carr and Bradley W. Hart The Global 1930s Marc Matera and Susan Kingsley Kent The Global 1960s Edited by Tamara Chaplin and Jadwiga E. Pieper Mooney Forthcoming titles: The Global 1980s Jonathan Davis The Global 1970s Duco Hellema

THE GLOBAL 1960s Convention, contest, and counterculture

Edited by Tamara Chaplin and Jadwiga E. Pieper Mooney

First published 2018 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN and by Routledge 711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2018 selection and editorial matter, Tamara Chaplin and Jadwiga E. Pieper Mooney; individual chapters, the contributors The right of Tamara Chaplin and Jadwiga E. Pieper Mooney to be identified as the authors of the editorial material, and of the authors for their individual chapters, has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A catalog record for this book has been requested ISBN: 978-1-138-70941-6 (hbk) ISBN: 978-1-138-70948-5 (pbk) ISBN: 978-1-315-20082-8 (ebk) Typeset in Bembo by Apex CoVantage, LLC

For Angie Estes And in loving memory of Thomas G. Mooney (✞October 4, 2015)

CONTENTS

List of figures ix List of contributors xi Acknowledgementsxvi Introduction1 Tamara Chaplin and Jadwiga E. Pieper Mooney   1 The politics of colonial history: Bourguiba, Senghor, and the student movements of the global 1960s Burleigh Hendrickson

13

  2 Unity and conflict in the socialist scramble for Africa, 1960–197033 Nick Rutter   3 “We shall create a New World, a New Man, a New Society”: Globalized horizons among Bengali Naxalites Milinda Banerjee

52

  4 Challenging British sovereignty: Transnational activism and political power in Northern Ireland, 1963–1973 Steffen Bruendel

72

viii Contents

  5 Social science, cultural imperialism, and the Ford Foundation in Latin America in the 1960s Patrick Iber   6 The global erotics of the French sexual revolution: Politics and “Arab Men” in post-decolonization France, 1962–1974 Todd Shepard   7 Left out: Writing women back into Japan’s 1968 Chelsea Szendi Schieder

96

115 140

  8 Refashioning Spain: Fashion, consumer culture, gender, and international integration under the late Franco dictatorship Alejandro J. Gomez-del-Moral

159

  9 Hong Kong at the movies: Cold war masculinity, action melodrama and sixties martial arts films Jing Jing Chang

176

10 Artists’ networks in the 1960s: The case of El Corno Emplumado/The Plumed Horn (Mexico City, 1962–1969) Gabriela Aceves Sepúlveda

196

11 “Kill that gook, you gook”: Asian Americans and the Vietnam War Karen L. Ishizuka

217

12 The export of Zionism?: Global images of Israel in the 1960s Jérôme Bourdon 13 Looking out, cheering on: Global leftist vocabularies among Palestinian citizens of Israel Maha Nassar

236

255

14 Herbert Marcuse: Media and the making of a cultural icon Marvin Menniken

273

Index

293

FIGURES

1.1 University of Dakar enrollments by gender and percentage of female students at the College of Sciences and the College of Humanities, 1968–1969. 24 4.1 Civil rights campaigners in Derry (or Londonderry) demanding equality in housing, employment, and voting rights for Catholics in Northern Ireland, January 10, 1969. 74 4.2 An RUC Police Officer fires a tear gas pistol at rioters during the Troubles, 1969. 81 4.3 “For the IRA. Against British Imperialism,” The Red Mole, Vol. 2 No. 14, August 1971. 84 4.4 “Defeat British Imperialism in Ireland,” The Red Mole, No. 34, 85 January 10, 1972. 6.1 Revolutionary masculinity: “Ali la pointe” (nom de guerre of 120 FLN fighter Ali Amar (1930–1957)). 6.2 Revolutionary masculinity: Brahim Haggiag as Ali la pointe in 121 The Battle of Algiers (1965). 6.3 “Wanted: Mohammed el-Prick, Born in Algeria, Living in France. This Man is Dangerous! Liable to Kill! Rape! Steal! Plunder! etc., etc.You Won’t Have to Look Very Far to Find 123 Him . . . All Around You, There Are 700,000 Just Like Him!” 6.4 The front cover of Rivarol, May 16, 1968. 125 6.5 “Arab or leftist?” “Faggot.” Cartoon taken from Front homosexuel d’action révolutionnaire, Rapport contre la normalité.129 6.6 This FHAR “petition” parodied the famous 1971 “Manifesto of the 343” circulated by French feminists who advocated 130 legalizing abortion in France.

x Figures

7.1 Student activists at the University of Tokyo meet in an attempt to block the riot police’s efforts to dislodge a student occupation of the clock tower on January 15, 1969. 9.1 Kang in shock immediately after Pei Er severs his right arm. One-Armed Swordsman (Dir. Chang Cheh, 1967). 9.2 The final duel between Kan and Long-Armed Devil. OneArmed Swordsman (Dir. Chang Cheh, 1967). 11.1 Cover of Gidra: Monthly of the Asian American Experience,Vol. IV, no. 5 (May 1972) by Alan Takemoto.

141 188 189 218

CONTRIBUTORS

Gabriela Aceves Sepúlveda is Assistant Professor in the School of Interactive Arts

and Technology at Simon Fraser University. As both an interdisciplinary media artist and cultural historian, her research focuses on Latin American feminist media and contemporary art and design history and practice. She is currently working on a monograph on the histories of feminist media in 1970s Mexico. Her articles have been published in Platform: Journal of Media and Communication and Artelogie: Recherches sur les arts, le patrimoine et la littérature de l’Amérique latine. Milinda Banerjee is Assistant Professor, Department of History, at Presidency University, Kolkata. His doctoral dissertation (from Heidelberg University) was titled: “ ‘The Mortal God’: Debating Rulership and Genealogies of Sovereignty in Colonial India, 1858–1947 (with a primary focus on Bengal)”; it is now forthcoming as a book. Banerjee specializes in intellectual history (18th to 20th century), with a particular emphasis on ideas of sovereignty and justice. His principal postdoctoral project focuses on a global intellectual history of the Tokyo Trial (1946–1948). He is also the author of two books and a number of articles in peer-reviewed journals and volumes on the intellectual history of Bengal. Jérôme Bourdon is Professor at the Department of Communications at Tel Aviv

University and associate professor at INA-SUP School of Broadcasting in Paris. He researches the global history of television, the relations between media and memory, the global representation of the Israeli–Palestinian conflict across media and genres, and the archeology of the Internet. Recent books include Television Audiences Across the World: Deconstructing the Ratings Machine (co-edited with Cécile Méadel), Palgrave, 2014 and Du service public à la télé-réalité: une histoire culturelle des télévisions européennes, Paris: INA, 2011 (Italian translation, Milano: Vita e Pensiero, 2015).

xii Contributors

Steffen Bruendel is Research Director of the Frankfurt Humanities Research Center at Goethe University, Frankfurt am Main, Germany. He started his professional career in the field of non-profit management working for the private Hertie Foundation (1999–2006) being responsible for international academic exchange and later joined a E.ON Ruhrgas company (2006–2014) heading the department for international cultural and academic affairs as well as the company’s scholarship fund. He also lectured in Contemporary History at Bielefeld University (2003– 2006) and at Bochum University (2011–2012). Steffen studied Modern History and Constitutional Law at Freiburg University, University of London (Queen Mary College) and Bielefeld University where he did his Magister Artium (M.A.) in 1997 and his Ph.D. in 2001. His fields of research include political ideas of the 20th century, arts and culture in the First World War and its aftermath, new social movements in Britain in the 1960s, and Franco’s dictatorship in Spain. Jing Jing Chang is Assistant Professor of Film Studies at Wilfrid Laurier University,

Ontario, Canada, where she teaches courses in film history, Hong Kong cinema, Bollywood film, and World Cinemas. Her research interests include Hong Kong cinema, Cold War culture, diaspora, and postcolonial studies. Her article on the border-crossing career of Chinese film star Li Lihua appeared in the journal Film History (2014) and her article on Ann Hui’s Tin Shua Wai diptych appeared in the journal Quarterly Review of Film and Video (2016). She is currently working on a book manuscript in the area of colonial and Cold War politics in postwar Hong Kong cinema during the 1950s and 1960s. Tamara Chaplin is Associate Professor of Modern European History at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, and a scholar of contemporary France. Her first book, Turning On the Mind: French Philosophers on Television (2007), explores the relationship between TV, high culture, and French national identity in the wake of decolonization. Her work has appeared in French Historical Studies, the Journal of the History of Ideas, the Journal of the History of Sexuality, and in edited collections in French and English.With support from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Camargo Foundation, and UIUC’s Center for Advanced Study she is now completing a book manuscript on the history of lesbian life in postwar France. Alejandro J. Gomez-del-Moral is Assistant Professor of History at the University of Southern Mississippi. He holds a Ph.D. in Modern European History from Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey. His research examines the role that mass consumption played in the sociopolitical transformation of the Franco dictatorship (1939–1975) and Spain’s transition to democracy. This work was a finalist for the Herman Krooss Prize for Best Dissertation in Business History, and has been recognized by the Spanish Ministry of Culture’s Hispanex program. More broadly, he is interested in the study of consumer culture and transnational cultural flows between postwar Europe and the Americas. A native of Barcelona and lifelong F.C. Barcelona supporter, his scholarly interests also extend to the history of

Contributors  xiii

mass sport and its commercialization, as well as to the history of the construction and marketing of Spain’s global gastronomic brand identity. Burleigh Hendrickson is Visiting Assistant Professor in the history department at

Boston College. A historian of French empire and decolonization, he has published articles on comparative and transnational activism in the 1960s in the International Journal of Middle East Studies and French Historical Studies. His current book project, tentatively entitled, Fragments of Empire: 1968 in Tunis, Paris, and Dakar, focuses on the postcolonial relationships between France and its former colonies during the global university protests of 1968. His research highlights the enduring links between France and its ex-colonies after empire, and the emergence of transnational human rights organizations in response to the state repression of 1960s university protests. He is the past recipient of Andrew W. Mellon fellowships from the Council for European Studies and the Social Science Research Council, and research fellowships from Fulbright-Hays and the Society for French Historical Studies. Patrick Iber is Assistant Professor of History at the University of Texas at El Paso. He is the author of Neither Peace nor Freedom:The Cultural Cold War in Latin America (Harvard University Press, 2015). His writing has appeared in journals including Diplomatic History and the Journal of Latin American Studies as well as magazines such as The New Republic, Dissent, Letras Libres, Nexos, and the Los Angeles Review of Books. Karen L. Ishizuka is a third-generation American of Japanese descent who is the

author of Serve the People: Making Asian America in the Sixties (Verso Press, 2015) and Lost and Found: Reclaiming the Japanese American Incarceration (University of Illinois Press, 2006), many journal articles, and co-editor of Mining the Home Movie: Excavations in Histories and Memories (University of California Press, 2008).An awardwinning documentary writer/producer and museum curator who helped establish the Japanese American National Museum in Los Angeles, her honors include an HBO Producers Award, First Place C.L.R. James Scholar Essay, and three CINE Golden Eagles as well as having an official selection at the Sundance Festival. She received a Master’s degree in social work from San Diego State University, a Ph.D. in anthropology from the University of California, Los Angeles and has been a Visiting Scholar in Residence at the Getty Research Institute in Los Angeles. Marvin Menniken is a Ph.D. candidate at the Global History Chair of Freie Uni-

versität, Berlin and a Fellow at the International Max Planck Research School “Moral Economies.” Marvin studied history and political science in Freiburg, Brussels, and Berlin. He specializes in the history of social movements in Western Europe and North America. His Ph.D. project “Between Conservatism, Cold War and Counterculture:The American Legion in California, 1950–1980” seeks to uncover grassroots conservative activism in the world’s largest veterans’ organization and its interconnection with larger threads of the United States and global history.

xiv Contributors

Currently, Marvin is Visiting Student Researcher at the University of California, Berkeley, where he is participating in the Ph.D. program and conducting archival work on his dissertation. Maha Nassar is Assistant Professor in the School of Middle Eastern and North

African Studies at the University of Arizona. She holds a B.A. in English Language and Literature from Benedictine University, an M.A. in Middle Eastern Studies, and a Ph.D. in Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations, both from the University of Chicago. A specialist of Palestinian history during the 1950s and 1960s, Dr. Nassar’s research seeks to uncover how intellectuals constructed and contested nationalist narratives. Her articles have appeared in Journal of Palestine Studies, Arab Studies Journal, and Middle East Journal of Culture and Communication. Her first book, Brothers Apart: Palestinian Citizens of Israel and the Arab World (Stanford University Press, 2017) examines the ways in which Palestinian intellectuals in Israel positioned themselves within a third-world cultural and political milieu that extended far beyond the confines of the nation-state. By mapping the strategies they deployed, her book demonstrates the importance of Arabic texts (especially newspapers and literary journals) in the development of shared political vocabularies and transnational communities of solidarity. Jadwiga E. Pieper Mooney is Associate Professor of Modern Latin American History and Chair of Gender and Women’s Studies at the University of Arizona. Her research and teaching reflect her interests in human rights, women’s rights, feminist activism, gender equity, and notions of inclusion and exclusion in the making of modern nations. In 2009, she published The Politics of Motherhood: Maternity and Women’s Rights in Twentieth-Century Chile; in 2012, she co-edited, with Fabio Lanza, De-Centering Cold War History: Local and Global Change. She has written peer-reviewed articles addressing such topics as history and technology, forced sterilization and reproductive rights, as well as women’s transnational political activism in the Cold War. She is presently writing a book titled Medical Doctor, TwentiethCentury Man: Benjamin Viel and the Politics of Health in Chile and the Americas. This project adopts a biographical lens to explore networks of scientific exchange, uses of medical knowledge, and systems of public health and citizenship rights. She is also working on a manuscript Roads They Traveled: Chilean Exile in Cold War Germany. Nick Rutter is Lecturer at Fairfield University. His earlier publications and current

book manuscript tell the history of the World Festivals of Youth and Students. His research draws on archives in Germany, Austria, Russia, the US, and UK, and his current work concerns the histories of postwar Vienna, and communist-backed world organizations. He received his Ph.D. from Yale University and has held fellowships at the Woodrow Wilson Center, Central European University, and Botstiber Institute for Austrian-American Studies. Todd Shepard is Associate Professor of History and co-director of the Program

for the Study of Women, Gender, and Sexuality at Johns Hopkins University. He

Contributors  xv

is the author of The Invention of Decolonization:The Algerian War and the Remaking of France (2006), Voices of Decolonization: A Brief History with Documents (2014), as well as Mâle décolonisation. L’ ”homme arabe” et la France, de l’indépendance algérienne à la révolution iranienne (2017), which was subsequently published as Sex, France, and Arab Men, 1962–1979 (2017). Chelsea Szendi Schieder is Assistant Professor in the Department of Political

Science and Economics at Meiji University. She obtained her Ph.D. in Modern Japanese History from Columbia University in 2014. She has published in Monthly Review and Dissent alongside articles in academic journals, and is currently working on her book, tentatively titled Coed Revolution, on the political meaning of female student participation in postwar student activism in Japan.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

All book projects have both individual and collective dimensions. Our edited volume was conceived in the aftermath of Jadwiga’s less-than-satisfying search for teaching materials for a class on the global sixties. It was further inspired by a provocative conference discussion on the controversial nature of the sexual revolution, and took shape soon thereafter via the creative suggestions of Routledge’s acquisitions editor Eve Setch. We are truly grateful for Eve’s insights, and for her confidence in our work as we defined our goals and selected the contributions that comprise this book. Routledge editor Amy Welmers shepherded this book to completion and we thank her for her careful work. We, the editors, first met while graduate students in the Department of History at Rutgers:The State University of New Jersey. A chance encounter at a Social Science History Association Conference enabled us to exchange ideas about this project at its inception, and later gave us a venue through which to meet many of the scholars whose work appears here. Reconnecting with one another while working together has been an unexpected joy. Adding to our fruitful collaboration, institutions and foundations also supported this book in numerous ways. We each owe a profound debt to our colleagues at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and the University of Arizona for nourishing intellectual and political inquiry in the multiple departments we call home. In particular, Tamara thanks the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign for granting Humanities Released Time that enabled her to accept a fellowship from the Camargo Foundation (Cassis, France) in spring 2016.This semester of leave was crucial to furthering both her own research and our work on this collection. This volume has been much improved by the many excellent scholars at our respective institutions and beyond who provided their expert feedback and advice to us and to our contributors. Many thanks to Bill Beezley, Anne Betteridge, Richard Eaton, Kevin Gosner, Fabio Lanza, Stephen Neufeld, David Ortiz,

Acknowledgements  xvii

Carl Smith, and Nathaniel Smith. We further thank Tariq Ali, Jérôme Bourdon, Jim Brennan, Antoinette Burton, Belinda Davis, Peter Fritzsche, Poshek Fu, Richard I. Jobs, Kevin Mumford, Fiono Ngo, Dorothee Schneider, Todd Shepard, Roderick Wilson, and all the other anonymous reviewers for their constructive and insightful feedback. Each of you helped in critical ways to bring out the best of the arguments and evidence presented by our authors and assisted in shaping our book as a whole. Above all, we are indebted to our authors: it has been our pleasure and our privilege to work with you, and we have learned much from your scholarship. This book is quite literally yours. To our families and friends, who have supported each of us and our work with such grace and good cheer, we offer our thanks, and our abiding love. Tamara also thanks—too small a word—the poet Angie Estes, for laboring ceaselessly to provide her with spaces, at once physical, intellectual, affective, and imaginary, that make life both bearable and sublime. Finally, Jadwiga would like to thank her wonderful, loving, and supportive husband Thomas for the many years in which a happy home allowed life and work projects to be ever more enjoyable and fruitful. Thomas passed before the completion of the manuscript. He would have been happy and proud to have seen its completion—and he remains painfully missed.

INTRODUCTION The global 1960s: Convention, contest, and counterculture Tamara Chaplin and Jadwiga E. Pieper Mooney

Introduction The 1960s. To invoke the decade is often to invoke the fantasy of a rupture after which the world became somehow irreversibly more youthful, more inclusive, more just. This nostalgic vision is invariably shaped through the prism of the Western world—namely Europe and the United States. Here, baby boomers strained universities to capacity, and youth rose up against the “establishment,” culminating in popular uprisings—notably in France in May 1968 when more than ten million people went on strike. Liverpool’s The Beatles led “The British Invasion” and ushered in the “Swinging Sixties.” The androgynous Twiggy (dubbed “The Face of the Sixties”) represented a new standard for female beauty and modeled the psychedelic fashions of the time. Movies like La Dolce Vita and Lawrence of Arabia captured the imagination of Western audiences, while television beamed white middle-class values into the intimate private sphere. Economic, scientific, and civil developments mirrored social and cultural transformations. Citizens across Western Europe and the United States benefited from the postwar economic miracle, coveting the televisions, refrigerators and washing machines that were flooding the markets and revolutionizing domestic life.Tourism and leisure travel expanded as automobiles and passenger airlines became accessible to a growing demographic, changing the way that people experienced and learned about the world and one another. The Soviets put a man into space in 1961, and by 1969 United States astronauts Neil Armstrong and Edwin “Buzz” Aldrin had landed on the moon. Medical advances like the contraceptive pill—authorized for use in the US in 1960—promised to liberate sexual desire from reproduction. In the United States, hippies took to the streets in places like San Francisco, which exploded in the Summer of Love in 1967. People rose up against racism, participating in acts of civil disobedience and demanding equal rights for ­African-Americans. In 1969, at New York City’s Stonewall Inn, homosexuals rioted against police

2  Tamara Chaplin and Jadwiga E. Pieper Mooney

repression, triggering movements for gay and lesbian liberation. Meanwhile, people around the world joined US citizens in opposing the Vietnam War, often linking their condemnation of US involvement in Southeast Asia to larger campaigns against capitalism, colonialism, and imperialism. From this perspective, the sixties were epitomized by the power of the people to push back against government, against prejudice, and against military might in ways that appeared unstoppable. And yet, despite undeniable achievements, recent events—spurred on by the threat of terrorism and buoyed by religious fundamentalism and the rise of rampant nationalisms—increasingly call such rosy conclusions into question. The transnational dimensions of current political developments also remind us that we cannot understand the past, much less the present, if we fail to place our analysis in a global frame. The Global 1960s: Convention, contest, and counterculture de-centers the role played by Europe and the United States in both popular memories of and scholarship on the sixties. This volume suggests that we can find clues to our current conservative retrenchment in a re-examination of the contests between convention and counterculture that shaped this age. Our global perspective is adopted not purely for reasons of “inclusivity” and our aim is not “complete coverage” in any standard sense—as if such an aspiration were even possible. Rather, we challenge dominant interpretations based on traditional understandings of centers and peripheries because we believe that thinking expansively through “the global” fundamentally reconfigures how we understand not only the story of “the sixties,” but also how we analyze the present. Such an analytic is vital because, as Antoinette Burton and Tony Ballantyne have observed in their work on world history “from below”: The stories often told imagine that the energy, creativity, and influence has stemmed from western Europe and North America; that the world we have ended up with in the twenty-first century is a predominantly Westernized one; and that ‘others’ whose histories arise along the way are easily incorporated into a seamless account of globalization’s past, as well as its ascendant future.1 When it comes to chronicles of the sixties—a period that, while shaped by governmental and corporate imperatives was indissociable from the radical actions of ordinary people be they workers, students, or activists—Burton and Ballantyne’s argument is clearly prescient. Our contributing authors introduce largely unknown stories while pointing to the ways in which battles over state power, decolonization, education, gender, sexuality, and the mass media—all central foci in this volume— both transformed and connected people, ideas, regions, and countries around the world, often in unexpected ways.

Searching for the global sixties Unlike Gerard DeGroot, whose The Sixties Unplugged claims to be “the history of a decade, not of an idea,” we deploy the term,“the sixties” not as a strict chronological

Introduction  3

epoch lasting from January 1, 1960 through December 31, 1969, but rather as a heuristic concept.2 For us (riffing on historian Richard Jobs’ work on “the idea of youth” in postwar France), “the global sixties” is a tool “for exploring social and cultural meanings” in a particular part of the postwar era.3 When we render this category “global” we not only make our object of study critically capacious, we also ensure that our historical parameters take geographic specificity into account. Consequently, our authors propose definitions of “the sixties” that are relevant to both non-Western and Western contexts, variously situating their analyses within a span that stretches from the late 1950s through the early 1970s. Thus, for example, Jérôme Bourdon identifies an Israeli sixties bounded by the Suez Crises of 1956 and the Six-Day War in 1967, whereas Alejandro Gomez-del-Moral’s Spanish sixties are framed by the economic boom of 1959–1973. Like Gomez-del-Moral, Todd Shepard also ends his analysis of France’s sixties in the early seventies, but his work suggests that the French sexual revolution (often seen as a result of 1968) actually commences in 1962, with the end of the Algerian war. Shifting focus, Nick Rutter, in his work on communist-sponsored world organizations, proposes a “socialist sixties” emerging out of Khrushchev’s internationalism in the late fifties. Such disparities complicate our assumptions about the signal events that guide interpretations of “the sixties” on a global scale and remind us that all historical periodization both shapes understanding and requires explanation. The Global 1960s explores the “long sixties” both chronologically and geographically.4 We also insist on the value of disciplinary breadth in our approach to this period. Consequently, our authors work in the departments of Interactive Arts and Technology, English and Film Studies, Communications, Humanities, and Political Science and Economics as well as History. They hail from institutions in India, Israel, Germany, France, Japan, Canada, and the USA, as well as from outside the academy. Their wide-ranging backgrounds offer this volume a range of voices and analytics, from Karen Ishizuka’s autobiographical first-person manifesto on Asian American political activism during the Vietnam War, to the social-science focus exhibited in Steffen Bruendel’s work on the Irish Troubles, to Jing Jing Chang’s cinematic investigation of the Hong Kong martial-arts film. We see this volume’s disciplinary and stylistic diversity as emblematic of our interest in overcoming the limitations of traditional political history and a testament to our commitment to transnational analysis and comparison.

Writing the global sixties Our book makes four arguments. First, we claim not only that decolonization and movements of national liberation changed the dynamic of international politics in the 1960s, but also that new configurations of the “global” emerged in political, cultural, and social spheres as a result. Importantly, change resulted as much from subaltern aspirations in rural locales, as it did from mediatized moments of metropolitan activism or state-to-state negotiation and contact. Second, countering what we see as an often overly glowing perspective on the period, we argue that

4  Tamara Chaplin and Jadwiga E. Pieper Mooney

throughout the sixties, governments, individuals, and groups fought hard to protect extant patriarchal and racial hierarchies just as others sought gender equity and sexual and civil rights. Our chapters illustrate that national and international efforts to preserve “traditional” (i.e. white, heteronormative) gender expectations and patriarchal controls proved remarkably resilient in the face of widespread mobilization and dissent. Third, The Global 1960s provides evidence not only of how states and markets sought to control the mass media, entertainment, and the arts during these years, but also of how a widening scope of social actors made use of newly accessible technologies to create transnational communities and to “speak truth to power”—often across vast political and cultural divides. Our chapters thus reveal how both top-down political projects and grass-roots resistance collectively contributed to the dissonant voices that shaped the global sixties. Finally, fourth, our volume demonstrates that both public and private media expanded exponentially in the sixties while simultaneously becoming uniquely vulnerable to market forces. In the half century since, the sixties itself has become a marketing phenomenon. The commercial recuperation of the sixties testifies to the capacity of modern consumer capitalism to profit from and perpetuate particular visions of the past. It also reminds us of the crucial role that the market, the media, and popular culture have played in shaping both the global decade of the 1960s, and mainstream—often romanticized—memories of it. Notwithstanding George Katsiaficus’ now classic 1987 book on the global New Left, until recently, scholarship on the sixties concentrated primarily on the West.5 Arthur Marwick’s massive The Sixties: Cultural Revolution in Britain, France, Italy and the United States, c.1958–c.1974 is typical in this regard.6 While Marwick’s desire to move beyond the confines of single-state boundaries is commendable, and while his detailed descriptions of myriad cultural expressions in multiple locations are impressive, his evidence is often limited to descriptive summaries of revolutionary moments. Marwick’s narrative style may be the outcome of his “Rankeian” search for a single truth. He writes: “we need a history which tells it, as nearly as humans can, as it was.”7 While we share Marwick’s interest in the cultural diversity of the sixties, our chapters make clear that we are skeptical of such claims. To us, histories of the sixties will always be (as are all histories) unfinished, open to contest, and complicated by the specific contexts, interests, and sources on which they are based. Although newer work has manifestly recognized the importance of “the global” to the history of the 1960s, most studies remain rooted either in a specific location (the “Third World,” West Germany, the Soviet Union and Cuba) or a particular theme (1968, fashion, media, counterculture).8 The Socialist Sixties: Crossing Borders in the Second World, for example, explores “global interconnections” and “cultural crosspollination,” but as its subtitle proclaims, its central interest is the collision between the Socialist East and the Capitalist West.9 Other books, like Mark Kurlansky’s aptly titled 1968, and the edited collection, 1968:The World Transformed, focus mainly on the student revolutions that “rocked the world” that year.10 Our multi-sited volume instead investigates how an international global perspective can change and challenge our

Introduction  5

understanding not only of 1968, but also of the entire period. In this, our book is in the spirit of Alexander C. Cook’s Mao’s Little Red Book: A Global History.11 However, whereas Cook’s insightful study of how this key text traveled focuses uniquely on global appropriations of state ideology, our volume emphasizes that not only political projects, but also feminist ideas, cultural modes, and media products were utilized and experienced differently in different parts of the world. Luisa Passerini’s ­Autobiography of a Generation: Italy, 1968 conveys both the pleasures and the challenges of such trans-cultural negotiations well when she shares biographical accounts of European activists in Africa. At times, she writes, they felt “in direct contact with those countries ­undergoing transformations,” which “heightened the feeling” that they shared “a great common undertaking” with people from very different places and cultures. However, Passerini reports, Europeans also realized that their role as “white s­ympathizers was increasingly tenuous,” demonstrating the limits of a “voluntarism that abandoned the cities of the world for the countrysides of the oppressed.” Clearly, translating political visions and communicating the goals of political activism also tested the boundaries of sixties transnational and transcontinental collaboration.12

Politics, power, and (transnational) discontent When the sixties began, superpower rivalries dominated the global landscape. A Cold War contest pitted the capitalist US and the communist USSR—and their allies—against each other. This contest took place in the midst of a nuclear age in which an arms race coupled with recent advances in weapons technology had rendered global annihilation a new and terrifying possibility. For the US, guerilla warfare in places like Latin America epitomized the communist threat, and the execution of sixties icons like the Marxist revolutionary Ernesto “Che” Guevera by the Bolivian high command on October 9, 1967 represented a small but important victory for the capitalist world order.13 For the Soviet Union, armed intervention (in places like Czechoslovakia and Vietnam) aimed to extend communist control outward from the eastern bloc towards the rest of the world. And yet, if Cold War rivalries redrew the geopolitical map, sixties p­ olitical projects did not always fit neatly into the bipolar Cold War order. For example, anti-colonial revolts in Africa and Asia signaling the end of formal colonial domination and the rapid emergence of new nation-states transformed the lives of approximately one billion people. In 1960 alone, 17 African countries gained independence from their rulers.The United Nations grew from 82 to 127 member states over the course of the decade. Political parties like Algeria’s Front de la Libération Nationale (FLN or National Liberation Front) waged a brutal—and ultimately victorious— battle against French colonial oppression from 1954 to 1962 and contributed to the gradual weakening of the bipolar divide. The FLN’s guerilla tactics inspired revolutionary groups—from the Black Panther Party and the Tamil Tigers, to the Irish Republican Army and the Palestine Liberation Organization—in countries around the world while laying a template for modern terrorism. Importantly from our standpoint, the political conflicts that marked the sixties—over the decolonization

6  Tamara Chaplin and Jadwiga E. Pieper Mooney

of Africa, Vietnam, the Six-Day War, the arms race, the Chinese Cultural Revolution, civil rights in the United States, the Troubles in Northern Ireland, education, state power, and consumer society in France, and revolutions and dictatorships in Latin America—also mobilized peoples and ideas situated far from the geographic locations in which they arose. Our chapters show the links between local and regional struggles and global political competitions and testify to how people, groups, or new nations deployed and reshaped superpower geopolitics and colonial and anti-colonial ideologies for multiple political ends. Thus, for example, in Chapter 1, Burleigh Hendrickson’s discussion of student movements in Tunisia and Senegal reveals that when students at universities in Tunis and Dakar rioted in 1968, state officials ironically accused them of practicing a kind of neo-imperial mimicry that copied the decadent politics of their former French colonial oppressors. Hendrickson’s work, which shows how both agents of the state and students in North Africa weaponized colonial history to denounce each other, describes a political scenario that was in some ways more invested in the colonial past than the Cold War present. In contrast, Nick Rutter’s contribution (Chapter 2) on the evolution of international relations within the Soviet bloc during the global sixties traces how the colonial question reoriented the ways in which communist states communicated with one another at that time. By 1965, the Sino-Soviet split had incapacitated communist-sponsored international events, while competition for African markets and allies had placed additional strain on the Soviet-Eastern European alliance. The solution for the bloc, as Rutter reveals, lay in the Soviet production of smaller, more policy-focused alternatives to the splashy international congresses and conferences of the 1950s. Milinda Banerjee’s study of the Naxalite movement in West Bengal, India ­(Chapter 3), also reflects China’s widespread influence. There, Naxalite rebels gave rise to an insurgency in which they used an idealized Maoism to justify the ritualized destruction of statues of Indian nationalist heroes and the torture of class enemies. These rebels prized immediate political over gradual economic change. Maoism also helped Bengali Naxalites to construct their rebellion as part of a broader global fight against both US neo-colonialism and Soviet socialist imperialism. Steffen Bruendel continues this transnational focus in Chapter 4 as he links the history of the political conflict—the Troubles—in Northern Ireland to student unrest, British protest against the Vietnam War, Black activism in the US, and colonialism. Indeed, Irish left-wing political activists interpreted the aggressive British policies aimed at controlling Northern Ireland as a form of British “colonialism at home.” Bruendel subsequently reveals how the Irish Republican Army’s (IRA’s) fight against British imperialism in Ulster was inspired by African-American struggles for freedom and a new society half way around the globe. Finally, in Chapter 5 Patrick Iber employs the expanding activities of the Ford Foundation in Latin America as a lens into the critique of cultural imperialism that emerged amongst Latin American leftists in the 1960s. Iber’s work demonstrates that the Foundation claimed to promote the modernization of the social sciences in Latin America, yet actually helped to construct a “positive” anti-communism that was used to justify radical anti-communist politics well beyond the global sixties.

Introduction  7

These chapters confirm the ways in which sixties political activities on both the right and the left demonstrated both remarkable variation and cultural crosspollination among people of different continents, and between communist and capitalist countries. As our authors show, political solidarity was often hard won: for example, although frequently referred to in the singular, the New Left was neither uncontested nor one-dimensional. In their diverse treatment of the New Left, our contributors echo the broader scholarship. Scholars of Latin America predominantly discuss the New Left with a focus on its armed wing, often citing the 1959 Cuban Revolution as the key paradigm shift that confirmed that armed revolutionaries could, indeed, overthrow the capitalist old order.14 Scholars of France frequently describe the New Left within a Maoist tradition—an influence equally visible, as noted above, in Milinda Banerjee’s chapter on the Naxalite movement in West Bengal. We recognize that radical quests for change in the sixties came from both small islands of counterculture and large movements (like fidelismo in Cuba), as well as stemming from a wide variety of political and religious positions, including liberation theology.15 In general, our authors’ discussions of radical political activism confirm the usefulness of Van Gosse’s definition of the New Left as “the totality of the overlapping social movements for radical democracy and social justice,” which gradually emerged after the Second World War and had significant impact on the long global sixties.16 Our critical re-evaluation of sixties political activity reminds us that we need to look beyond national boundaries—and Western borders—if we want to better understand this era. And yet, even as international political actions were inseparable from the sixties, examined in isolation they fail to capture the complexity of these turbulent years. We argue that the sixties must also be understood as a global crucible in which politics and social protests—over race, gender, class, sexuality, and generation—collided with new forms of technology, a growing mass media, and expanding commercial markets. Our remaining chapters explore these interconnected themes in turn.

The political is personal: sexual, gender, and race revolutions re-examined During the “long sixties,” challenges to normative gender roles and sexual practices became testing grounds for debates about the structure of contemporary society. However, just as we reject the romanticization of the sixties, we also assess the ways in which this period is often unproblematically associated with a “sexual revolution” that was purportedly produced through the happy confluence of unfettered sexual freedoms, legal emancipation, and new contraceptive technologies (namely the contraceptive pill).We argue that claims that the sixties heralded a dramatic shift in everyone’s sexual practices due to a global “liberation” from conservative morals and gendered double standards are misleading at best. Surely, while the sexual revolution encouraged the expression of (certain) sexual desire(s), it also provoked new inequalities where some people and groups benefited from changing attitudes towards sexuality more than others.17 Jeffrey Week’s assertion that the sexual

8  Tamara Chaplin and Jadwiga E. Pieper Mooney

revolution of the 1960s was “by definition, a male-oriented one which subordinated women ever more tightly to the heterosexist norm” inspires not only a careful revisioning of any notion of revolutionary change, but also a more nuanced reading of its implications.18 Our volume seeks to complicate interpretations of the sixties that celebrate the sexual revolution’s alleged achievements, arguing instead for a critical reassessment that tests not just how, but also for whom, and in what ways, sexual behavior, gender performance, and sexual rights changed during these years. Of course, all historical projects are based on assumptions about gender and sexuality, even if activists and scholars do not always articulate the influence of sexgender systems on their work. As Lessie Jo Frazier and Deborah Cohen’s edited collection Gender and Sexuality in 1968 reminds us: “there is no politics disconnected from desire.”19 Indeed, they confirm that public issues always have private dimensions, thereby motivating our reversal of the slogan, “the personal is political.” Reframing this connection between public and private (i.e. seeing the political as personal) is especially critical to us because of the ways in which sixties politics were grounded, as Luisa Passerini notes “in undercurrents about the racialized and gendered body” that have frequently remained “unarticulated” in understandings of the sixties more broadly.20 Todd Shepard’s contribution to this volume, on the sexual revolution in post-decolonization France (Chapter 6), offers a particularly incisive example of why such preconceptions matter. As Shepard notes, “Attending to the admixture of anticolonialism and racism that defined French sexual history maps out large areas where the terrain of sexual liberation was more perilous than usually thought.” Focusing on the writings of both far-right journalists and male sex radicals fighting for homosexual revolution, Shepard’s chapter describes how recourse to invocations about Arab men and Algeria differentiates the sexual revolution in France from that experienced in other countries. In shifting our attention to the nexus of race and sexuality, Shephard also analyzes radical attempts to politicize “intersectionality” long before the emergence of either the term or of sexual identity politics in the 1970s. Shepard’s work likewise reminds us that we cannot write the history of the sexual revolution relying solely on normative narratives focused on the emancipation of heterosexuality. Finally, and most importantly, his chapter emphasizes that inasmuch as politics illuminates the history of sexuality, the history of sexuality can be both central to and constitutive of political history writ large. Just as Shepard’s work differentiates the history of the sexual revolution in France from that of sixties sexual revolutions elsewhere, Chelsea Szendi Schieder analyzes the ways in which, despite some surprising similarities, the experiences of Japanese female student activists on the barricades are not identical to those of their Western counterparts. Szendi Schieder’s examination of the gendered contradictions of Japanese New Left student activism (Chapter 7) explains how a dichotomy between ideologies of “violence” and “nurturing” and a particular Japanese notion of “everyday life” created new social hierarchies in the campus-based student movements that ultimately reconfirmed traditional Japanese attitudes towards female gender roles while emancipating young men. In Chapter 8, Alejandro Gomez-del-Moral also illustrates how specific socio-economic practices can either maintain or contest

Introduction  9

conservative rule. “Refashioning Spain,” examines changing attitudes towards fashion under Franco’s dictatorship. Gomez-del-Moral’s work demonstrates that while the onset of Spanish mass consumption paradoxically resulted in the promotion of such things as “unisex” gender equity “on the rack,” the Franco regime’s moralistic sociopolitical project nevertheless preserved gender inequities via the sartorial disciplining of female (and male) bodies. On a broader scale, G ­ omez-del-Moral’s careful analysis of the contradictory impact of mass-oriented consumerism on the liberalization of Spanish society helps us understand the preservation of repressive attitudes towards gender and sexuality in the post-Franco era. Movies, as Jing Jing Chang insists in her chapter on Cold War politics in Hong Kong cinema (Chapter 9), played an equally important role in gendering national identities. Chang’s work reveals that sixties Hong Kong cinema became a significant site for the gendered production of pan-Chinese global nationalism during the 1960s Chinese diaspora. By showing how the Hong Kong martial-arts film appropriated the “critical discourse of Cold War masculinity,” Chang provides yet another example of transnational cultural influence at work. In so doing, Chang reminds us that global assumptions about gender and sexuality are deeply embedded in cultural production. Her chapter on cinematic masculinity also transitions us from chapters in which gender is at the fore to the focus of our final essays: culture and the media.

Manufacturing dissent? Culture, media, commodification Our final chapters explore the ways in which governments and individuals—from state broadcasters and newspapers, to poets, artists, and filmmakers—utilized mass media to intervene in, comment on, and direct the social conversations that rocked this turbulent decade. Many of the forms of media and technology that dominate life in the twenty-first century emerged during the long sixties. From the first cassette tape, to the Sony Portapak video recorder, to the Telstar I satellite and the Arpanet (precursor to today’s Internet), these inventions were used both to bolster national power (the Space Race) and to contest it (guerrilla television). By the end of the sixties, people around the world were making new arguments about the power of the mass media to control cultural production and public debate. The unprecedented availability of new media generated conflicts over freedom of expression that remain strikingly relevant. Indeed, our chapters attest that issues raised in the sixties by contests over popular culture, mass consumption, and between state-produced, commercial, and alternative media continue to inform many of the arguments over global media that occupy the public sphere today. Chapters 10 and 11 focus on the uses of print media as a tool to forge politicalcultural alliances. Gabriela Aceves Sepúlveda considers the bilingual magazine El Corno Emplumado/ The Plumed Horn, published in Mexico City from 1962 to 1969 and distributed across the Americas and in Europe and Australia. Her contribution, which analyzes how the magazine presented differing ideologies and cultures (from beat poets and black mountain college artists to indigenous mystical traditions), illustrates the challenges of using art and journalism to bridge national and political

10  Tamara Chaplin and Jadwiga E. Pieper Mooney

boundaries. By examining one set of attempts to unify the southern and northern hemispheres of the American continent via a revivification of avant-garde media arts, Aceves Sepúlveda expands our understanding of how transnational communication initiatives influenced sixties cultural and artistic history. In contrast, Karen Ishizuka’s chapter on Gidra (the longest running Asian-American newspaper in the United States) examines ethnic diversity within one nation in order to show how minority communities used print media to forge social movements, strengthen cultural bonds, and gain political power. Ishizuka’s work on the double instantiation of Asian Americans as at once “adversary and citizen” during the Vietnam War, provides both a nuanced analysis of the war itself, and a justification for the specific contours within which a “distinctly political” Asian-American identity was forged during the war years. We cannot consider media in the global sixties without addressing the impact of television and cinema, which is precisely what our next three contributors do. Jérôme Bourdon (Chapter 12) explains how Israeli state television produced the nation of Israel as a global media phenomenon during the 1960s. In his chapter, Bourdon shows TV’s role in exporting Israel’s national ideology, Zionism, and explains how the tiny country came to dominate the global imagination of the Middle East. He also tracks the media’s influence on the internationalization of “Israelophilia” in the years leading up to the 1967 Six-Day War, as well as the disintegration of positive media coverage of the country—at least outside of the US—in its aftermath. While Bourdon’s work makes evident that television exerted tremendous power to shape Israel’s image on the global stage, Maha Nassar argues in Chapter 13 that cultural productions by Palestinian-Israeli poets, writers, activists, and intellectuals also challenged TV’s political hegemony. Nassar’s contribution reveals the political dimension of acts of translation. By making texts by foreign leftists available in Arabic, or creating works expressing solidarity with leftist causes (African decolonization, for example), Palestinian-Israeli cultural producers spread international political vocabularies while inserting themselves within global political communities. Finally, Nassar’s chapter demonstrates how local Palestinian cultural producers talked back to state-produced media, thereby putting the Palestinian cause on the global map. The last chapter in our collection, Chapter 14, returns us to an icon of 1960s radicalism: German-born philosopher and New Left activist Herbert Marcuse. Marvin Menniken argues that Marcuse’s renown was a product of media publicity as much as it was an effect of scholarly influence. From his perspective, journalists not only constructed Marcuse as the “intellectual father” of the New Left, but were also crucial in claiming Marcuse’s alleged universal popularity in New Left circles, and later—inadvertently—in prefiguring his demise. Menniken invites us to remember that just as the new mass media could help to construct the identities of nations, it could also either bolster or destroy the reputation and power of individual citizens. This final chapter returns us to our earlier observation about how commercial culture helps shape memory, reminding us that the history of the global sixties is inextricable from media representations of it.

Introduction  11

Conclusion Literary critic Kristin Ross has argued that the meanings of events such as May 1968 are distorted unless we explore the processes of remembering and forgetting that have occurred ever since.21 We agree, and likewise affirm that histories of the global sixties are as much about the struggle for meaning, for interpretive power, as they are about what “actually happened.” Encouraged by Ross’ assertion that by reducing the sixties to a specific place and time (such as May 1968) we participate in an undue act of control, in imposing an inexcusable silence on wide-ranging, sweeping struggles, we seek to illustrate the complexities of sixties-histories. We therefore present research that challenges seemingly hegemonic interpretations of sixties events by providing an unruly range of themes, geographies, and chronologies. Our edited volume supports endeavors by Ross and others who strive to recover the political language of the sixties, presenting evidence to show that these years were neither “simply” cultural, nor “merely” about student discontent or disgruntled youth in specific places and at particular moments. But we also seek to expand the political field, rendering it inclusive of the myriad arenas—cultural, mediatic, social, civil—that were subject to both contest and control at this time. Our chapters present proof of the individual and collective initiatives that challenged traditional hierarchies—of class, of race, of gender, of sexuality—throughout the long sixties, but they also testify to the remarkable resilience of entrenched structures of political and social power. We remain inspired by the ways in which sixties revolutionary activism connected diverse peoples around the globe: from Paris to Senegal and Tunisia, from West Bengal to China, from Japan to the US. The work collected here thus reminds us that in our contemporary world—where populist politics and religious fundamentalisms are delivering increasing power into the hands of demagogues, where anti-establishment anger is leading not to new forms of liberal humanism but to conservative backlash and right-wing nationalism—re-examining the global sixties is not just an intellectual task, it is a political act.

Notes   1 Antoinette Burton and Tony Ballantyne, eds, World Histories from Below: Disruption and Dissent, 1750 to the Present (London: Bloomsbury, 2016) 1.   2 Gerard DeGroot, The Sixties Unplugged: A Kaleidoscopic History of a Disorderly Decade (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008) 3.   3 Richard I. Jobs, Riding the New Wave:Youth and the Rejuvenation of France after the Second World War (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2007) 3.   4 The term “long sixties” derives from the editors of the journal The Sixties, who situate this era from 1954 to 1975. See Jeremy Varon, Michael Foley and John McMillan, “Time Is an Ocean: The Past and the Future of the Sixties,” The Sixties 1/1 (2008) 5.   5 George Katsiaficus, The Imagination of the New Left: A Global Analysis of 1968 (Cambridge, MA: South End Press, 1987).   6 Arthur Marwick, The Sixties: Cultural Revolution in Britain, France, Italy, and the United States, c.1958– c.1974 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998).

12  Tamara Chaplin and Jadwiga E. Pieper Mooney

  7 Nineteenth-century German historian Leopold Von Ranke famously believed that history should “show what actually happened.” Ranke, “Preface: Histories of the Latin and Germanic Nations from 1494–1514”, in Fritz Stern, ed., The Varieties of History, 2nd Edition (New York:Vintage, 1973) 57. Marwick, 20.   8 Examples are legion. See: Timothy Scott Brown and Andrew Lison, The Global Sixties in Sound and Vision: Media, Counterculture, Revolt (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014); Samantha Christiansen and Zachary Scarlett, The Third World in the Global 1960s (London: Berghahn Books, 2013); Timothy Scott Brown, West Germany and the Global Sixties: The Anti-Authoritarian Revolt, 1962–1978 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015); on the sixties in the visual arts, decorative arts, fashion, and architecture, see, Okwui Enwezor, et al., Global Village: The 1960s (Ghent: Snoeck Publishers, 2004); on the sixties in the Soviet Union and Cuba, see Anne E. Gorsuch and Diane P. Koenker, eds, The Socialist Sixties: Crossing Borders in the Second World (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2013).   9 Gorsuch and Koenker, 2. 10 The phrase “rocked the world” is drawn from the subtitle of Kurlansky’s monograph. Carole Fink, Philipp Gassert, and Detlef Junker, eds, 1968: The World Transformed (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998) and Mark Kurlansky, 1968: The Year that Rocked the World (New York: Random House, 2005). There is an enormous literature on 1968. See also Martin Klimke, The Other Alliance: Student Protest in West German and the United States in the Global Sixties (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2010);Victoria Langland, Speaking of Flowers: Student Movements and the Making and Remembering of 1968 in Military Brazil (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2013); Kristin Ross, May ’68 and its Afterlives (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002). 11 Alexander C. Cook, Mao’s Little Red Book: A Global History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014). 12 Luisa Passerini,  Autobiography of a Generation: Italy, 1968 (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1996) 59. 13 In a letter to US President Lyndon Johnson, economist Walt Whitman Rostow celebrated the killing of Che as “the passing of another of the aggressive, romantic revolutionaries . . . [His death] shows the soundness of our ‘preventive m ­ edicine’ assistance to countries facing incipient insurgency.” As cited in Odd Arne Westad, The Global Cold War: Third World Interventions and the Making of Our Times (Cambridge: ­Cambridge University Press, 2005) 178. 14 Diana Sorenson, A Turbulent Decade Remembered: Scenes from the Latin American Sixties (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2007); Thomas C. Wright, Latin America in the Era of the Cuban Revolution (Westport, CT: Praeger, 1991). For efforts to link the armed wings with other new left movements, see Eric Zolov, “Expanding our Conceptual Horizons: The Shift from an Old to a New Left in Latin America,” A Contracorriente 5/2 (2008): 47–73. 15 Liberation Theology, of course, emerged independently from organized political lefts and stayed true to religious doctrine, with a few exceptions. 16 Van Gosse, “A Movement of Movements: The Definition and Periodization of the New Left,” in Jean-Christophe Agnew and Roy Rosenzweig, eds, A Companion to Post-1945 America (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2002) 277. 17 To take just one example, while the pill ultimately had a revolutionary impact on sexual behavior (offering women in particular control over their bodies in unprecedented ways), access to and social acceptance of this technology was uneven. 18 Jeffrey Weeks, Sexuality and its Discontents: Meanings, Myths, & Modern Sexualities (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1985) 19. Emphasis added. 19 Luisa Passerini, Foreword to Lessie Jo Frazier and Deborah Cohen, Gender and Sexuality in 1968:Transformative Politics in the Cultural Imagination (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009) x. 20 Passerini in Frazier and Cohen, ix. 21 See Ross, May ’68 and its Afterlives.

1 THE POLITICS OF COLONIAL HISTORY Bourguiba, Senghor, and the student movements of the global 1960s Burleigh Hendrickson

While the events of France’s revolutionary moment of May 1968 have been well documented, related political activism in former colonial possessions in Africa like Tunisia and Senegal represent far less researched terrain.1 Like France, during May 1968 campuses at the Universities of Tunis and Dakar erupted in protest—in March in Tunis and in late May in Dakar. In Tunis, students expressed solidarity with young Tunisian activists who had been incarcerated for staging a pro-Palestinian demonstration in June 1967.2 Meanwhile, state cuts to student funding at the University of Dakar led to a campus-wide protest that, as in France, ultimately precipitated a parallel workers’ strike. This chapter explores how agents of the state and student protestors resurrected colonial history to negatively depict each other. In both cases, campuses were closed down and students sent home with varying degrees of force. And in both cases a war of words ensued between protestors and the state over the authentic meanings of revolution, neo-imperialism, and mimicry, and, more importantly, over the very events of 1968 themselves. In addition to revealing a broader moment of global protest beyond France’s borders, these cases also speak to important shared colonial histories linking them to France and to the global 1960s. Rather fittingly (given France’s intellectual predilections), in February 1968 on the eve of France’s May events, the French New Left philosopher, Louis Althusser, declared philosophy to be a revolutionary weapon. In an interview with the Italian journalist, Maria Antonietta Macciocchi, Althusser noted the violent potential of ideas that, “in political, ideological and philosophical struggle, [are] also weapons, explosives or tranquilizers and poisons. Occasionally, the whole class struggle may be summed up in the struggle for one word against another word.”2,3 Philosophy was indeed deployed as a weapon in 1968 when a number of Althusser’s students at the Ecole Normale Supérieure on rue d’Ulm participated in protests at Parisian universities and surrounding factories, with New Left and Maoist ideas providing the theoretical bases for their political activity. Drawing inspiration from Althusser’s 1968 commentary, this chapter

14  Burleigh Hendrickson

examines how colonial history was similarly used in 1968 as an ideological and political weapon by both the state and protesting students in their struggles to control postcolonial university campuses in Africa. While a brief summation of the 1968 protests in Tunisia and Senegal is necessary, this essay is more interested in the ways in which colonial history was mobilized in the discursive battles that followed, than it is in the events themselves.The focus on the Francophone world draws attention to its important place in the global constellation of activism of this period. This approach further underscores the power of ideas and, in particular, the power of colonial historical memory as a key element in the global 1960s.

March 1968 in Tunis and May–June 1968 in Dakar Given Tunisia and Senegal’s deep colonial ties to France, it is perhaps no surprise that their colonial histories played such a key role in the upheaval of 1968. Though French presence in Senegal dates to at least the seventeenth century, when Gorée Island acted as an important hub in the French slave trade, it was not until 1895 that the French established the Government General of French West Africa (AOF). From 1895 to 1956, the Government General oversaw an area nine times the size of France, consisting of present-day Mauritania, Senegal, Ivory Coast, Guinea, Burkina Faso, Mali, Niger, and Benin.4 Senegal had long held a special place in the French colonial hierarchy, with the four communes of Senegal acting as the only regions of the AOF in which French citizenship was possible—though rarely granted—and providing the seat of colonial government in the port cities of Saint Louis and later Dakar. Like the AOF, Tunisia was part of France’s “second overseas empire” as it expanded in the nineteenth century after territorial losses in North America and the Caribbean.5 While Algeria was administered as part of France itself after 1848, the French colonial regime instituted protectorates in neighboring regions of North Africa, namely Morocco and Tunisia, in the 1880s. Throughout the colonial period, subjects in North and West Africa routinely challenged French rule either through claims to additional rights or direct calls to independence. Future presidents of postcolonial Tunisia (Habib Bourguiba) and Senegal (Léopold Sédar Senghor) shared many similarities as both beneficiaries and victims of the French colonial system. On the one hand, the French government funded both men’s educations at prestigious French schools in the interwar period, where Bourguiba sharpened his political views as a law student at the Sorbonne, and Senghor studied literature and linguistics at the University of Paris and the École pratique des hautes études. On the other hand, Bourguiba and Senghor both faced financial hardship and racism as colonial students in Paris, which no doubt contributed to a hardening of their anti-colonial positions. While Bourguiba expressed ardent demands for Tunisian independence as early as the 1920s, Senghor’s politicization was much more gradual, even advocating for an African federation under the umbrella of France as late as the 1950s.6 With France distracted by its bloody conflict with Algeria (1954–1962), Bourguiba finally secured Tunisian independence in 1956. Two years later, France at last acknowledged the eventual independence of “Black Africa” when

The politics of colonial history  15

the French Community extended citizenship to subjects in the AOF. After a failed federation with Mali in 1959, Senghor became president of independent Senegal in September 1960. The euphoria of independence was brief, however. By 1968, citizens of these new nations had ample time to evaluate their progress, and university students often served as mouthpieces of dissent against leadership. In March 1968, the University of Tunis erupted in protest over the sentencing of student activist Mohamed Ben Jennet to 20 years of forced labor. Along with others, Ben Jennet had protested Bourguiba’s failure to denounce Israeli aggression in the Arab–Israeli conflict, and was later scapegoated as the leader of the movement.7 Though the Bourguiba regime insisted that Ben Jennet had orchestrated the June upheaval, in actuality, Ben Jennet was but one member of a growing New Left activist group, Perspectives, which had organized a rally outside of the American and British embassies. The demonstration degenerated into vandalism for which Ben Jennet was later blamed and, after the incident, Perspectives became a common target of media attacks by Bourguiba’s Destourian Socialist Party (PSD).8 Founded in 1963 by figures such as Mohamed Charfi and Gilbert Naccache while studying in Paris, Perspectives was originally designed to comment on Tunisian politics and society through the intellectual critique of its journal, Perspectives tunisiennes. In 1964 the group shifted its center of activity to Tunis, and began to explore more direct actions like the June 1967 demonstration. Ben Jennet’s severe sentence set in motion a student-driven movement for his liberation. In early March, supporters collected more than 1,300 signatures in a petition demanding his release. By 15 March, a crowd of more than 2,000 students at the University of Tunis had gathered to declare solidarity with Ben Jennet, denounce Bourguiba’s neo-imperialism, and demand education reforms. Tunisian students and sympathizers living in Paris weighed in on events taking place in Tunis by staging demonstrations in the metropole. These continued throughout the rest of the year as Bourguiba set up a Special Court back in Tunis to try more than 200 arrested students for crimes against the state, with more than 80 convicted in September show trials, where some received sentences of more than 16 years.9 As we shall see, in the aftermath of these tumultuous events, Tunisian activists recalled French colonial history to decry the injustices of their postcolonial present. In Senegal, rising education costs and state revenue reductions related to low peanut-crop yields prompted the Senegalese Commission on Higher Education to cut student scholarships in October 1967. Monthly stipends would be reduced to either two thirds or one half, and they would no longer be distributed over 12 months, but over ten instead. When confronted directly by leaders from the Democratic Union of Senegalese Students (UDES), university officials argued that several other African nations had made similar cuts without protest from students.10 After a brief period of unproductive negotiations with the office of the Minister of National Education, UDES (with the backing of the larger Dakar Student Union (UED), a body that included non-Senegalese African students) called for an unlimited strike of exams and classes on 27 May.11 In response to the strike, Senegal’s President, the award-winning poet Léopold Sédar Senghor, ordered the paramilitary Special Armed Forces onto campus to break

16  Burleigh Hendrickson

up the masses of students.12 Students reported that there were no university or government representatives on hand with which to negotiate—having been convoked by Senghor during the invasion—and at 10:30am on 29 May, Senegal’s fiercest fighting forces breached the sacred university grounds to disperse protestors. The clashes on 29 May resulted in 800 arrests, 70 injured students, and the death of one protestor.13 Following the fighting, between 400 and 500 students were sent to military camps in Archinard. Senghor announced publicly on 30 May that the university would be closed indefinitely. He also expelled 48 student union leaders from the university for having protested, and forced the expatriation of foreign participants. After news of campus violence spread, Senegal’s largest labor union joined the students in calling for a general strike on 30 May 1968. The government ordered police to occupy its headquarters (Bourse du Travail) in Kaolack and Dakar and sent a number of detained leaders to military camps in Dodji. Police statistics show wide participation outside of Dakar, leading the Senghor regime to release all detainees from military camps in June and ultimately grant a 15 percent increase in minimum wages.14 Senghor’s initial use of force can be explained in part by his fear that striking students were eroding the very education system into which he had invested so much (20 percent of the state budget in 1967), and one that he believed would lead to the modernization of Senegal.15 A seemingly simple budgetary act regarding scholarship reductions—that had been passed at other regional African universities—had not only placed the fate of higher education in the balance, it had fomented unrest in labor sectors beyond Dakar and, as Senghor stated privately, “called into question the existence of the Senegalese state.”16

Senghor and neo-imperialism In the days that followed a military intervention at the University of Dakar on 31 May 1968, President Senghor announced over national public radio that Senegalese protestors were simply imitating their French counterparts. And, indeed, it is true that the disruptions on Parisian campuses at Nanterre and the Sorbonne had taken place nearly a month before the clashes in Dakar. In the larger debate over the meaning of the protests, the state narrative that emerged involved common references to its former colonial oppressor. And in an August speech given during a visit to Paris, Senghor declared that “if there hadn’t been a May crisis in France, there would not have been one in Senegal.”17 Fueling already hostile Senegalese public opinion toward the French after about 300 years of colonial domination, Senghor drew a causal relationship between the Senegalese student movement and the nation’s former French oppressors. Because of his torn relationship to France and French culture, however, Senghor seemed reticent to take his charges too far, especially as his policies depended on French technology, financing, and language. As Gary Wilder recently pointed out, Senghor’s theories on poetry and language also melded with his politics in complex ways, leading him to the conclusion that “Africans and Europeans were jointly responsible for the common future they were fated to share.”18 This convergence could be seen in Senghor’s unconventional merging of sometimes conflicting

The politics of colonial history  17

concepts of Francophonie and Negritude—with the former understood as participation in a larger community based on a shared language and cultural values and the latter as pride in Blackness and celebration of African heritage. Thus, Senghor simultaneously embraced a politics of Francophonie, in which French techniques and cooperation would play major roles in Senegalese development, and promoted a politics of Negritude via his writings and what he termed “African Socialism.” Indeed, with French subsidies covering up to 70 percent of the costs of running the University of Dakar in the 1960s, Senghor frequently promoted both French and African culture.19 On the one hand, the University of Dakar was part and parcel of the larger commitment to Francophonie. On the other, Negritude was not reflected within the university, which still drew heavily upon the French system and employed primarily European instructors in 1968. On the eve of the May events, Senghor claimed that Francophonie would modernize Africa “by incorporating scientific technology and French techniques.”20 He placed great importance on the University of Dakar as the conduit for this revitalization, noting “the high standard to which we hold ourselves that, by the way, we inherited from the French University.”21 Senghor felt the need to defend his position after May 1968, declaring to French President Georges Pompidou in 1971 that, “Our spiritual ancestors, veritable precursors to Negritude and Francophonie, declared their double quality as ‘Negroes’ and ‘Frenchmen.’ ”22 Though neither concept existed until the twentieth century, as each faced increasing scrutiny in the independence era, Senghor felt the need to defend these terms historically as elements of African identity deeply rooted in Senegal’s spiritual and colonial past. Nationalism was at the heart of Senghor’s denunciation of student agitators. Not surprisingly, he used his individual trajectory as a national leader against French colonialism to argue that the most recent student movement was actually an affront to the Senegalese nation itself, and even part of a foreign imperialism dictated from abroad. Citing a nineteenth-century French historian, Senghor linked his own participation in Senegalese worker strikes in the 1940s to the French Revolution. Senghor states: “What I call revolution,” wrote the French historian Fustel de Coulanges, “is not the loud and violent events which often produce nothing; revolution produces change that is real, effective, and durable.” The Senegalese Revolution could never be the spectacle of pillaging and burning that we witnessed on Friday 31 May. That is nothing but a revolt by a group refusing established order without anything to propose in its place.23 Since the days immediately following campus protests, Senghor distinguished his “Senegalese Revolution”—an anti-colonial resistance to replace French imperialism—from the students’ haphazard and misguided “revolt.” Yet even in his veneration of the Senegalese overthrow of French rule, Senghor drew upon connections with the history of the French Revolution. Because of his conflicted dual position on both Francophonie and Negritude, Senghor shifted his charges of imperialism—once directed at France—to new

18  Burleigh Hendrickson

major threats, namely China and New Left imperialism. In June 1968, he claimed that “the looting and burning of 31 May, the fabrication of nitroglycerine bombs at the Fac des Sciences, all that is not Senegalese, all that is marked with the stamp of foreign imperialism.”24 Indeed, Senghor expelled a correspondent from the press agency Chine Nouvelle and rescinded permits to other Chinese correspondents immediately after the May 1968 events, and failed to recognize Mao’s Communist regime in China until 1971, when the UN acknowledged the PRC as the only representative of China (over Taiwan).25 Thus while Francophonie was central to Senghor’s national vision of Senegalese cooperation with other French-speaking nations, he faced competing notions of a global world. The initial context for the student strikes—the cutting of university stipends—was quite localized, yet Senghor insisted upon its foreign character. This was a battle over the direction of the nation in which Senghor strategically drew upon colonial history to both justify his own politics of Francophonie and, later, to accuse Senegalese students of French mimicry. This tactic of de-localizing the content of protest movements was widely practiced by authorities in the global 1968: President Lyndon B. Johnson was convinced that student activism was part of an international communist plot, Bourguiba would denounce activist leaders as foreign Zionists, and, more generally, “those in power repeatedly emphasized nationality, foreignness, and the sanctity of borders and frontiers in response to the transnational aspirations of [the youth] community.”26 Senghor charged that protesting students were either under Maoist influence or “in the service of the most retrograde international capitalism.”27 This anti-capitalist position was also strategic in that Senghor may well have hoped to attract moderate anti-imperialists from the student movement away from more radical positions while still maintaining an anti-imperial stance.

Bourguiba: the Supreme Combatant In Tunis, Bourguiba likewise drew upon colonial history—including his own anti-colonial past—to denounce the student movement and justify his political positions regarding Tunisian nationalism. Indeed, he referred to himself publicly as the “Supreme Combatant”—harkening back to his days as an anti-colonial Tunisian nationalist prior to independence in 1956. His anti-French stance was in part a response to his arrest and detainment in a series of colonial prisons in the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s.28 And yet, like Senghor, Bourguiba’s relationship with France was nevertheless rather complex and contradictory. He advocated French language learning in Tunisian schools and universities, and implemented a number of French-inspired modernization policies promoting both secularism and European-style education in Tunisian society. Bourguiba viewed mastery of the French language itself as a weapon to be wielded against the French when necessary. Speaking of the French in 1950, the Supreme Combatant famously stated that “[o]ne must embrace his enemy in order to strangle him” and that “[l]ike a boxer, one must get close to his adversary, that

The politics of colonial history  19

is how to land blows and conquer him.”29 Bourguiba’s personal biography as a Tunisian freedom fighter placed him in a unique position of privilege from which he could conjure both pro- and anti-French sentiment when necessary. Before the National Assembly of Niger in 1965, Bourguiba again evoked his strategic use of the French language: “For me as a combatant, the French language was always a precious and salutary weapon that I used not only during the political struggle against colonialism, but also against the forces of obscurantism in our struggle for development.”30 To distance the students’ cause from Tunisian nationalism, the Bourguiba regime repeatedly claimed that the student agitation had foreign roots. With twisted irony in a speech on human rights given in 1968, the year Bourguiba’s repression against students amplified, the Supreme Combatant cited numerous human rights failures during 75 years of French colonial rule.31 While denouncing 1950s censorship of Tunisian presses by the French, Bourguiba conveniently failed to mention his own regime’s censorship and banning of the Tunisian Communist Party in 1962–1963. French colonial history continued to play an important role in Tunisian politics in the aftermath of the 1968 university protests in Tunis. After years of exile, Leftist protest organizer Simone Lellouche Othmani returned to Tunisia in February 1972 only to be arrested on arrival under dubious charges. In this instance, pro-Bourguibist elements in the national labor union invoked colonial history to vilify Lellouche Othmani. Comparing her to Daniel CohnBendit, the Franco-German and Jewish student agitator from Paris’ May 1968, Lellouche Othmani was labeled a “Zionist destroyer.” Both she and Cohn-Bendit were accused of being “children of former collaborators of the colonial regime.”32 Labor leaders further vowed to prevent them “from disturbing our country’s march toward progress,” declaring that “[the labor union] and the masses of students, sons of resistors and patriots who gave so many sacrifices for the liberation of their country will not allow Simone to duplicate in Tunisia what Cohn-Bendit was able to do in France.”33 The ruling party related Lellouche Othmani’s political activism to Cohn-Bendit to emphasize its French origins, and further link it with Zionist imperialism. Reactionary xenophobia was a hallmark of 1968, as the French too focused on CohnBendit’s German heritage when depicting him as a foreign orchestrator of events in France. He was declared an “undesirable” by French authorities, and barred from entering Belgium during a global solidarity tour.34 This strategy also mirrored Senghor’s scapegoating of Chinese Maoists in Senegal. A clear line was drawn between French colonial intruders like Lellouche Othmani, trying to impede upon Tunisian progress, and national liberators like Bourguiba. The PSD reported on the March events in a livre blanc entitled The Truth About the Subversion at the University of Tunis, blaming student activism on foreign agents.35 The fact that the March 1968 movement was launched by pro-Palestinian activists did not stop the Special Court or the PSD-dominated media from casting its members as both Zionists and fanatical Muslims when convenient. According to the livre blanc, Perspectives’ members were “zealots of Mao Zedong”; extremists in Damascus and Beirut controlled Tunisian Ba’thists; and Tunisian Communists were “puppets of the French Communist

20  Burleigh Hendrickson

Party.”36 But through the process of alienating activists from their Tunisian roots— by labeling them all foreign and thus anti-Tunisian—the PSD put itself and the Special Court in position to condemn the entire slate of the political opposition. In addition to vilifying Lellouche Othmani, PSD leadership also used the events of May 1968 in France to deflect any notion of a homegrown movement in Tunisia. This was particularly important given that Lellouche Othmani’s return from exile in France in 1972 had actually set off another series of university protests in Tunis in February.37 In an interview published in a PSD-friendly newspaper, Minister of Foreign Affairs Mohammed Masmoudi warned about the possibility of a “contagious phenomenon” following the French events, and denounced “ ‘the absolute mayhem’ produced in the heart of the university and the petty and shameful imitation of agitators in the Latin Quarter by our students.”38 The PSD falsely claimed that the March 1968 Tunisian movement was inspired by French riots that took place in Paris two months later. Whether coming directly from the regime or from its minions in puppet labor and student unions, anti-state claims were first and foremost painted as anti-Tunisian. However, the regime’s narrative, and the activists’ counter-narratives, in fact reflected debates about postcolonial nationalism in independent Tunisia.When agitators expressed their desires for a modern Tunisia where free speech and a wide array of political currents were accepted, they were portrayed in state-controlled media as a foreign threat to the Tunisian nation: Jewish, Maoist, European, Communist, or Ba’athist. Like Senghor and many other national leaders in 1968, Bourguiba’s PSD blamed student activism on foreign infiltration, citing Maoists from China as well as French neo-imperial influence.

“The people alone is the Supreme Combatant” During their political ascendancy as national liberators, both Senghor and Bourguiba deployed colonial history as a weapon to attack French oppression. After independence, these revolutionary ends shifted to counter-revolutionary ones—in which colonial history was redeployed to draw parallels between student agitation and foreign neo-imperialism (often French). Yet students also mobilized this weapon in order to lambast new regimes that they viewed as mere replacements of the old colonial powers. Consequently, (and ironically) the story of the Tunisian New Left, in all its anti-colonial glory, begins in France. The Leftist intellectual group Perspectives was created in 1963 in Paris, and became the mouthpiece for student opposition to the Bourguiba regime with active centers at universities in Tunisia and France. In its inaugural journal issue, Perspectives directly linked the regime and Tunisia’s elite to the previous French colonial oppressors: “It is now established that the Tunisian government continues colonial policies to the letter, of which no one can ignore its true objectives. The only difference is that the beneficiary is no longer the French colony, but the wealthy Tunisian landowner.”39 The journal also criticized trade policies that gave France preferential access to Tunisian agricultural exports.Viewing this relationship as an extension of the colonial era, Perspectives argued, “This state of affairs is a direct consequence

The politics of colonial history  21

of colonial politics . . . the day after independence, a commercial agreement maintained these advantageous rates.”40 Perspectives’ negative comparison between the Bourguibist and French colonial regimes gradually gained currency in the broader student movement after several members of the group returned from France to the University of Tunis in the summer of 1964. The movement radicalized with campus eruptions in Tunis in 1968, precipitating mass arrests and the exile of Simone Lellouche Othmani. Colonial history played a particularly interesting role in her case. First, she was able to avoid the prison sentences and torture of many of her Tunisian colleagues after the March events in part because of an old colonial decree that had granted her French citizenship. In the 1920s the French colonial regime had passed naturalization laws designed specifically to increase the French population vis-à-vis the Tunisian population in Tunisia. To this end, the French administration began to recognize all non-Muslim residents of Tunisia as French citizens, benefiting a number of Italian, Maltese, and Tunisian Christians and Jews.41 As the daughter of Tunisian Jews, Lellouche Othmani inherited this status, and the Bourguiba regime opted to send her into exile in France rather than detain her with the other protestors. It was not long after her arrival in Paris that Lellouche Othmani engaged in France’s own May 1968 movement. She became directly involved after stumbling by accident upon a protest in early May, only to be brutalized by police when struck with a billy club while trying to register at the Saint-Geneviève Library in the Latin Quarter. Days later, Lellouche Othmani and other activists disrupted a publicity campaign in Paris by the Tunisian Minister of Tourism to increase French tourism, suggesting that in addition to its lovely beaches,Tunisian authorities should also bring French tourists to visit student activists detained in Tunisia’s prisons. As she recalled, About 90% of the attendees threw chairs in the air trying to take out those who would dare to ask the Minister to organize tourist travels to visit prisons in Bizerte . . . [The cops] rounded up everyone on the spot. We didn’t know that on rue Gay Lussac that same night students were building barricades against the [French riot police].42 Not only do her comments speak to the spontaneity of the events, they also highlight the global reach of 1968, and the dissolution of boundaries separating the French and Tunisian movements. The police brutality in the Latin Quarter further radicalized an already active Lellouche Othmani. After being struck by police in Paris she “spent every day at every protest . . . It was the first time that I found myself in sync with the French, with the children of those who had colonized us and with whom I was hurling the same slogans.”43 Her activism in Tunis seamlessly continued in Paris, from where she engaged in demonstrations supporting both Tunisian and French causes. Following a period of relative calm on Tunisian campuses after the September show trials, student protests re-ignited again in February 1972. These were set

22  Burleigh Hendrickson

off after Simone Lellouche Othmani was detained in Tunis when she returned to visit her imprisoned activist husband, Ahmed Othmani. Lellouche Othmani was arrested to serve out a sentence she received in absentia (and about which she had never been notified) related to the events of March 1968.44 In a demonstration of support, more than 4,000 students at the University of Tunis went on strike in February 1972. The movement to free Lellouche Othmani spread beyond the university to high-school students and other campuses. Protestors occupied the steps of the courthouse and took to the streets in solidarity with Lellouche Othmani on the day of her trial.45 Just days later, thousands of students gathered at the Law School in Tunis on 2 February 1972 to challenge Bourguibist authoritarianism by chanting “the people alone is the Supreme Combatant.”46 Like in 1968, the regime cracked down heavily on the activists. Authorities launched tear gas at protestors, intimidating sympathetic French coopérants, and engaging in mass arrests of many of the March participants who had since been released from detention.47 Ahmed Ben Othmani was implicated in the February events even though he was in prison at the time. Authorities arrested students and other members of undesirable political persuasions en masse and engaged in the same torture tactics used in 1968. Many imprisoned activists faced the common “balançoire,” where victims were suspended from a rod with their hands tied behind their legs and their genitals beaten.48 One activist and Perspectives’ member—who had escaped arrest in 1968 but was apprehended following February 1972—recounted in an interview that he then spent two and a half months in the hospital to recover from injuries related to torture and sexual assault while imprisoned.49 Many were denied attorneys, though the majority of the accused were liberated without trial between September and December 1972. Notwithstanding such actions, the Bourguiba regime attacked most of its opponents relentlessly, and several of the original Perspectives’ leaders remained unlawfully imprisoned for most of the 1970s. Back in France, as part of the efforts to obtain the release of arrested protesters, the Tunisian Democratic Mass Movement (MDMT) (an off-shoot of Perspectives), participated in actions protesting Bourguiba’s diplomatic visit to the metropole in June 1972. On the eve of the Supreme Combatant’s arrival, MDMT proclaimed that “Bourguiba is only coming to France to receive the approbation of his French masters . . . for the Bourguiba regime, it’s the old metropole that has always provided for these privileged masters.”50 Though the Tunisian student movement may have reached its apogee in February 1972, it sustained international activism against government repression throughout the 1970s. Through these transnational exchanges, both the Bourguiba regime and student activists accused each other of being under the influence of French colonial masters, instrumentalizing the past to make claims about politics in Tunisia’s postcolonial present. Yet Tunisia’s place in this story extends beyond its own context, and even beyond Franco-Tunisian colonial history. Indeed, the origins of the movement—a ­pro-Palestinian protest in June 1967—intersected with that of other transnational radical groups operating in North and West Africa. For example, Algeria became a

The politics of colonial history  23

second base for Black Panther Party activism after many of its members faced exile for militant radicalism in the United States. Key party leader Eldridge Cleaver corresponded with Senegalese activist Omar Blondin Diop, and met with Yasser Arafat in Algiers in December 1969, vowing to “help the Arabs in their struggle against the Zionists.”51 Tunisian events also had a marked impact on Michel Foucault, who witnessed Bourguiba’s repression first hand as a visiting professor in the philosophy department at the University of Tunis in 1968. Foucault had long been criticized by the French Left for his lack of political engagement, especially during May 1968— at a time when he was actually abroad. On an intellectual level, reports of the torture inflicted on some of his students while incarcerated in Tunisian prisons no doubt influenced his thinking on systematic punishment and societal control in Discipline and Punish (1975) and in the late 1970s, on his concept of governmentality. After his return to France, Foucault also became inspired to actively participate in anti-racist demonstrations in North African immigrant neighborhoods in the outskirts of Paris in the Goutte d’Or.52 Thus, while Tunisia’s historical relationship to France played a fundamental role during this period of Tunisian activism, Tunisia was also a key node in a broader network of global events and intellectual life.

From French resister to neo-imperialist Senegalese students likewise deployed colonial history as a political weapon. Senghor’s opponents at the University of Dakar accused him of supplanting the old French colonial regime with a corrupt Senegalese bourgeoisie. In a tract released on 30 May 1968, on the eve of the general student strike at the university, students from UDES asserted, “Senghor is barely hanging on because he knows that the bell toll of the bourgeoisie, the servants of colonialism and neo-colonialism, has just rung.”53 Other youth activists, such as Omar Blondin Diop, had already been active in the Paris movement alongside Daniel Cohn-Bendit. Blondin Diop frequented leftist circles and even landed himself a prominent role as a Maoist revolutionary in Jean-Luc Godard’s film La Chinoise (1967). While some historians have suggested that immigrants were largely uninvolved in the May events, Diop, along with Lellouche, was on the front lines in France.54 Other Senegalese living in Paris, like the activist couple, Marie-Angélique and Landing Savané, also participated actively in May 1968, having already exhibited Maoist tendencies prior to the protests. They used the backdrop of French activism to strategically make claims in support of university protests in Dakar, and even organized the occupation of the Senegalese embassy in Paris on May 28, 1968 in denunciation of government repression of the student movement.55 Just as the radical Left in May 1968 carried posters calling for the unity of French and immigrant workers, immigrant students held their own banners proclaiming “Students of the Third World [unite] in solidarity with their French comrades.”56 African students of the Federation of Students of Black Africa in France (FEANF) opposed the police invasion of the Sorbonne on May 2 (when the institution was shut down by administrators), critiquing police violence more generally in

24  Burleigh Hendrickson

postcolonial terms. FEANF issued a tract stating, “The savage repression of which French students are victims recalls the massacres perpetrated by the colonialist and neocolonialist forces in our countries against the masses and African students in their struggle against pro-imperialist regimes installed by French neo-colonialists.”57 They further called upon African students from Abidjan to Dakar to France to “lead the fight against neo-colonialist education” and to “contes[t] the content and the purpose of education imparted to them by professors named by the French government.”58 FEANF’s position testifies to the ways in which African students actively engaged with the French student movement and linked French events to anti-colonial movements in Abidjan and Dakar. These activists established a clear connection between the police repression of 1968 in Paris and the colonial violence they had suffered at home. And just as Simone Lellouche Othmani and other Tunisian activists used the momentum of the Paris movement to protest Tunisian authority in France, African students’ participation in the French movement aimed to leverage support for events in their home countries. As with the Tunisian case, where activism intensified after Perspectives’ members in France returned to Tunisia in 1964, Senegalese student activists like MarieAngélique and Landing Savané reinvigorated the Dakar movement when they returned from Paris in the summer of 1968.59 After her return to Dakar, MarieAngélique became the first woman elected to lead a delegation of students at a university general assembly in 1969. But although there were trailblazing women like the Senegalese Marie-Angélique and Fatou Sow who participated in activism in Paris and Dakar, or Eugénie Rokhaya Aw, a political journalist who lost an unborn child while pregnant during incarceration in Dakar in the 1970s, the vast majority of protestors were young men. Limited female participation in Senegal can be explained in part by university access related to demographics (see Figure 1.1), since women made up less than 20 percent of the total university population at the largest university colleges. And though far more Senegalese women enrolled at the College of Humanities than at the College of Sciences, the number of French women at the College of Humanities actually outweighed the number of men.

Male Senegalese French All students

207 36 371

Totals

Male 836

College of Sciences Female % Female 23 13 43

Male

9.6 26.5 10.4

309 80 465

College of Humanities Female % Female 86 103 203

21.8 56.3 30.4

Both Colleges Combined

FIGURE 1.1  University

Female 246

% Female 18.5

of Dakar enrollments by gender and percentage of female students at the College of Sciences and the College of Humanities, 1968–1969.60

The politics of colonial history  25

Interestingly, while Senegalese female enrollment at the university, and thus, participation in the protests, was rather rare, I have yet to find even a single reference to French female activism in the Dakar movement, in spite of the relatively high number of women in Humanities tracks. This seems to corroborate the recollections of both French administrators and Senegalese activists, both of whom noted that support for the Dakar movement by French students enrolled at the university was almost non-existent.61 Of course, many of these students were the sons and daughters of French diplomats and business people; their chief concerns were likely receiving credit for coursework and achieving French recognition for their university degrees. Importantly, these young people would not have been affected by cuts to student scholarships in the new government reforms. At the administrative level, while continued French influence could be seen in the newly independent Senegalese government, it was perhaps most present at the University of Dakar. To maintain reciprocity and official recognition of diplomas in France, all major university decisions passed through a joint Franco-Senegalese commission. Nearly one-third of the students in 1968 were of French nationality, almost equaling the number of Senegalese students (with the other third made up of neighboring African nations). University curricula were based on French models, and the French were highly represented in the professoriate at this time. Indeed, UDES declared that the University of Dakar was “in reality nothing but a French university installed in Senegal.”62 Senghor’s close relationship to France and France’s elite, including his friendship with his former classmate, Georges Pompidou, was not lost on student protestors, who labeled him a puppet “whose only knowledge of the Senegalese is as President of a nation he pillages in order to construct a lasting estate in Normandy,” where he was known to spend summer vacations with his French wife.63 Indeed, in the early years of Senegal’s independence, many viewed Senghor’s consolidation of power into a single-party rule under the Senegalese Progressive Union (UPS) and his reliance on French cooperation at the University as extensions of French colonial power. In this climate of anti-French sentiment, Senghor’s effort to strike a delicate balance between Francophonie and Negritude were no longer tenable in the eyes of student activists. On the eve of the 1968 protests, both concepts had lost weight with the new student generation. The hybrid notion of Francophonie, premised on cultural and technological exchange between the Third World and the West, was thoroughly rejected by protesting students who clamored for Africanization at the University of Dakar. With his revolutionary credibility under intense scrutiny, Senghor’s public pronouncements of African and French unity elicited negative responses from his critics. Beyond his close ties with Pompidou and his marriage to a French national, it was not until the student strikes that Senghor named the first African rector at the University of Dakar. When Charles de Gaulle died on November 9, 1970, Senghor issued a statement that his passing “has shocked Senegal as much as it has France,” and gave homage “to the decolonizer of Africa, to the Father of Senegalese independence.”64 It is worth pausing to remark that Senghor

26  Burleigh Hendrickson

planted the roots of African independence at the feet of a Frenchman, rather than an African. This seemed a far cry from Senghor’s anti-colonial stance from the preindependence era, and undermined his status as a mouthpiece for Negritude. Competing postcolonial narratives also took on racialized characteristics. By 1968, activists viewed their rejection of the Senghor regime, with its ties to France, as anti-white as well as anti-colonialist. Many identified colonial practices as white, and Senghor’s background in French literature and his close friendship with Pompidou made it all too easy to associate him and his party with “whiteness,” or at the very least, “Frenchness.” Perhaps Senghor himself described it best: For me, French is no longer a foreign vehicle, but the natural form of expression of my thought. . . . From time to time I would dream that I was white. Each time, I was so tormented that I awoke suddenly. Not because I’m racist—as you know my wife is French—it’s just that, if I were white, I had the impression that I would no longer know pain and suffering, nothing to struggle for. I prefer, in spite of it all, to remain in contradiction and suffering—to have the joy of struggle, action, and creation.65 Senghor’s own fragmented identity may explain his conflicting positions on Francophonie and Negritude. However, Gary Wilder’s recent defense of Senghor’s international and domestic politics would have fallen on deaf ears among students in 1968.66 According to journalist Vieux Savané, recalling 1968 in Dakar 40 years later, “Activism against the regime was risky, perilous, anti-militaristic, anti-white in the sense of the color of colonialism, imperialism, and oppression.”67 After Senghor’s campus crackdowns, both his persona and his actions were perceived as reflections of Frenchness. Such critiques reveal that the regime’s student adversaries were not alone when they stood accused of succumbing to French imperialism. Senegalese activists called Senghor’s allegiances into question in February 1971 during the official visit of his friend, French President Georges Pompidou. In the eyes of the militant activists, the notion that Senegal would open its arms to the head of state of its former colonial oppressor was an absolute farce, and one that warranted direct action. Proclaiming, “Pompidou might be a friend of Senghor, but he is certainly an enemy of the people of Senegal and all of revolutionary Africa,” a group of Senegalese radicals set fire to the French Cultural Center in Dakar, while another group was apprehended with Molotov cocktails intended for Pompidou’s cortège on February 5, as his car proceeded along Dakar’s Avenues Lamine Gueye and Faidherbe.68 The arson and failed attack on Pompidou were followed by the 1971 “trials of the incendiaries.” During the trials, authorities implicated the French coopérant Jean-Louis Ravel, who was found guilty of distributing tracts provoking crime and handed three years of mandatory prison.69 After significant lobbying by the French embassy, Senghor agreed to amnesty Ravel, on condition that he would leave Dakar for Paris in November 1971. Ravel nevertheless showed no remorse, as he declared

The politics of colonial history  27

the following to police: “In my estimation, the French-Senegalese ‘cooperation’ is a fraud for the benefit of France . . . I observed and studied the misery and difficulty of the Senegalese peasantry. I know that French imperialism is partly responsible for this misery.”70 Ravel’s denunciations of French neo-imperialism in Senegal placed him in the global community of anti-imperialists. Like the French students of Louis Althusser, who rejected their privileged origins in search of authentic immigrant and worker experiences, Ravel disavowed the French economic and political “cooperation” that he witnessed first hand. From 1968 to 1972, criticism of the Bourguiba and Senghor regimes issued from domestic sources, but it also came from Tunisians and Senegalese living abroad in France. France was not the lone bearer of imperial malfeasance. Both students and leaders targeted the forces of neo-imperialist capitalism at home, with the Bourguiba and Senghor regimes likewise denouncing the imperialist diffusion of Maoism—the ideological bearer of pernicious ideas like “cultural revolution” that threatened national unity and national security.

Conclusion Brandishing history as an antidote to revolutionary student activism, leading political officials in Senegal and Tunisia drew on the colonial past to claim that protesting students in 1968 were practitioners of neo-imperial mimicry, merely copycats of the decadent protest movement that was challenging their former French colonial oppressors at that time.The nature and meaning of the events themselves were contested by protestors and the state, fought over in the media and tried in legal courts and courts of public opinion. For both activists and the state in Senegal and Tunisia, French colonialism was the villain, though degrees of distancing from Frenchness varied among groups. While Senghor and Bourguiba both found plenty of opportunities to negatively compare student movements to the activism of former colonizers in France, they also both found new anti-imperial targets in international capitalism and foreign Maoist infiltrators. This was especially true in the case of Senghor, who redirected his anti-imperialism from France to China and foreign capital, claiming that the latter were influencing students in an international imperialist plot. Tunisian head of state Habib Bourguiba’s tenuous position as a resister and promoter of French culture in Tunisia enabled him to opportunistically level similar charges against his opposition. For their part,Tunisian and Senegalese student activists recycled and transformed the anti-imperialist characterizations of French oppressors and redirected them at newly formed governments that they felt were in collusion with the former colonial power. While the transnational 1960s visions of Bourguiba and Senghor were articulated as various iterations of Francophonie (university cooperation, tourism, technical support, etc.), young activists imagined an alternative globalized world. Their competing global vision was one of Maghrebi- and Afro-centric transnationality, seeking access to university education and human rights protections that would address local realities and lay the foundations for the future of the nation.

28  Burleigh Hendrickson

Rather than calling for continued ties to France, anti-colonialism was still paramount to students’ anti-French and pro-Palestinian positions. Cooperation with France meant linking up activist movements across borders with French sympathizers rather than acquiescing to education commissions that required French approval. Yet student activists and state leaders drew upon colonial history in unique ways as both justification and rationale for these competing visions. The convulsions of the Francophone 1968 thus provide a window into the deployments of colonial history as both a counter-revolutionary and revolutionary weapon by state leaders and student activists. Like the powerful philosophical ideas that Althusser cited in 1968, history, too, can be equally political. Such narratives remind us of the power of history as a political and ideological weapon, and underscore how, during the long 1960s in particular, colonial history acted as a powerful instrument for both revolutionary and counter-revolutionary activity.

Notes   1 See Boris Gobille, Mai 68 (Paris: Éditions de la Découverte, 2008); Michelle ZancariniFournel, Le Moment 68: Une Histoire Contestée (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 2008).   2 For details of the 5 June 1967 protest, see Burleigh Hendrickson, “March 1968: Practicing Transnational Activism from Tunis to Paris,” International Journal of Middle East Studies 44:4 (2012), 759–762.   3 Maria Antonietta Macciocchi interview with Louis Althusser, “Philosophy as a Revolutionary Weapon,” reprinted in The New Left Review 64 (1970), 7.   4 Alice L. Conklin, A Mission to Civilize: The Republican Idea of Empire in France and West Africa, 1895–1930 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997), 23.  5 Robert Aldrich and John Connell, France’s Overseas Frontier: Départements et Territoires d’Outre Mer (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 35.  6 On Bourguiba’s early militancy, see Claude Liauzu, “Bourguiba, héritier de Tahar Haddad et des militants réformistes des années 1920?” in Michel Camau and Vincent Geisser, eds, Habib Bourguiba: La trace et l’héritage, (Paris: Editions Karthala, 2004), 21–28. On Senghor’s federalism, see Gary Wilder, Freedom Time: Negritude, Decolonization, and the Future of the World (Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press, 2015), 137–147.   7 You can read more about this conflict in Jerome Bourdon’s chapter in this volume.   8 Sophie Bessis, “ ‘Perspectives’: l’effervescence tunisienne des années 1960,” in Philippe Artières and Michelle Zancarini-Fournel, eds, 1968: Une Histoire Collective (Paris: La Découverte, 2008), 122.   9 “À la lumière du procès G.E.A.S.T.: Les acquis et les perspectives de la lutte révolutionnaire en Tunisie,” Perspectives Tunisiennes, brochure no. 4 (June 1969). 10 “Mémorandum sur les événements de l’Université de Dakar,” UDES, 26 May 1968 in Sénégal: Événements 1966–68, Liasse Crise Mai 1968, Archives Nationales du Sénégal (ANS), Dakar. 11 For a detailed narrative of events, see Abdoulaye Bathily, Mai 1968 à Dakar: Ou la révolte universitaire et la démocratie (Paris: Éditions Chaka, 1992). 12 Françoise Blum, “Sénégal 1968: Révolte étudiante et grève générale,” Revue d’histoire moderne et contemporaine 59:2 (2012), 161. Special Armed Forces units were known as the groupes mobiles d’intervention. 13 Letter from Jean de Lagarde to the Minister of Foreign Affairs, 2 June 1968 in ADMAE, Afrique: Sénégal (1959–1972), Carton 49, Politique intérieure, Liasse: Crise de mai 1968, La Courneuve. 14 “Sanctions consécutives aux faits de grève,” June 19, 1968, Archives École de Police, Dakar.

The politics of colonial history  29

15 Letter from French ambassador to Senegal, Jean de Lagarde to Minister of Foreign Affairs, Maurice Couve de Murville, January 4, 1967; in Afrique: Sénégal (1959–1972), Carton 49, Politique intérieure; Archives Diplomatiques du Ministère des Affaires Étrangères (ADMAE), La Courneuve. 16 Letter from Jean de Lagarde to the Minister of Foreign Affairs, 2 June 1968 in ADMAE, Afrique: Sénégal (1959–1972), Carton 49, Politique intérieure, Liasse: Crise de mai 1968, La Courneuve. 17 “Être francisé ne représente pas que des avantages,” L’Unité Africaine 315 (1 August 1968). 18 Wilder, Freedom Time, 59. Wilder discusses Senghor’s challenges with reconciling French cultural influence and Negritude at length in The French Imperial Nation-State: Negritude and Colonial Humanism between the Two World Wars (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005), 147–200. 19 Pierre Fougeyrollas, “L’Africanisation de l’Université de Dakar,” in J.L. Balans, C. Coulon and A. Ricard, eds, Problèmes et perspectives de l’éducation dans un état du tiers-monde: le cas du Sénégal, (Institut d’études politiques de Bordeaux, 1972), 35. 20 “Toast du Président de la République au diner offert en l’honneur de M. le Sec. de’Etat aux Affaires Etrangères chargé de la coopération et de Mme. Yvon Bourgès,” 2 April 1968, in Dossier Léopold Sédar Senghor: 1968, Archives Nationales de Sénégal (ANS), Dakar. 21 Ibid. 22 “Toast du Président de la République du Sénégal: Déjeuner en L’honneur de M. et Mme Georges Pompidou,” 6 February 1971, in Dossier: Léopold Sédar Senghor, 1971, ANS, Dakar. 23 Emphasis added. Cited in “Message à la Nation,” 13 June 1968, in Dossier: Léopold Sédar Senghor, 1968, ANS, Dakar. Senghor was active in strikes by Senegalese port and railroad workers in 1946–1947 for increased wages. The oft-cited Fustel de Coulanges reference comes from his Leçons à l’impératrice sur les origines de la civilisation française (Paris: Hachette, 1930), published posthumously. 24 “Toast du Président de la République du Sénégal: Déjeuner en L’honneur de M. et Mme Georges Pompidou,” 6 February 1971, in Dossier: Léopold Sédar Senghor, 1971, ANS, Dakar. 25 See Momar Coumba Diop,“La population expulsée du Sénégal de 1948 à 1978” (Dakar: Unpublished, October 1979), available at the ANS, Dakar. 26 Richard Ivan Jobs, “Youth Movements: Travel, Protest, and Europe in 1968,” American Historical Review 114:2 (2009), 403 and fn 110. 27 “Message à la nation du chef de l’état,” Dakar, Dakar-Matin, 1 June 1968. 28 On student anti-colonialism, see Habib Belaïd, “Bourguiba et la vie associative pendant la période coloniale et après l’indépendance,” in Michel Camau and Vincent Geisser, eds, Habib Bourguiba, 330. 29 See Michel Camau and Vincent Geisser interview with Sayah, April 2002, in ibid., p. 607. 30 Quoted in Jean Capelle, L’Éducation en Afrique noire à la veille des indépendances (1946– 1958) (Paris: Editions Karthala, 1990), 313. 31 Cited in “Le Comité National des Droits de l’Homme,” 1968 Année internationale des droits de l’homme: Douze années de réalisations et de Progrès en Tunisie (Tunis: Imp. S.A.E.P., 1968), 11. 32 L’Action, 3 February 1972. 33 Ibid. 34 Jobs, “Youth Movements,” 385. 35 L’Action, 27 March 1968 and 28 March 1968. 36 Parti Socialiste Destourien, La vérité sur la subversion à l’université de Tunis (Tunis: Parti Socialiste Destourien, 1968). 37 For details of the February 1972 movement, see Burleigh Hendrickson, “Imperial Fragments,” 193–199.

30  Burleigh Hendrickson

38 Portions of Masmoudi’s interview in Al-Amal, the Arabic language journal of the PSD, were translated and published in the French daily, La Presse, March 2, 1972. The Latin Quarter here refers to the primary site of student resistance during the French May ’68. 39 Perspectives Tunisiennes, no. 1 (December 1963), 22. 40 Perspectives Tunisiennes, no. 2 (February 1964), 13. 41 Mustapha Kraïm, Nationalisme et syndicalisme en Tunisie, 1918–1929 (Tunis: Presses de l’imprimerie Union Générale Tunisienne du Travail, 1976), 249 and Kenneth J. Perkins, A History of Modern Tunisia (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 144. 42 “Une Tunisiene citoyenne des deux rives: Simone Lellouche-Othmani,” Mémoire & Horizon, numéro spécial, published by Citoyenne des Deux Rives (April 2007), 43. 43 Ibid., 42–43. 44 Letter from Simone Lellouche to the Ambassador of France in Tunisia, undated, in Fonds Simone Lellouche et Ahmed Othmani, SOL 28; Bibliothèque de Documentation Internationale Contemporaine (BDIC), Nanterre, France. 45 “Une Tunisiene citoyenne des deux rives,” 6. 46 “Mouvement de février 1972 en Tunisie: Un nouveau bond dans le combat de la jeunesse intellectuelle,” Perspectives Tunisiennes, brochure no. 8 (1972), 6, 9. 47 See Tribune Progressiste, no. 13 (February–March 1972); “Mouvement de février 1972”; “Bulletin d’Information du 27 mars 1972,” GILT in Fonds Simone Lellouche et Ahmed Othmani (Fonds Othmani), SOL 3, BDIC, Nanterre. 48 US State Department Report on Human Rights (1998) cited in Olivia Ball, “ ‘Every morning, just like coffee.’ Torture in Cameroon” (London: Medical Foundation for the Care of Victims of Torture, 2002). 49 Interview with “Jamel,” Tunis 2011. Jamel met with a lawyer for the first time after ­six months of intermittent isolation and torture. He was released without trial. 50 “Vive la lutte du peuple tunisien: Non à la division de ses rangs,” tract signed MDMT (Mouvement de masse démocratique tunisien) on 23 June 1972, in Fonds Othmani, SOL 3, BDIC, Nanterre. 51 See unclassified FBI monograph, “Fedayeen Impact: Middle East and the United States” (June 1970), https://archive.org/details/FedayeenImpactMiddleEastAndUnitedStatesJune1970. On Cleaver in Algiers and the global circulation of Black Panther Party members, see Samir Meghelli, “From Harlem to Algiers: Transnational Solidarities between the African-American Freedom Movement and Algeria, 1962–1978,” in Manning Marable and Hishaam Aidi, eds, Black Routes to Islam (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), 99–119; Martin Klimke, The Other Alliance: Student Protest in West Germany and the United States in the Global Sixties (Princeton: Princeton University Press), 108–142. 52 See Abdellali Hajjat, “Alliances inattendues à la Goutte d’Or,” in Artières and ZancariniFournel, eds, 68: Une histoire collective, 521–527. 53 “Peuple sénégalais,” UDES, 30 May 1968, in ANS, Dakar. 54 Michael Seidman in particular has downplayed the participation of immigrants in The Imaginary Revolution: Parisian Students and Workers in 1968 (New York: Berghan Books, 2004), 174. For an opposing viewpoint, see Daniel A. Gordon, Immigrants and Intellectuals: May ’68 and the Rise of Anti-Racism in France (Pontypool, Wales: Merlin Press, 2012). 55 Sénégal: Évenements Généraux 1966–1968, Liasse Dossiers Généraux1968, ANS, Dakar, Senegal. 56 See Michael Wlassikoff, Marc Riboud, Jean-Claude Gautrand, and Philippe Vermès, Mai 68, l’affiche en héritage (Paris: Éditions Alternatives, 2008), 29. 57 Communiqué signed by the Executive Committee of FEANF, 11 May 1968, in Tracts et documents de propagande/FEANF, Bibliothèque Nationale de France, Paris. 58 Ibid. 59 Interview with “Mariane,” November 2011, Dakar. 60 Figures compiled with data from “Tableau Recapitulatif III/10 [de la faculté des sciences]: Répartition par sexe et par cyle d’études” and “Tableau Recapitulatif III/15 [de la faculté des lettres] des inscrits par sexe et par cycle,” in “Statistiques Scolaires

The politics of colonial history  31

1968–1969,” Ministère de l’Éducation, Rèpublique du Sénégal, in Éducation Nationale: Service universitaire des relations avec l’Étranger et l’Outre-mer, AN-19771275, Article 10, Archives Nationales, Fontainebleau. 61 See Bathily, Mai 68 à Dakar, 18; Letter from Jean de Lagarde to the Minister of Foreign Affairs, 2 June 1968, in ADMAE, Afrique: Sénégal (1959–1972), Carton 49, Liasse Crise Mai 68, Politique intérieure, La Courneuve. 62 “Mémorandum sur les événements de l’Université de Dakar.” 63 “Peuple sénégalais,” UDES, 30 May 1968, in ANS, Dakar. 64 Dispatch of Hubert Argod to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, 12 November 1970, in ADMAE, Afrique: Sénégal (1959–1972), Carton 56, Politique Extérieure: Relation avec divers pays de l’Afrique noire (Octobre 1961–Novembre 1972), La Courneuve. 65 Quoted in Stanislas Spero K. Adotevi, Négritude et Négrologues (Paris: Éditions Le Castor Astral, 1998), 102. The tensions in Senghor’s cultural identification are explored in Nassurdine Ali Mhoumadi, Un métis nommé Senghor (Paris: L’Harmattan, 2010); and Janet G. Vaillant and Roger Meunier, Vie de Léopold Sédar Senghor: noir, Français et Africain (Paris; [Amsterdam]: Éditions Karthala; [SEPHIS], 2006), 426. 66 One of Wilder’s ambitious political projects in Freedom Time is to “challenge a commonplace attempt to . . . dismiss Senghor as essentialist or comprador.” See Wilder, Freedom Time, 276, fn 18. 67 Vieux Savané, “Un élan d’audace,” in Special Edition of Sud Quotidien, “Que reste-il de Mai 68?” 30 May 2008. 68 See Dispatches of Hubert Argod to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, 29 January and 12 February 1971; “Procès des incendiaires,” of 28 July, in ADMAE, Afrique: Sénégal (1959–1972), Carton 36, Synthèses de l’ambassade de France au Sénégal, La Courneuve. 69 Ibid. 70 Letter of P. Zundel to the Secretary of State of Foreign Affairs, “Affaire Ravel,” of 4 March 1971, in ADMAE, Afrique: Sénégal (1959–1972), Carton 57, Politique Extérieure, La Courneuve.

Selected bibliography Bathily, Abdoulaye. Mai 1968 à Dakar: ou la révolte universitaire et la démocratie. Paris: Éditions Chaka, 1992. Blum, Françoise. Révolutions africaines: Congo-Brazzaville, Sénégal, Madagascar, années 60s–70s. Rennes: Presses universitaires de Rennes, 2014. — Pierre Guidi and Ophélie Rillon (eds). Étudiants africains en mouvement: Contribution à une histoire des années 68. Paris: Publications de la Sorbonne, 2016. Bourg, Julian. From Revolution to Ethics: May 1968 and Contemporary French Thought. Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2007. Christiansen, Samantha and Zachary A. Scarlett (eds). The Third World in the Global 1960s. New York: Berghahn, 2013. Cornils, Ingo and Sarah Waters (eds). Memories of 1968: International Perspectives. Oxford, New York: Peter Lang, 2010. Gobille, Boris. Mai 68. Paris: Éditions la Découverte, 2008. Gordon, Daniel A. Immigrants and Intellectuals. May ’68 and the Rise of Anti-Racism in France. Pontypool, Wales: Merlin Press, 2012. Jackson, Julian, Anna-Louise Milne, and James S. Williams (eds). May 68: Rethinking France’s Last Revolution. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011. Othmani, Ahmed with Sophie Bessis. Beyond Prison:The Fight to Reform Prison Systems around the World. Trans. by Sophie Bessis. New York: Berghahn Books, 2008.

32  Burleigh Hendrickson

Ross, Kristin. May ’68 and its Afterlives. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002. Vigna, Xavier. L’insubordination ouvrière dans les années 68: essai d’histoire politique des usines. Rennes: Presses Universitaires de Rennes, 2007. Wilder, Gary. Freedom Time: Negritude, Decolonization, and the Future of the World. Durham, NC, London: Duke University Press, 2015. Zancarini-Fournel, Michelle. Le Moment 68: une histoire contestée. Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 2008.

2 UNITY AND CONFLICT IN THE SOCIALIST SCRAMBLE FOR AFRICA, 1960–1970 Nick Rutter

Anti-communists read and wrote a great deal about three developments in the world communist movement in the early 1960s.1 One was East Europeans’ selfassertiveness in the wake of Nikita Khrushchev’s refutation of Stalinism.2 Another was the dilemma of China’s break with the USSR: the potential for a nuclear war versus the benefit of a divided enemy.3 Third was the rush of communist engineers, teachers, and doctors into newborn African republics in these years, a phenomenon intriguing and unsettling enough to inspire a rush of journalistic paperbacks, including Subversion of the Innocents (1963), Red Star Over Africa (1964), East Wind Over Africa (1965), and Communism in Africa (1966). The most influential analysis of world communism of the period was more optimistic and academic than the paperbacks. In its original 1960 edition, Zbigniew Brzezinski’s The Soviet Bloc: Unity and Conflict identified two core challenges to Soviet-East European solidarity. The first was “ideological relativization,” a phenomenon that Brzezinski attributed to the rise of “interparty” debates over what socialism and solidarity meant, and the second was the weakening of interparty “institutions of power” that followed. Absent ideological consensus, argued Brzezinski, Soviet authority rested on “multilateral institutions.” And without an executive institution to command the rest, like the Comintern (Communist International), which Stalin had dissolved in 1943, or the Cominform (Communist Information Bureau), which Khrushchev had shuttered in 1956, unity was fragile. The Red Army conducted military maneuvers in Poland and invaded Hungary six months after the Cominform’s death, in autumn 1956, on this basis—as a last resort for solidarity. By 1960, wrote Brzezinski, the Soviet priority was to restore the two pillars that Moscow had let fall since Stalin’s death in 1953: ideological coherence for the sake of unity, and robust “multilateral institutions” to stifle conflict. Soon enough, he concluded, a “Commonwealth Politburo” might take the Cominform’s place.4

34  Nick Rutter

In an edited volume published in 1963, Brzezinski applied the same thesis to communism’s outreach to Africa. Alliances with “African socialist” governments added to the strains that Russia’s and China’s revolutions had already placed on Marx’s philosophy of history. And without communist-led multilateral institutions large and diffuse enough to accommodate these governments, unity with them was impractical.5 By the time that a second, “revised and enlarged” edition of The Soviet Bloc appeared in 1967, it was “difficult to exaggerate the historical significance of the Sino-Soviet conflict,” and bloc members’ disillusionment with African socialism had proved Brzezinski right. If the USSR and PRC (People’s Republic of China) could not align their historical clocks, then premodern, postcolonial states had no business trying to do so.6 The Soviets had started off the decade endorsing a long road to modernization for agrarian economies, reasoning that once the bloc had ensured peace with the West, more of its resources could be reallocated from arms production to “socialist modernization” abroad.7 Yet when China began urging Asians and Africans to seize total economic and political sovereignty by arms, the Soviets felt obliged to speed their modernization models up. Brzezinski’s diagnosis, meanwhile, stayed the same. “Without some central power,” he wrote in 1967, “unity rooted in ideology disintegrates under the impact of time.”8 The following chapter frames the Soviet bloc’s global sixties much as Brzezinski did—as a ten-year search for an institutional remedy to ideological diversity. It draws its evidence not from the party congress speeches that Brzezinski read, but from the bureaucratic reports that he could not access. The “other means of interparty coordination” that Soviet and East European mid-level officials took up in the 1960s exchanged International Meetings and Brzezinski’s hypothetical Commonwealth Politburo for a much humbler, more policy-oriented method of policy coordination.9 The consequence, according to Austin Jersild’s characterization of communist technocrats in the 1950s, was a more “pragmatic,” Eastern European sort of meeting than the “imperial” Soviet spectacles that came before it.10 What follows is not a comprehensive study of the transition’s origins, but one of two noteworthy contributions to it: the Sino-Soviet and Soviet-East European scrambles for African allies.

Unity and conflict inside communist-sponsored world organizations Joseph Stalin’s antipathy for congresses and conferences was noteworthy, considering how much stock the world communist movement placed in them. The CPSU (Communist Party of the Soviet Union) held just four party congresses during Stalin’s 26 years of uncontested rule (1928–1953), as compared to nine in the previous decade. The same was true for the Communist International (Comintern), which dropped from five world congresses in its first nine years (1919–1927), to two in its last 16 (1928–1943). The nine “world democratic federations” that held founding conferences between September 1945 and August 1946 broke with Stalinist tradition not only by holding a steady stream of such events, but also by pairing

The socialist scramble for Africa, 1960–1970  35

the Comintern’s global scope with the refusal of the prewar “popular fronts” to acknowledge their pro-Soviet orientation. Like the national fronts of the 1930s, the federations declared themselves politically and ideologically neutral.11 Unlike them, however, the new organizations claimed to speak for trade unionists, youth, women, lawyers, journalists, scientists, teachers, radio operators, and students from the whole world at once—each with a separate headquarters, conference itinerary, and catalog of multilingual publications. Recent scholarship has sought to rehabilitate the federations partly out of sympathy for their principles, especially on gender and race, and partly in defense of their diversity. Franscisca de Haan argues that communist sponsorship was not absolute, and came with no guarantee of controlling the organizations’ activities. De Haan cites discussions of political terminology at the Women’s International Democratic Federation’s (WIDF) earliest meetings in 1945 to prove her point, where non-communists favored “democratic” and communists “anti-fascist.”12 As late as 1953, by which time most non-communist member organizations had left for Western, oftentimes equally “non-governmental” alternatives, a similar conversation took place between a Danish communist and her colleagues on the WIDF’s Executive Committee. The Dane considered it unwise to take aim at “imperialism” in WIDF publications, as “most women of [Western] countries do not know what imperialism is.” The rebuttal came not from Europeans, much less Eastern Europeans, the Soviets reported, but rather from the representatives of six Asian countries, some but not all of whom were likely communists. “Representatives of colonial countries objected loudly,” read the report, “arguing that in their countries no woman would not understand [the word] imperialism.”13 The anti-colonialists thus spoke the same language as the eastern bloc, one that Western readers were too intolerant to understand. Few issues fostered more solidarity at federation events, and met with more hostility from their opponents, than the colonial question. Already in 1948, mainstream Western news media attributed leftist insurrections in Burma, Malaysia, and Indonesia to a “Conference of Youth and Students of Southeast Asia Fighting for Freedom and Independence” that the youth and student federations, the World Federation of Democratic Youth (WFDY) and International Union of Students (IUS), had organized in Calcutta in February 1948. The choice for the federations amid the press storm that followed was whether to soften their anti-imperial rhetoric, or risk alienating non-communist members who were fearful of guilt by association.14 The groups’ anti-colonial mission, it appears, was never in doubt. At an International Union of Students (IUS) congress held in Prague in 1950, the crowd chanted, “Tell the truth about Malay!” in response to a representative of Britain’s National Union of Students (BNUS) who assured them that it “continued to keep British students informed of the problems of colonial students.” The speech that followed earned future KGB head Alexander Shelepin a reported 30 minutes of applause, and the next day’s IUS newspaper printed excerpts from the Englishman’s speech, surrounded by anti-colonial testimonials from nine countries: China, Korea, Malaysia, Algeria, India, Guadeloupe, the USSR, and, for fairness’s sake, a second Briton.15

36  Nick Rutter

One year later the same student federation dedicated an entire Executive Committee meeting to the anti-imperial struggle, this one held in Beijing ten months into the Korean War. A Nigerian student seemed to share the Danish woman’s sensitivity to words when he called on the IUS to define “the much used statement, Support for a truly democratic and advanced system of education for the Youth and Students of the Colonies,” and to publicize a “unanimously adopted” definition. Whether the conference organizers complied is unclear. But other speeches, combined with the Nigerian’s other statements, suggest that there was little pressure on them to do so. In his first speech at the conference, the Nigerian man had lauded the IUS for its attention to the plight of African students, and in the second he had prefaced the above request for clarity with a lengthy rebuttal to what a British National Union of Students representative had said the previous day.16 All told, the event’s topic, succinct slogans, location in Beijing, and the BNUS’s presence as a stand-in for the British Empire, combined to make precise definitions unnecessary. “Support for a truly democratic and advanced system of education” in the colonies was a call to action, not legislation. Irrespective of how communist the early federations were, their challenge to traditional narratives of Stalinism’s neglect of the Third World is clear.17 As conferences moved south and more non-Europeans took up positions at federation headquarters, mounting criticism of Soviet inaction from within the anti-colonial movement appears to have left the federations unscathed.18 When news came of near mutinies at events organized by the IUS’s CIA-sponsored rival, the International Student Conferences (ISC), IUS headquarters in Prague immediately set about wooing Third World students from one pseudo-non-governmental organization (NGO) to the other. At its Sixth Congress in Baghdad in October 1960, for example, the IUS pledged “to support the organization of an International Student Conference on colonialism and neo-colonialism.”19 No one at IUS headquarters expected the pledge to influence decisions inside its ISC counterpart in Leiden, Holland.The true targets were the ISC’s Asian, African, and Latin American member organizations. Frantz Fanon dismissed all such North–South liaisons in 1961 as a “caricature of internationalism,” the real beneficiaries of which were not Africans but “the airlines.” “Asian and African officials can attend a seminar on socialist planning in Moscow one week,” he wrote, “and then another on free trade in London or at Columbia University the next.”20 Yet by the time Fanon published this, the federations were holding nearly as many events outside Europe as inside it. In 1960 alone, for example, Conakry, Guinea was slated to host a congress of the international teachers’ federation (FISE), an Executive Committee meeting of the youth federation (WFDY), a WFDY-sponsored All African Youth Conference, and a major conference of the Afro-Asian People’s Solidarity Organization (AAPSO)—an association based in Egypt, on which “the Bloc was ably represented.”21 The IUS, for its part, held an Executive Committee in Tunis that February, and of 38 resolutions on “situations in individual countries” passed at its Baghdad Congress that October, ten concerned Africa, including one regarding all five of Portugal’s African colonies.22

The socialist scramble for Africa, 1960–1970  37

The irony of the federations’ grand entry into Africa in 1960 was that one of the headline events, the AAPSO congress in Conakry, hosted the first public dispute in the Sino-Soviet split. The Chinese attacks on Soviet fecklessness that began there, in Conakry, continued at a World Federation of Trade Unions (WFTU) conference in Beijing two months later, in response to which a furious Khrushchev resolved to take revenge at a Romanian Party Congress that July. When the Soviet leader exchanged shouts with Chinese Politburo member Peng Zhen in Bucharest, the Sino-Soviet troubles became world news.23 For federation propagandists, the next seven years read like a Marxist-Leninist parody of the political, cultural sensitivity that the Dane had called for 15 years earlier. Conference resolutions required all-night sessions to resolve disputes between rival drafts, some as long as 28 hours.24 African participants typically found the disputes petty and abstract, a needless distraction from the material issues at hand. In preparation for an AAPSO (Afro-Asian People’s Solidarity Organization) congress in 1964, an Algerian official took Soviet and Chinese participants aside to ask each to explain their dispute between “general disarmament,” in the Soviet text, and “complete disarmament,” in the Chinese one. The replies were the same, he told the US ambassador: “nothing wrong with either term except its point of origin.”25 The dysfunction reached its peak in 1966, when according to the CIA, four communist-led international organizations suffered near or complete schisms in the space of six weeks.26 The prospect of a schism in the anti-imperial federations was not new; a Chinese speaker had asked a 1965 WFDY meeting in Ghana rhetorically, “whether it makes sense to fight for the unity of youth of all countries, or to move toward a split.”27 What alarmed federation leaders most about a possible Chinese defection was the likelihood that China’s youth officials would use the same tactics against the bloc-backed world federations as the federations had used to woo Third World organizations from the ISC. Hence their fear of “unrelenting Sino-Soviet argumentation over issues fundamentally irrelevant to youth problems,” wrote the US State Department, arguments that “only serve to annoy WFDY affiliates from Africa, who increasingly wonder if WFDY can ever be anything more than a living fossil from another era.”28 If WFDY seemed fossilized, perhaps a more militant, Beijing-based alternative would not. The benefit of the crisis of 1966 to the federations, in the State Department’s view, was the impetus that it gave to quieter, more sober voices to speak. A Czechoslovak’s address to the youth federation’s (WFDY) fractious Seventh Congress in Sofia was exemplary in this respect. The first problem, the Czechoslovak argued, was by now familiar: a loss of “prestige” to ideological debate. The second was the federation’s failure to keep pace with rapid developments in the “international youth movement.” And the last was money—too little to sustain the publications and events on which unity depended.29 Central to the first and second criticisms was an alleged malaise at WFDY headquarters in Budapest. The Sino-Soviet split had atomized the multinational staff, according to US intelligence, deterring them from writing and editing a monthly magazine whose mission was to engender transnational solidarity in an

38  Nick Rutter

anti-capitalist, anti-imperial key.30 A similar fractiousness was evident at a meeting held in Vienna to find a new site for the Eighth World Festival of Youth and Students—the largest, most expensive federation event of all. Soviet and East European functionaries pushed hard for Sofia, only to wind up voting for Accra. Africans now commanded 13 of 39 votes on the Festival’s International Preparatory Committee, and if Accra was not selected, then there was a good chance that they would vote for an even more radical, anti-imperial alternative, this one at an even greater distance from Eastern Europe than Accra: Havana or Hanoi.31 The bloc delegates had voted both pragmatically and reluctantly. Turning to the Czechoslovak’s final complaint, after ideological disputes and bureaucratic lethargy, we should note that by 1966, five of the original nine federations were headquartered in Eastern Europe, including three in Prague. Revenue came from many sources, including magazine subscriptions and Western communist parties. Still, the federation’s chronic budgetary woes, and the prestige that international institutions brought to socialist states, suggest that host states provided many services and personnel free of charge, from chauffeurs to apartments. Such conditions help to explain advertisements like one for Czechoslovak Airlines (ČSA) that appeared in the Prague-based IUS’s World Student News in October 1962, telling readers to, “Choose Your Destination.” Here and in ads for Hungary’s airline in the Budapest-based WFDY’s World Youth, Fanon’s “gold mine for the airlines” was in reality a tenant’s fee.32 The upkeep costs that the federations could not cover, maybe publicity for host countries’ state-owned enterprises could. In 1967, to cite a similar example, Bulgarian officials expressed frustration at the proposed budget for Sofia’s World Youth Festival. WFDY and IUS had not pledged what they had promised, the Bulgarians argued, to which Federation representatives replied that cuts had to be made, since China, North Korea, and Cuba were unlikely to pay their Festival dues. A Hungarian WFDY functionary then assured the Bulgarians that there was no need to worry. Soviet colleagues had informed him “that they are ready to assist the Festival by other means, that we can rely on them.”33 The Czechoslovak’s remark about money, the Bulgarians’ complaint about the Festival budget, and the Soviets’ safety net all illustrate the precarious position that the federations were in by the late 1960s. Abused by China, and alienated from Eastern Europe, they had grown ever more reliant on the USSR, a situation that was no better at avowedly socialist multilateral institutions like Comecon and the Warsaw Pact. Romania’s representatives at the Committee for Mutual Economic Assistance (Comecon) exploited a Stalin-era “unanimous vote principle” to hobble Khrushchev’s plan for greater economic integration in 1962. Romanians at the Warsaw Treaty Organization, meanwhile, brought about the worst “years of crisis” that the alliance had ever seen, writes historian Vojtech Mastny, during which they torpedoed Soviet-led efforts to “institutionalize” military decision-making.34 The principal difference between the world federations and these formal “multilateral institutions” was not, by the mid-1960s, the latter’s self-reference as communist or socialist, and the former’s alleged neutrality. The more conspicuous difference was that aside from Cairo’s AAPSO, no organizations had hosted as many

The socialist scramble for Africa, 1960–1970  39

Sino-Soviet debates as the federations had. None, therefore, conveyed the severity of the Sino-Soviet conflict’s effect on inter-communist relations to as broad an audience. Already in 1961 China had stopped sending “observers” to Comecon meetings, and delegates to Soviet Party Congresses.35 They held on at federation conferences, by contrast, until the onset of the Cultural Revolution in 1966–1967. The seven years between the first and second editions of Zbigniew Brzezinski’s The Soviet Bloc confirmed the federations’ significance to Cold War history as bellwethers of “unity and conflict” in the world communist movement. The Sino-Soviet split, meanwhile, made it harder than before for organizations like the WFDY and IUS to make their neutrality credible. Ideological, Marxist-Leninist debate was louder at their meetings, most of which took place west or south of the Iron Curtain, than was possible, or at least audible, coming from Comecon or the Warsaw Pact. By the middle of the decade, responsibility for winning new allies to the federations thus rested on an ever-smaller circle of allies—the USSR and its five most “fraternal” neighbors: Czechoslovakia, East Germany, Bulgaria, Poland, and Hungary. The appearance of dozens of new African states in the early 1960s drove the volume of recruitment work at the federations up at the same time as their host states struggled to cover the federations’ costs. In Africa itself, meanwhile, bloc diplomats found it difficult to reconcile national interest with the socialist division of labor. The chief concern here, though, was not cost but opportunity. The fact that the scramble for friends and markets in newly sovereign Africa took place far away, without on-site institutions to arbitrate between allies, helps to explain the reorientation of intra-bloc intercourse from mass meetings and conferences, to discreet exchange of information. In Africa by the mid-1960s, coordinated policy had become vital to the pursuit of national interests.

Unity and conflict in bloc relations in Africa In 1974, China’s party daily, Renmin Ribao, characterized the Comecon as “an instrument for the Soviet revisionists to control, exploit and plunder other Comecon countries,” a judgment that it no doubt had passed many times before.36 Comecon, though, as we know, was not nearly as effective as Renmin Ribao alleged. Mao watched Romania obstruct Khrushchev’s efforts to govern foreign production by assigning quotas in 1962, and he no doubt drew on this insight into how Sovietbacked multilateral institutions did and did not function in an optimistic speech to the CCP’s (Chinese Communist Party) Central Committee in September 1963. “Things are evolving and contradictions are revealing themselves,” Mao said.37 A Hungarian diplomat had done his best to disabuse 12 high-ranking Chinese officials of this idea that fall, and succeeded in brushing it aside until he arrived in Premier Zhou Enlai’s office shortly before Zhou’s departure to tour ten African countries. Angry at the Hungarian’s indifference to “whether or not the Soviet Union is correct or incorrect,” Zhou likened his complacency to “pouring oil on fire.” To Zhou, the conversation testified to the USSR’s continued authority

40  Nick Rutter

over Eastern Europe, the same grip on power that Mao had disputed just a few weeks earlier. And it was this contradiction that helps explain the normally mildmannered Zhou’s bitterness toward his Hungarian guest.38 Comecon’s difficulties vis-à-vis Romania in 1962, over the “principle of specialization,” coincided with another intra-bloc tension over what to sell to newly sovereign Third World states.39 As yet, very little is known about the Comecon subcommittees that began meeting in these years to work toward coordinating foreign trade.40 What is clear, however, is that socialist states’ “economic structures differed sometimes significantly,” a condition that made it hard for “members [to] share a single vision for the future,” writes historian Suvi Kansikas, or reconcile export policies in the present.41 Future GDR foreign minister Otto Winzer’s call “for the coordination of the [bloc’s] foreign economic relations with the African countries” in 1963, including “a general consultation about it . . . at the highest level,” indicates how ineffectual the fledgling subcommittees were.42 Whatever coordination did take place between bloc states in Africa belonged chiefly to embassies like the ones that Winzer visited in his 1963 tour of the West African capitals most amenable to trade with the bloc.43 In his study of Czechoslovakia’s outreach to Africa, Philip Muehlenbeck writes that any policy of consequence went first to the Soviet embassy for approval. True to Renmin Ribao’s and Zhou Enlai’s caricatures of Soviet hegemony, moreover, Muehlenbeck reports finding not one document in the Czech archives that “directly opposed the Kremlin’s wishes.” Klaus Storkman has written similarly about the USSR’s “undisputed supremacy” over East Germany’s arms trade with the Third World in the 1970s.44 Yet as Muehlenbeck points out, agreement is not the same as initiative. It was not unusual, for example, for Czechoslovak officials to seek Soviet approval for actions that they had already taken.45 Natalia Telepneva makes a similar argument in her study of Soviet relations with national liberation movements in the Portuguese colonies.The USSR’s three main allies in Africa,Telepneva writes—Czechoslovakia, East Germany, and Bulgaria—“defined [the anti-imperial struggle] in terms that did not necessarily satisfy the agenda in Moscow.” And so, “there is no reason to assume that Moscow ‘handed out’ instructions to its satellites.” Soviet-Eastern European joint aid packages like the one to Angola’s People’s Liberation Movement (MPLA) in 1961 proved that concerted action was possible. And this, together with Winzer’s calls for greater “coordination of economic relations” two years later, suggests that it was easier for bloc states to collaborate on arms deliveries to insurgencies than on trade deals with African governments.46 The advantage of decentralized diplomacy to communist trade officials and diplomats in Africa, Zbigniew Brzezinski wrote in 1963, was that it let each bloc state play to its strengths. The Soviet ambassador’s expulsion from Guinea in December 1961, for example, on allegations of conspiring to overthrow President Sekou Touré’s government, did no harm to Czechoslovakia’s embassy there.47 This owed partly to Czechoslovakia’s history of strong relations with the continent, having opened its first embassy in sub-Saharan Africa 33 years before the USSR did the

The socialist scramble for Africa, 1960–1970  41

same.48 In the early 1950s, moreover,Touré had studied at a school for trade unionists in Prague—very likely with help from the Prague-based WFTU.49 It was fitting, therefore, that the first bloc embassy to open in Conakry was Czechoslovakia’s, and the first Guinean delegation to travel abroad went to Prague, not Moscow.50 Sizable investments and aid projects followed, including the printing of a new Guinean currency in Czechoslovakia to replace de Gaulle’s franc. And although the economic ties slackened considerably after 1962, the contacts that Czechoslovakia’s intelligence service made in Conakry’s diverse revolutionary community would prove invaluable not only to itself, but also to the KGB, for the rest of the decade. Had the Soviet bloc engaged with Guinea en masse, then, as a single alliance under the leadership of the USSR, it might have left as one, too.51 If the benefit of decentralized relations was versatility, then the cost was what communists termed “parallelism.” Literally, the word meant redundancy—two hospitals built in a city that needed one. Figuratively, it meant competition between socialist states, an especially troubling phenomenon given Lenin’s definition of “imperialism” as a race between industrial European economies for foreign markets.52 For his part, Stalin defined “socialist competition” as the practice of improving worker productivity by example, through “comradely assistance” for the sake of “general advancement.”53 And in 1958, an East German report described collaboration between doctors and nurses from six countries in North Vietnam, five of them socialist, in exactly this manner. Of all the countries represented, the Czechoslovaks were reportedly the most adept at promoting their medicines and implements. The best way to “bring more profit, even after subtracting all the costs,” the GDR (German Democratic Republic) report concluded, was to follow the Czechoslovak example: send more East German doctors and nurses to promote and sell more GDR-made drugs.54 Struggles to reconcile “national competition” and “bloc cooperation” in Africa, to borrow a dichotomy cited in Brzezinski’s 1963 edited volume, Africa and the Communist World, followed three basic scenarios.55 The first featured a single collaborative project or enterprise, from business ventures like the PolishGerman-Czechoslovak “Uni-Africa” shipping line, to a Guinean bauxite mine managed by Czechoslovak, Hungarian, Polish, and Soviet technicians.56 The collaborative projects had proved successful enough to win Otto Winzer’s approval in 1963, when he wrote that “[c]onsiderations must be given to building shared industrial entities by the socialist states where appropriate,” and to adopt “a unified course of action [Vorgehen]” everywhere else.57 Critical to any such project was of course a clear delineation of authority. When the USSR built Egypt’s Aswan Dam, it hired East German firms to conduct certain jobs, provided they abided by the Soviet blueprints.58 Humanitarian aid projects, however, were considerably more complicated in this respect. Algerian health officials managed to dispatch 35 Cuban, 14 Chinese, and untold Soviet, Czechoslovak, Hungarian, French, and Egyptian doctors and nurses to clinics and hospitals across the country in 1963 without, it seems, prompting any noteworthy conflict between them.59 It may be that the opposing sides never caught sight of one another. But

42  Nick Rutter

even if they did, doctors could keep to themselves without much difficulty, with little need for a vertical hierarchy of authority. The same appeared to be true for the youth brigades from France, several Arab countries, and eight socialist republics, including China and Albania, that began work on a youth camp in the hills east of Algiers in the summer of 1964. Each brigade was to build its share of 64 planned buildings, with oversight provided by the Algerian National Liberation Front’s (FLN) youth wing, and with freedom to mingle or keep to itself as each brigade saw fit. Within four weeks of their late arrival that October, the 40-person East German brigade found itself working alone, all other groups having returned home for the winter.60 Once the rain, wind, and knee-deep mud had given way to spring, the absentees returned, and the head of the 130-person Soviet brigade expressed his surprise and gratitude for the Germans’ contribution. According to the GDR brigade leaders, he “repeatedly expressed his astonishment at the political influence that we had won in Algeria.”61 Not long after their arrival, the Soviets and Bulgarians began forming “international brigades,” each “specialized in a different trade [Facheinrichtung],” and all determined to build as quickly as possible. Taken aback by the new brigades’ competitive streak, but determined to get the credit that they deserved for their work that winter, the East Germans asked to join the brigades, and wrote a detailed report to East Berlin about what followed: Although a close and brotherly friendship unites us with these delegations, there was an intense tactical and diplomatic tug-of-war over the completion of the first 5 housing units [the foundations for which the East Germans had laid that winter]. . . . In our assessment, the Soviet friends had lost a great deal of their prestige by leaving in December 1964, and are making every effort to make up for it this year. In a group discussion between the Soviet delegation’s leadership and ours we stated our position in light of the actual facts on the site, and we convinced the . . . delegation leader of our position. We told them with utmost clarity that we do not agree to speak among friends like diplomats, that we are always ready to work in international brigades, that it was we who made this suggestion, and that we have the same right as they to be the first to complete a certain number of houses. We owe that to our friends who worked here in the hard days that winter.62 At the root of the camp’s sibling rivalry, the report suggested, was the Soviet brigade’s hunger to win “political influence” in Algeria for the USSR first, and its allies second. “We explain the problems so thoroughly here,” the brigade leaders continued, “because . . . the Soviet delegation’s leadership always tried to belittle the good traditions [Traditionen] that we exhibit here.”63 In the end, the dispute resolved itself at a meeting of leaders from all four bloc brigades at the construction site (Soviets, East Germans, Poles, and Czechoslovaks), at which the same Soviet who had expressed gratitude to the Germans now spoke on their behalf, and convinced the others to let the Free German Youth complete their houses first.

The socialist scramble for Africa, 1960–1970  43

A second, simpler method of dampening intra-bloc rivalry than collaborative projects was to allocate influence and responsibility by geography. In Guinea, as noted above, the Czechoslovaks stood “in a more favorable position than any other foreign power” from the very beginning, a primacy that neither the Soviets nor the other allies contested.64 East German preeminence arose differently but functioned similarly in Zanzibar, a pair of islands off the Tanzanian coast. The GDR sought the same diplomatic recognition from Zanzibar’s socialist government in the weeks following its seizure of power in January 1964 that it sought everywhere else in the world in the 1960s. It therefore wasted no time in telling the Zanzibaris that “money was no object,” according to CIA intelligence, a statement validated by the approximately $6.5 million in interest-free grants and credits that arrived shortly thereafter. In Zanzibar, allied socialist states quickly ceded authority and responsibility to East Berlin, much as they had to Prague in Guinea. The Soviets refused to match an approximately $14 million interest-free loan to the Tanzanian government from China only a few months after Zanzibar’s union with Tanganyika. In response to this and the “unfavorable” terms that the Soviets placed on their credits, Tanzania broke off trade talks with the USSR, Poland, and Czechoslovakia all at once.65 Socialist states maintained embassies and trade offices in African capitals irrespective of who stood closest to each host government. It was the job of the Czechoslovaks in Guinea, the East Germans in Zanzibar, or the Soviets in Algeria, nevertheless, to earn their unrivaled position by providing the most aid, and outspending China in the process.66 The riddle in both cases is how the territorial allocation took place. Was it a laissez-faire process, or did formal, “multilateral” negotiations occur in a Soviet bloc variation on Bismarck’s Africa Conference of 1884–1885? A Hungarian official’s contribution to a meeting held in East Berlin between Afro-Asian Solidarity Committee functionaries in 1966 indicates the former. “Hungary has given a lot of aid but it can never be enough,” he said, a fact that made it “better to divide up the regions and countries among us so that the support is more effective.”67 Evidently, the laissez-faire method that had existed until then had lost its luster.The judgment at the meeting was all but unanimous: face-to-face gatherings like this one could function as “multilateral institutions” unto themselves. Unlike collaboration on a single project or preeminence in a particular country, the third remedy for “parallelism” in Africa was that of discrete, “turnkey” enterprises. The virtue of the turnkey factory or school was its simplicity: a bloc state built it, then gave the host government the key. Bloc universities educated African students on the same premise, by training them in a field, then returning them to work in whatever trade their state required.68 The liability of this method was the potential for redundancy discussed above. How could planners from one fraternal state ensure that another would not build the same factory or ship the same machinery? The mosaics of bloc-built, turnkey enterprises that appeared in Sovietfriendly African cities in the 1960s indicate that some manner of joint planning or information sharing must have taken place. Consider Accra, Ghana, as described by a South African communist journal in March 1966, 1 month after Kwame

44  Nick Rutter

Nkrumah’s overthrow: “Czechoslovak technicians were helping build a sugar refinery, Rumanian geologists had found the first traces of oil, while Soviet specialists were helping to build Ghana’s fishing fleet, working on the state farms, building a gold refinery and constructing an atomic research reactor, to mention but a few projects.”69 Here, the benefit of the “socialist division of labor” that Romania had rejected in 1962 stood in plain sight: the USSR was the bloc’s sole nuclear power; Romania was its second largest oil producer; and Czechoslovakia boasted the largest industrial sector per capita. The number and variety of turnkey projects in Africa in the 1960s reflected an equal number and variety of meetings. In the absence of a centralized “multilateral institution” to keep track of who built what, the task of coordinating commercial, infrastructural and scientific projects in cities like Accra and Conakry fell on an everwider range of offices and ministries. Furthermore, the more specialized the menu of projects became, the smaller and more intimate the meetings between socialist functionaries and bureaucrats had to be. The result was a laboratory for Soviet bloc internationalism comparable to the friendships between Eastern Europeans and Africans discussed by Telepneva.70 Consider, for example, a meeting that took place in Prague in May 1963, between higher-ups in the East German and Czechoslovak Red Cross. The Czechoslovaks thanked the Germans “for the . . . extremely valuable and new information” that they had provided in a report on the GDR group’s just completed tour of postwar Algeria’s dismal medical facilities. However selfflattering the East German report on the meeting might have been, the high value that it placed on “mutual information” derived from dialogue is noteworthy. Of the many topics discussed, some relayed information from other meetings, as when Germans shared Bulgarian and Hungarian doctors’ remarks about the “dire need for stronger investment by socialist states in medical aid for Algeria.” Others invited sympathy, like the Czechoslovaks’ complaint about their organization’s lack of hard currency. Still others highlighted opportunities for collaborative projects like the ones discussed above, including “possible joint steps toward opening a similar relief operation for Spanish anti-fascists.”71 The aforementioned 1966 meeting of Afro-Asian Solidarity Committee chairs from the six core bloc states came to the same conclusions about the usefulness of “mutual information” as the Red Cross officials did, only this time on a larger scale. Three years earlier, in 1963, when Otto Winzer returned from West Africa, he had made it clear that “incidents of parallelism [Nebeneinander] and competition [Konkurrenz]” between fraternal states, “offer oppositional forces in these countries the opportunity to discredit economic relations and aid from socialist countries, and to play the socialist countries off against one another.”72 Now at the 1966 Solidarity Committee summit in East Berlin, a solution to harmful competition seemed within reach. “We should meet more often to clarify the problems and tasks,” said a Bulgarian. “[Let us e]xchange information about who is [who] in Africa, which political positions they have, what influence on the masses, etc.,” said a Pole. “We need more information about the national liberation movement[s],” and so “must inform one another,” remarked a Czechoslovak.“We have to coordinate our actions

The socialist scramble for Africa, 1960–1970  45

so that we can direct and inform each other so that everyone shares experiences,” added a Soviet.73 The solution recommended by the bloc officials who perhaps knew Africa best was not a centralized, executive institution of the kind that Khrushchev recommended for Comecon in 1962, that Brezhnev hoped to revive at a third International Meeting of Communist and Workers’ Parties in that years that followed, or that Zbigniew Brzezinski recommended in the 1960 edition of The Soviet Bloc.The bureaucrats at one or more rungs beneath the Politburo sought information on practical topics, and regular meetings to transmit it.

Conclusion: the multilateral institution reconceived In a memorandum to the world communist movement that he wrote hours before his death in August 1964, longtime Italian Communist Party leader Palmiro Togliatti advised comrades against overestimating the healing power of “the international meeting” that would soon take place in Moscow. “Undoubtedly, an international conference can help,” he wrote, but only if enough parties attended to warrant the title, and only if they came to discuss, not accuse or belittle. The atomization of the movement had grown such that “every party must know how to act in an autonomous manner,” Togliatti argued, an autonomy that prompted the Italian party to contest,“any proposal to create once again a centralized international organization.” Mindful of the Soviets’ eagerness to hold an international meeting in the traditional, spectacular fashion, and wary of how easily his above statements could be misconstrued,Togliatti warned against “isolation,” and recommended new meetings to take the old one’s place. It was time for “frequent contacts and [the] exchange of experiences among the parties on a broad scale,” combined with the “convocation of collective meetings dedicated to studying common problems by a certain group of parties,” and, “international study meetings on general problems of economy, philosophy, history, etc.” Ritual demonstrations of loyalty to the USSR would give way to more meetings on a wider spectrum of topics, some of them theoretical, but most of them practical and empirical, toward solutions to “common problems.”74 Togliatti’s memorandum matters to this chapter first, because it addressed communist party relations with “colonial and ex-colonial nations” in the manner described above. Communists were best off pursuing “a common, concrete program” born out of dialogue with anti-imperialists of all ideological stripes. He added at the Soviets’ expense: “as I have already stated, we would have welcomed with pleasure an international meeting completely dedicated to these problems.”75 The memo pertains to the chapter second, because of its recognition that communist parties must meet the Chinese challenge, but must do so locally, from the bottom up, not at a meeting of party leaders from around the world. The memo matters third, because of the link that it draws between the past and present of world communist institutions. No Western communist party benefitted more from the Comintern’s dissolution in 1943 than Italy’s, its membership soaring to about 2.5 million by 1947, more than any other party outside the USSR.76 Already by September 1947, however, the founding of the Cominform had snuffed out the

46  Nick Rutter

autonomy that Togliatti had exercised so well, to the detriment of the Italian party’s standing in the polls.77 Now in 1964, confronted with the rebellion of China, Albania, Romania, and Cuba, Togliatti acknowledged the need for solidarity, but rejected the notion that a new Comintern or other supranational organization could help achieve it. Parties must combat Chinese revisionism, as noted, at the local level, just as international meetings must limit their scope to fruitful topics. It is important not to exaggerate Togliatti’s criticisms of the Soviet government’s intentions in 1964. Politically, he was a Soviet loyalist to the end, and spoke a different, freer language than party officials did farther east.78 Hence the world’s surprise when Pravda published Togliatti’s memo in full shortly after it appeared in Italy’s L’Unita, and hence the danger of equating Togliatti’s proposal for more “meetings” and “exchange” with those made at closed-door discussions between Afro-Asian solidarity officials in East Berlin. Granted, policy-centered, intra-bloc exchanges were nothing new. Czech émigré Vladimir Kusin wrote in the 1970s about how Soviet influence tended to move “through the channels that have been painstakingly built up from the end of the 1940s,” some at a “high-level,” others via “social organizations” like the world federations of women, youth, and trade unions.79 Without a quantitative study to show who met where, when, and on what topics, it is difficult to prove that more meetings of this kind took place in the 1960s than had in the decade prior. What this chapter has shown, nonetheless, is that the Sino-Soviet split’s strain on an already attenuated network of inter-communist “channels” and institutions helped to inspire a revision in how communist states manifested solidarity, and coordinated policy.The coincidence of this crisis with Africa’s independence from European rule drew further attention to the problem of “parallelism” toward Africa within what remained of the Soviet bloc, a topic on which little has yet been written.What both impulses for increased solidarity and coordination between the USSR and its five core allies shared, one from China and the other from Africa, was the question of what channels of communication best suited the refracted geopolitics of the 1960s. Multilateral institutions like Comecon, as we have seen, had fallen on hard times in the “crisis years” of the mid-1960s. And when the meeting that Palmiro Togliatti had advised against convened in spring 1965, just two-thirds of the parties that the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU) had invited turned up. A chastened Brezhnev advocated for “periodic meetings of the representatives of the parties, which enable them to exchange views on questions of mutual interest.”80 And a year later he boasted to the twenty-third CPSU Congress that Moscow had hosted 200 delegations from 60 “brother parties” in the past 18 months.81 Although the topics and rosters of the 200 meetings have not been tabulated, we can assume that most involved officials from the same departments of different governments, and that their stated objective was coordination, or even better, collaboration. In the case of INTERKIT (China International), a diplomatic roundtable that met for the first time in 1967, its mission “to coordinate Soviet-bloc analysis of and policy toward China,” the downscale method worked well. The USSR’s five fraternal neighbors adopted its anti-China policies without hesitation.82 More common, though, judging by the sources cited above, was an exchange of information that left the door to coordination and collaboration open, but did not pass through it.83

The socialist scramble for Africa, 1960–1970  47

When the USSR finally did bring a well-attended International Meeting to Moscow in 1969, Togliatti’s favorite pupil, Enrico Berlinguer—himself a former president of the World Federation of Democratic Youth (WFDY)—refused to sign three-quarters of the closing declaration. The Meeting’s organizers had not explained adequately, Berlinguer argued, what “developed socialism” meant.84 Togliatti’s successor thus took up the Danish woman’s line of argument from 1953, the Nigerian’s from Beijing in 1951, and even the Chinese world federation speakers’ from 1960 until 1967, who disputed nearly every text that Soviet federation delegates wrote. The object in each case was to clarify terms so as to preempt distortions. The consequence of Berlinguer’s objections in 1969 was an International Meeting that teetered on the same edge, between unity and conflict, that the meeting was meant to secure. Ideologically, the “Eurocommunism” that Berlinguer introduced in Moscow could hardly have been more different from the Maoism that had issued its first public challenge to Soviet supremacy at a “multilateral” event in West Africa in 1960, at the start of the decade. Institutionally, however, on the dire threat that a “Commonwealth Politburo” posed to the movement at large, they were identical.

Notes   1 In what follows, I use “communist” with reference to communist parties and ideology, and “socialist” with reference to states and governments. Finally, “Soviet bloc” refers to the USSR and its East European allies, excluding Yugoslavia, Albania, and circa 1964, Romania, too.   2 For example, Zbigniew Brzezinski, The Soviet Bloc: Unity and Conflict (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1960).   3 For example, Adam Bromke (ed.), The Communist States at the Crossroads: Between Moscow and Peking (New York: Pall Mall Press, 1965).  4 Brzezinski, The Soviet Bloc (1960), 401, 405–408; ibid., 2nd ed. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1967), 500.   5 Brzezinski, “Conclusion:The African Challenge” in idem. (ed.), Africa and the Communist World (Stanford: Hoover Institution Press, 1963), 228. On the new vocabulary that Soviet ideologues generated to accommodate African states, see Jeremy Friedman, Shadow Cold War: The Sino-Soviet Competition for the Third World (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2015), 57, 108.  6 Brzezinski, The Soviet Bloc (1967), 397. For Czechoslovak disillusionment, see Philip Muehlenbeck, Czechoslovakia in Africa, 1945–1968 (New York: Palgrave, 2016), ch. 5.   7 Alessandro Iandolo, “The Rise and Fall of the Soviet Model of Development in West Africa, 1957–1964” in Cold War History, 12, 4 (2012), 690–699.  8 Friedman, Shadow Cold War, 124–125; Brzezinski, Soviet Bloc (1967), 397, 496.   9 Ibid. (1967), 474–475. 10 Austin Jersild, The Sino-Soviet Alliance (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2014), 137–141. 11 On the Comintern’s demise, see Ivo Banac, The Diary of Georgi Dimitrov, 1933–1949 (New Haven:Yale University Press, 2008), xxxviii; Geoffrey Roberts, Stalin’s Wars: From World War to Cold War, 1939–1953 (New Haven:Yale University Press, 2006), 172–173. On the federations’ neutrality, see Francisca de Haan, “Continuing Cold War Paradigms in Western Historiography of Transnational Women’s Organizations: the case of the Women’s International Democratic Federation (WIDF)” in Women’s History Review, 19, 4 (Sep. 2010), 570, fn. 59. 12 De Haan, “Continuing Cold War Paradigms,” 559.

48  Nick Rutter

13 The Soviet document does not indicate how many of said “colonials” were communists. RGASPI, f. 82, op. 2, d. 1413, ll. 62–63. 14 For contrary views of the Calcutta conference, see Jonathan Haslam, Russia’s Cold War (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2011), 116–117, and Larisa Efimova “Did the Soviet Union Instruct Southeast Asian Communists to Revolt? New Russian Evidence on the Calcutta Youth Conference of February 1948” in Journal of Southeast Asian Studies, 40, 3 (Oct. 2009), 449–469. For the contemporary Western response, see “Southeast Asia: The Plan,” Time, Oct. 4, 1948, http://content.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,799242,00.html (accessed July 21, 2016). 15 Jöel Kotek, Students and the Cold War (New York: St. Martin, 1996), 63; World Student News, Special Congress Issue N. 3, (Aug. 17, 1950), 3. 16 Russian State Archive for Social-Political History,Youth Division (RGASPI-M), fond 3, opis 1, delo 36, list 1; d. 37, ll. 37, 59–60. 17 Odd Arne Westad, The Global Cold War (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 55, 60. For a contemporary view on anti-colonialism’s role in Soviet propaganda in the immediate postwar years, see George Kennan’s “Long Telegram” of 1946 at http:// nsarchive.gwu.edu/coldwar/documents/episode-1/kennan.htm (accessed November 21, 2016). 18 For discussion of the criticisms, see Azinna Nwafor, “Critical Introduction” to George Padmore, Pan-Africanism or Communism (New York: Anchor, 1972), xxvii–xxix. 19 Resolutions of the VI. IUS Congress: Baghdad, 8th to 19th October, 1960 (Prague: IUS, 1960), 19. On the ISC’s troubles, see Karen Paget, Patriotic Betrayal: The Inside Story of the CIA’s Campaign to Enroll American Students in the Crusade against Communism (New Haven:Yale University 2015), 196–197. 20 Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth (New York: Grove, 2004), 42. 21 USIA Office of Research and Analysis,“The Communist Presence in Guinea—A Soviet Experiment in West Africa,” 18 May 1960, 5–6. 22 Report on the Committee of Three on the Round Table Conference (Prague: International Union of Students, 1960), 30; Resolutions of the VI. IUS Congress, 3–4. 23 Friedman, Shadow Cold War, 44–45, 52. 24 US Dept. of State to all posts, 7 July 1966, NARA, box 1553, folder CSM 6-WFDY, 11/16/1966, p. 1. 25 US Ambassador Porter to Rusk, 23 March 1964, NARA, RG 59, Central Foreign Policy Files, 1964–1966, Political and Defense, box 1554, folder CSM 6-AAPSO, 1/1/64, p. 1. For a similar exchange, see William McLaughlin, “The Vietnam Game,” 25 May 1965, Radio Free Europe, Open Society Archive, p. 4, online at: www.osaarchivum.org (accessed July 17, 2016). 26 “World Communist Affairs,” 7 June–4 July 1965, CIA-RDP78–03061A000400010040–4, 1. 27 See RGASPI-M, f. 3, op. 3, d. 75, ll.154–155. 28 DOS to all posts, 7 July 1966, 2. 29 Ibid. 30 Ibid., 3. 31 BStU, Mfs HA XX, Nr. 10224, Hft 1, 207. 32 An advert for Hungary’s airline in a 1978 issue of World Youth read, “Time is money: You save time by flying to Budapest.” World Youth (Budapest), 17, 3–4 (1978), 47; World Student News (Prague), 16, 2 (1962), inside back cover. 33 “Shorthand record of the meeting of IPC and NPC representatives. . . ,” 5 May 1967, Bulgarian National Archives (BNA), fond 1053, inventory 9, archival group 13, no page given. 34 Suvi Kansikas, “Trade Blocs and the Cold War: The Comecon and the EC challenge, 1969–1976” (Ph.D. dissertation, University of Helsinki, 2012), 44; Vojtech Mastny, “The Warsaw Pact as History,” in idem., M. Byrne (eds.), A Cardboard Castle? An Inside History of the Warsaw Pact (Budapest: Central European University, 2005), 28–34, for quote see p. 32.

The socialist scramble for Africa, 1960–1970  49

35 Elena Dragomir, Cold War Perceptions: Romania’s Policy Change towards the Soviet Union, 1960–1964 (Cambridge: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2015), 91, fn. 41. 36 Ugly Features of Soviet Social-Imperialism (Peking: Foreign Languages Press, 1976), 33. 37 “Mao Zedong, ‘There Are Two Intermediate Zones’,” September, 1963, History and Public Policy Program Digital Archive, Translation from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the People’s Republic of China and the Party Literature Research Center, eds., Mao Zedong on Diplomacy (Beijing: Foreign Languages Press, 1998), 387. 38 “Memorandum of Conversation, Chinese Officials and the Hungarian Ambassador to China,” November 12, 1963, History and Public Policy Program Digital Archive, National Archives, Prague, ÚV KSČ AN II, krabice 85, folder 118: Čína. Obtained and translated by Austin Jersild: http://digitalarchive.wilsoncenter.org/document/116834 (accessed August 4, 2016). 39 Kansikas, “Trade Blocs and the Cold War,” 44. 40 Young-Sun Hong acknowledges the coordination of Comecon member states’ aid projects through said subcommittees, but provides no specific examples or citations. Philip Muehlenbeck refers similarly to a Comecon trade deal with Guinea in 1960, absent details. Alessandro Iandolo, who has conducted extensive research on Comecon in Russian archives, reported to the author seeing very few references to coordination of trade or aid to Africa. My thanks to Alessandro for his correspondence. See Young-Sun Hong, Cold War Germany, the Third World, and the Global Humanitarian Regime (New York: Cambridge, 2015), 41; Muehlenbeck, Czechoslovakia in Africa, 56. 41 Kansikas, “Trade Blocs and the Cold War,” 217. 42 Archive of the German Foreign Office (PA/AA), C 735/75, 6, 8. 43 Here, Alessandro Iandolo reports seeing many instances of bloc embassies exchanging reports on trade with West African states—most notably Guinea, Ghana, and Mali. 44 Klaus Storkmann, Geheime Solidarität: Militärbeziehungen und Militärhilfen der DDR in die ‘Dritte Welt’ (Berlin: Ch. Links Verlag, 2012), 157; Muehlenbeck, it should be noted, later acknowledges that Czechoslovakia chose to decline participation in a “joint SovietGunean proposal to build an aluminum smelter and hydroelectric plant.” Muehlenbeck, 4, 162. 45 Ibid., 4. 46 Natalia Telepneva, “Our Sacred Duty: The Soviet Union, the Liberation Movements in the Portuguese Colonies, and the Cold War, 1961–1975,” (Ph.D. Dissertation, London School of Economics, 2014), 64, 280–281. 47 Brzezinski, “Conclusion:The African Challenge,” 217; Robert and Elizabeth Bass, “Eastern Europe,” in Z. Brzezynski (ed.), Africa and the Communist World (Stanford: Hoover Institution Press, 1963), 94, 99. 48 The first Soviet embassy opened in Liberia in 1956. Muehlenbeck, 17. 49 Touré was a prime example, according to historians Ulf Engel and Hans-Georg Schleicher, of the “first contacts with African representatives on a non-governmental level” that world federations gave to the states that housed them. Ulf Engel, Hans-Georg Schleicher, Die beiden deutschen Staaten in Afrika: Zwischen Konkurrenz und Koexistenz 1949–1990 (Hamburg: Institut für Afrikakunde, 1998), 90; Muehlenbeck, 153–154. 50 Ibid., 156. 51 Telepneva, 59, 279–280; Muehlenbeck, 55, 60. 52 Vladimir Lenin, Imperialism:The Highest Stage of Capitalism (1917), available in full at https:// www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1916/imp-hsc/ (accessed October 10, 2016). 53 Socialist Competition in the Soviet Union (New York: Progress Publishers, 1929), 3. 54 Hong, 129–130. 55 Bass, 93. 56 Bass, 94, 100. 57 “Erste Einschätzung der wirtschaftlichen Ergebnisse und Erkentnisse der Afrika-Reise,” 6 May 1963, PA AA, C 735/75, 6. 58 Hong, 41–42.

50  Nick Rutter

59 PA AA, A 13582, 15–16. 60 Political Archive of the Foreign Ministries, Berlin (PA AA), A 12719, 9; A 13580, 38. 61 He also affirmed that “all foreign delegations are equally qualified to solve construction problems [bautechnische Fragen lösen].” PA AA, A 13580, 26–27. 62 PA AA, A 13580, 29–30. 63 PA/AA, A 13580, 30. 64 Muehlenbeck, 63. 65 CIA Directorate of Intelligence, ESAU Intelligence Study, 21 Feb 1966, “Zanzibar: The Hundred Days’ Revolution,” 97, 100, https://www.cia.gov/library/readingroom/docs/ esau-28.pdf (accessed October 6, 2016). 66 For the outcome of the GDR’s investments in Zanzibar, and its failure to outmaneuver the Chinese by means of money and technology alone, see Hong, 313–316. 67 Special thanks to Natalia Telepneva for sharing this document with me. “Konsultationstreffen zwischen den Vertretern Afro-asiatischer Solidaritätskomitees (AASK) europäischer sozialistischer Länder am 28./29.06.1966,” Bundesarchiv Berlin-Lichterfelde, DZ8.32, 5. 68 The historiography of Third World students’ experience at eastern bloc universities is deep, if somewhat repetitive. For an overview, see Constantin Katsakioris, “The SovietSouth Encounter: Tennsions in the Friendship with Afro-Asian Partners, 1945–1965,” in P. Babiracki and K. Zimmer (eds), Cold War Crossings: International Travel and Exchange across the Soviet Bloc, 1940s–1960s (College Station, TX: Texas A&M Press), 134–165. 69 Dennis Ogden, “Reports on Ghana: Ghana Socialists Fight Back,” African Communist, n. 25 (1966), 22. 70 Telepneva, 277;Vladimir Shubin, The Hot “Cold War”:The USSR in Southern Africa (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008), 7. 71 PA AA, A 13582, 127. 72 PA/AA, C 735/75, 6. 73 “Konsultationstreffen zwischen den Vertretern Afro-asiatischer Solidaritätskomitees (AASK),” pp. 5, 6, 9. 74 Palmiro Togliatti, “The Togliatti Memorandum” in L’Unita (Rome), 4 September 1964, https://www.marxists.org/archive/togliatti/1964/memorandum.htm (accessed October 4, 2017). 75 Ibid. 76 Alessandro Brogi, Confronting America:The Cold War between the United States and the Communists in France and Italy (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2011), 14. 77 Haslam, 90, 94; Brogi, 95–96. 78 See Aldo Agosti, Palmiro Togliatti: A  Biography (London: I.B. Taurus, 208), 328, fn. 29. 79 Jan S. Adams, “Incremental Activism in Soviet Third World Policy: The Role of the International Department of the CPSU Central Committee” in Slavic Review, 48, 4 (Winter, 1989), 616. 80 Brzezinski, Soviet Bloc (1967), 472–473. 81 Leonid Brezhnev, “Rechenschaftsbericht des Zentralkomitees der KPdSU” in Neues Deutschland, 30 March 1966, 4. 82 James Hershberg, et al. (eds), The INTERKIT Story, CWIHP Working Paper No. 63 (2011), 106. 83 Records from meetings between East European and Soviet Ministers of Education from 1962 until late in the decade, and perhaps further once new files are made public, can be read in the opposite direction, insofar as they include some discussion of education aid to the Third World, and collaboration on it, but no hard data about how many African students each state accepted, much less what disciplines they should study. Having not read the file carefully, I unfortunately can say no more than that here. My thanks to Constantinos Katsakioris for recommending the file. See the State Archive of the Russian Federation (GARF), f. 9606, op. 2, d. 170. 84 Valentine Lomellini, “Reassessing the Communist Utopia? Euro communist intellectuals at the mirror of the ‘developed socialism’ ” in C. Palasan, C. Vasile (eds.), History of Communism in Europe, v. 2 (Bucharest: Zeta Books, 2011), 33, fn. 12.

The socialist scramble for Africa, 1960–1970  51

Selected bibliography Communist and communist-sponsored world organizations Brzezynski, Zbigniew, The Soviet Bloc: Unity and Conflict, 1st ed. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1960), followed by the second edition in 1967. de Haan, Francisca, “Continuing Cold War Paradigms in Western Historiography of Transnational Women’s Organizations: the case of the Women’s International Democratic Federation (WIDF)” in Women’s History Review, 19, 4 (September 2010). Hershberg, James, et al. (eds.), The INTERKIT Story: A Window into the Final Decades of the Sino-Soviet Relationship, CWIHP Working Paper No. 63 (2011).

Soviet, East European, and Chinese relations with Africa Brzezynski, Zbigniew (ed.), Africa and the Communist World (Stanford: Hoover Institution Press, 1963). Friedman, Jeremy, Shadow Cold War: The Sino-Soviet Competition for the Third World (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2015). Hong, Young-Sun, Cold War Germany, the Third World, and the Global Humanitarian Regime (New York: Cambridge, 2015). Iandolo, Alessandro, “The Rise and Fall of the Soviet Model of Development in West Africa, 1957–1964” in Cold War History, 12, 4 (2012), 683–704. Katsafikas, Constantin, “The Soviet-South Encounter:Tensions in the Friendship with AfroAsian Partners, 1945–1965” in P. Babiracki and K. Zimmer (eds.), Cold War Crossings: International Travel and Exchange across the Soviet Bloc, 1940s–1960s (College Station, TX: Texas A&M Press), 134–165. Mazov, Sergey, A Distant Front in the Cold War:The USSR in West Africa and the Congo, 1956– 1964 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2010). Muehlenbeck, Philip, Czechoslovakia in Africa, 1945–1968 (New York: Palgrave, 2016). Shubin, Vladimir, The Hot “Cold War”: The USSR in Southern Africa (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008), 7. Storkmann, Klaus, Geheime Solidarität: Militärbeziehungen und Militärhilfen der DDR in die “Dritte Welt” (Berlin: Ch. Links Verlag, 2012). Telepneva, Natalia, “Our Sacred Duty: The Soviet Union, the Liberation Movements in the Portuguese Colonies, and the Cold War, 1961–1975” (Ph.D. Dissertation, London School of Economics, 2014).

3 “WE SHALL CREATE A NEW WORLD, A NEW MAN, A NEW SOCIETY” Globalized horizons among Bengali Naxalites Milinda Banerjee

Introduction This essay focuses on specific aspects of globally oriented thinking among Naxalite political activists in the Indian state of West Bengal in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Under British rule, at least until the 1910s, Bengal was the political and cultural epicentre of British imperial power in India: its capital, Calcutta, was also the capital of British India until 1911. Western-educated Bengalis were at the forefront of social reform and anti-colonial nationalism in India, while there were also rich autonomous strands of peasant insurgency and “lower caste” and Muslim politics that developed in this region. Following the demise of colonial rule and the simultaneous Partition of India in 1947, the Hindu-majority western portion of Bengal was reshaped into the postcolonial Indian state of West Bengal (while Muslim-majority eastern Bengal became part of Pakistan, and later formed the independent nationstate of Bangladesh). The deeply stratified rural society of West Bengal, in combination with a long regional tradition of peasant insurgency and the presence of a modernist and radicalized intelligentsia, offered a fertile cultural ecology for the birth of ultra-left Maoism-inspired Naxalite politics in West Bengal. The Naxalite rebellion derives its name from Naxalbari in sub-Himalayan West Bengal, the site of a peasant uprising in 1967, conventionally regarded as a foundational event in the emergence of ultra-left politics in South Asia. The heritage of the Naxalites is still visible in the powerful Maoist politics that affects large parts of India and Nepal until today.This chapter gives special attention to the militant circles organized under the leadership of Charu Mazumdar (1918–1972). Mazumdar was the principal leader of the Communist Party of India (Marxist-Leninist) or CPI (M-L), whose establishment was formally announced in a public meeting in Calcutta in 1969; the party was the chief mouthpiece of Naxalite politics in the late 1960s and early 1970s. There is a rich spectrum of scholarship on the Naxalites, including, most notably, Sumanta Banerjee’s monograph on the subject.1 Banerjee’s volume, as well as other

Globalized horizons among Bengali Naxalites  53

works, such as by Edward Duyker, Rabindra Ray, and Jairus Banaji, have shown how the force of Naxalite politics stemmed from the conjunctures of global geopolitics – including the ideological and political splits between the Soviet Union and China, divisions within the Indian left, and alarm among radicalized pro-Mao/ China sections of the Indian left about American/Western as well as Soviet imperialism – and of local political imperatives. The latter stemmed from an increasing leftist disenchantment with the postcolonial Indian state and growing anger against capitalist and landlordist exploitation of the poor, and especially of the (frequently, lower caste and “tribal”) peasantry. In social terms, these works have underlined the solidarities forged between left-radical intellectuals (especially, but not exclusively, in West Bengal) and peasant rebels from the mid-1960s.They also show the manner in which these (admittedly, sometimes asymmetrical) “alliances” enabled the emergence of a broad-based Naxalite movement in India (with a powerful and originary epicentre in West Bengal), one that could only be crushed through brutal state repression across the 1970s. The foundational political importance of the Naxalite revolt has long been recognized in giving rise to the present “Maoist” insurgency in India.2 Recent scholarship has highlighted the scope as well as the limits of female agency in the Naxalite movement.3 Significant attention has been given to the discursive underpinnings of the Naxalite movement, such as the concept of the “new man”4 and on Naxalite ideologies of annihilation and iconoclasm, arguing about the connections between such discursive postures and the eventual emergence of postcolonial worldviews in India and beyond.5 Given such a rich canvas of scholarship on the Naxalite movement, it may well be asked as to whether anything worthwhile about the movement remains to be said. Comprehensive political narratives about the movement can be found elsewhere, and do not constitute my central concern. Nor does this essay aim to compare the Naxalites with similarly placed movements in other parts of the world in the sixties decade. Such a project would be fraught with difficulties, not the least of which is the devising of a comparativist methodology that can retain sensitivity for local differences (so essential for understanding a project like that of the Naxalites), rather than subsuming them into teleological stories of anti-capitalist struggle. My methodological ambitions, and the stories I want to tell, are rather different. At an empirical level, this essay bases itself on the examination of Naxalite propaganda literature (archived by the Intelligence Branch records of the West Bengal Police), and combines this with the study of published Naxalite documents. I seek to relate textual production carried on in small towns and villages of West Bengal, at the intersections of middle-class activism and small and landless peasant militancy, with the discourses emanating from the party leadership that, in West Bengal, came almost entirely from the Western-educated bhadralok (Hindu high-caste) gentry. I am interested, above all, in showing how and why it became plausible for many Bengalis to figure their political activism in terms of changing “the world”, and not in terms of transforming their localities or nation alone. I do not think that this question has ever been posed so starkly about the Naxalite movement before. Yet, this globality of horizon-making was, I would argue, one

54  Milinda Banerjee

of the greatest achievements of Naxalite politics with respect to West Bengal, and indeed India, in the 1960s. Put simply, this essay focuses on one important strand of the Naxalite insurgency: the question of the global. While previous scholars have noted that the Naxalites placed their politics within capacious geographies (relating themselves, in positive or negative ways, to other societies and political movements in their contemporaneous world), they have neglected to adequately theorize what precisely impelled this globalization of political horizons, beyond the obvious specificities of leftist transnationalism. To address this issue, I situate my work in the emergent domain of global intellectual history. I offer a broader argument about how to conceptualize the “global” without either resorting to homogenized mono-scalar descriptions (that further run the risk of re-inscribing Europe-centric assumptions),6 or of producing deceptively provincialized and bordered notions of the “local”. The Naxalites challenge us to think about the multi-sited intellectual genealogies of global moments, and, here, of the global sixties. While Maoist China provided the most appealing and frequently cited icon for Bengali Naxalites, the latter visualized themselves as part of a broader global trajectory of fighting against imperial power, including against American neo-­ colonialism as well as Soviet “social imperialism”. Transnational references and solidarities, including notably with Vietnam, resonated with regional needs for transforming local power structures, especially in agrarian society. Local affective horizons were expressed through a global dream of creating a new world, a new man, and a new society (in Bengali, natun duniya, natun manush, natun samaj). My hypothesis is that new horizons of globalized selfhood were constructed through such practices; in this sense “modernity” cannot be understood as having spread in a unilinear manner from Europe to the extra-European world, but as having been, in diverse shapes and forms, the product of truly “global” moments. In line with recent academic interventions that have re-drawn and globalized the spatial contours of foundational modern revolutionary moments,7 my case study of West Bengal helps to explain the globality of the late sixties revolutionary time. Rather than resorting to comparativist frames, I find it more fruitful to take a cue from Sanjay Subrahmanyam, whose advocacy for “connected history” rests on the argument that we transcend “boxes”, “not by comparison alone but by seeking out the at times fragile threads that connected the globe”.8 By focusing on a (geographically) limited space, and interrogating the nevertheless (intellectually) expansive globally oriented and connected worlds produced from such a space, I use the Naxalite case study to argue for re-centring the local at the heart of global history. In the process, I also shed light on political, economic, and discursive forces that shaped Naxalite thought. In particular, I concentrate on globalized definitions of the political among Naxalites, on their specific notions of violence (against human beings as well as artworks), and on their tropes of heroism, leadership, and martyrdom. In so doing, this chapter uses the Naxalites to reveal how intellectual practices made local conceptual labour simultaneously (and remarkably) global in scope. Such a global history drawn from the perspective of

Globalized horizons among Bengali Naxalites  55

the local – and even the subaltern – resonates with what Nile Green has recently underlined, about the need “to draw together two scales of analysis by recognizing that global history is at the same time microhistory.”9

Bengali Naxalites in global intellectual history What makes a particular intellectual discourse “global”? In a recent essay, Duncan Bell has sought to specify the global, as distinguished from “transnational, translocal, or regional”, by suggesting that the label “is best reserved for a class of worldmaking practices that articulate forms of universality.”10 Bengali Naxalite discourses fit this model: “the world” was frequently invoked here as a category of witness, and, even more importantly, of political and intellectual operation (through forging of solidarities). We can find in the passage quoted below an important statement, which linked local, national, and global politics, and further outlined the trope of temporal acceleration that, as Reinhart Koselleck,11 among others, has shown, was constitutive to modernist self-imagining. The lines are taken from an essay written by Charu Mazumdar and published in 1970 in the official Naxalite journal, Liberation: The battle of annihilation, started by our Party and led by the poor and landless peasants, must be carried forward for the establishment of Red political power in various areas, and must spread to every state and throughout India. The poor and landless peasants will become self-reliant and politically conscious, and their creative power will develop through waging the guerrilla warfare. What seems impossible today will become possible tomorrow, and a new man, who fears neither the most arduous hardship nor death, will be born in the course of this struggle. Faced with such men, imperialism, socialimperialism and all their lackeys are certain to flinch and flee in dread like beaten curs. The people of the world will then chase them, frightened rats scurrying along the street, and beat them to death; the imperialist system will be buried and a new world without exploitation will arise.12 It is important to observe here both the thick localization (“poor and landless peasants”, “various areas”, “every state”, “India”) as well as the ecumenism of the spatial conceptualization (“people of the world”). Equally significant is the production of the interlinked notions of the “new man” and the “new world”. Indeed, any analysis of Naxalite political imagination remains theoretically inadequate if it fails to insist on this global orientation of its imaginative scale: Naxalite anthropology and Naxalite globality were two sides of the same coin. What motivates the global intellectual orientation among the Naxalites? For Andrew Sartori, the global spread of the capitalist mode of production offers an explanatory frame.13 In a ground-breaking study, he has shown how Muslim peasants in late colonial Bengal could, due to their location within a commercializing agrarian economy, evolve notions about the property-constituting nature of labour

56  Milinda Banerjee

that resembled Lockean and Marxian discourses; what made possible this global parallelism was not a simple diffusion of ideas (the peasants had never read Locke or Marx), but the political-economic tectonic shift configured by global capitalism.14 For Samuel Moyn, contingent political choices equally need to be reckoned with; if there are macro-factors (including economic ones) that render plausible a globalization of conceptual work, it is still specific choices that determine the trajectory of which concepts are globalized, and which not.15 Naxalite imagination shows a way of thinking through these alternatives. Naxalite revolutionary critique linked problems of global capitalism and imperial (especially neo-colonial) power structures with the maladies created by localized forms of exploitative hierarchy, such as by big landholders (in Bengali, jotedars). Naxalites challenged forms of gradualist developmentalism that were advocated by the Indian government as well as by the Soviet-leaning Indian left (especially the Communist Party of India), and that drew on (if only in dialectical reaction to) British colonial and American Cold War era narratives of modernization and/or contemporaneous Soviet ones.16 The movement was born in the mid–late 1960s, in the wake of worsening Sino-Soviet relations, the identification of the Communist Party of India with the Soviet camp, and growing radicalization among dissident Communists who denounced the Indian state and the orthodox left, ideologically aligned themselves with China, and drew on the intensifying militancy of agrarian society. In the process, Naxalites produced a precocious critique of the transnational underpinnings of neo-colonialism, relating the ways in which apparently hostile powers or even divergent modes of production were secretly complicit in maintaining the basic framework of imperial rule. An early statement of this position can be found in a 1968 document, even before the CPI (M-L) had been officially founded: India, which was a colony of Britain a little over twenty years ago, has now become a neo-colony of several imperialist powers, chief among which are the U.S.A. and the Soviet Union. The U.S. imperialists, the most aggressive enemies of all mankind, are also the worst enemies of the Indian people. Their neo-colonial grip over India is now complete. The Soviet renegade ruling clique, which has set up again a bourgeois dictatorship in the first socialist state of the world, is actively collaborating with U.S. imperialism and has turned India into a neo-colony of both the U.S.A. and the Soviet Union. . . . In this era when the capitalist-imperialist system is heading towards its final collapse, the contradictions in semi-colonial, semifeudal India between the imperialist, neo-colonial powers and our people, between the feudal classes and the peasantry, between comprador-bureaucrat capital and the working class have grown sharper than ever.17 While also directed against local forms of dominance that often predated capitalism (and were labelled by the Naxalites as “feudal”), Naxalite politics was undoubtedly a product of international political-economic links that made it plausible for many rebels to think – in a Marxist mode – that global economic-imperial asymmetries

Globalized horizons among Bengali Naxalites  57

could only be dismantled through multi-pronged struggles that themselves needed to interconnect with one another on an equally global scale. Further, Naxalites self-consciously valorized the “political” as a category to disrupt gradualist narratives of economic emancipation. They thereby rendered urgent the question of revolutionary agency and localized choice. The “global” was thus not only a teleological product of capitalism and related Cold War policies, of exclusively economic entanglements, but it was rather a contingent and fragile repertoire, fashioned by specific on-the-ground decisions made by party activists and rebels to violently reclaim land, freedom, and political agency for the agrarian poor, to cancel peasant debts, to set up alternative village administrations, and to defeat local class enemies and the Indian state, with the aim of linking the demands of the rural poor in India with similar struggles outside the country. This subaltern globality was moreover always vulnerable to falling apart before state repression and ideological dissension. I quote here from a 1969 article by Mazumdar, which brings out the Naxalite privileging of the domain of the political over that of the (mere) economic:18 Some of the revisionist ideas that still persist inside our Party and against which we are struggling at present are mentioned here. First, economism. At present, economism expresses itself in the line of thinking, according to which the workers and the poor and landless peasants will be unable to accept revolutionary politics unless they are led into open struggles on economic demands. This line of thinking weakens all our work like propagating revolutionary politics – the politics of seizure of power – and building revolutionary base areas in the countryside. Such a line of thinking makes the Party members concentrate their attention and work on organizing struggles for economic demands, and politics loses its place of prominence. . . . We do not say that we shall never wage struggles for economic demands. What we say is that political propaganda and building Party organizations are the foremost and main tasks before us.19 What the Naxalite example shows is an intrinsic ambiguity: the “economic” and the “political”, as Naxalite categories, existed in tension while dialogically producing a global orientation. This globalization was given historical-empirical density in Naxalite discourses through the naming of those political actors outside India with whom the Naxalites aligned themselves. Vietnam offered a heroic exemplar, as visible in a condolence message sent by the Central Organizing Committee of the CPI (M-L) to the Embassy of the Democratic Republic of Vietnam in 1969, following the death of President Ho Chi Minh: Vietnam today is the spearhead of the world-wide struggle against U.S. imperialist aggression and for national liberation and it was President Ho Chi Minh who made important contributions to people’s war and created the present fighting Vietnam. . . . His clarion call to persist in the resistance war

58  Milinda Banerjee

until the last U.S. aggressor is driven out of Vietnam . . . will remain a guiding light for all the revolutionaries. . . . We, the Indian revolutionaries, take this opportunity to express our full support to our heroic Vietnamese brothers in their struggle against U.S. imperialist aggression and for national salvation. India has today embarked on the path of armed revolution. We know we can help our heroic Vietnamese brothers best and most effectively only here in India by developing and stepping up the revolutionary armed struggle of the Indian people against our common enemy.20 Vietnam offered impetus to the Naxalite anthropology of the new man, to the extent that Naxalites who were killed by the Indian state were linked with the Vietnamese victims. For example, after the Naxalite leader Saroj Dutta was killed in 1971, Liberation noted: “The blood of the martyrs is fertilizing the seeds of new men in this country. As in South Vietnam and elsewhere, the killing and persecution of revolutionaries and other people shall bring the doom of the reactionaries and their masters nearer.”21 Naxalites also expressed solidarity with leftist militants in other parts of SouthEast Asia (including Laos, Cambodia, Malaya, Indonesia, Thailand, and Burma), in Africa, in Latin America, and in Europe, especially when the latter resisted American “imperialism” and/or aligned with China against the Soviet Union; hence, for example, they supported the Albanian government of Enver Hoxha. Given their hostility to the Soviets, the Naxalites sympathized with the “revolutionary” desire for freedom among the people of Czechoslovakia, in the aftermath of the Sovietled invasion of 1968. They championed the Palestinian cause as well. The Naxalites saw hope in the African-American movement for civil rights in the United States, both because of its intrinsic emancipatory potential, as well as because they thought it would weaken the capitalist superpower. They identified in the intersections of the civil rights movement and the protests against the Vietnam War the possibility of a revolution that cut across race divides.22 Naxalite political imagination was “global” in its constitution, in the way in which it conceptualized “the world” as simultaneously an abstract and a concrete field of politics, and in the manner in which it operated through dense geographies of political citation, linking varied insurgencies into a connected landscape. If its globality cannot be explained except by taking into account the connections created by global capitalism (or, in Naxalite thinking, capitalist-imperialist exploitation), then the particular form that this globality assumed can nevertheless only be explained through the contingency of its politics, through the manner in which Naxalites identified specific allies and antagonists, friends and enemies.23 Naxalite politics was imbued with an almost febrile energy that derived from the powerful political distinctions it made, at local as well as transnational levels. The ubiquitous references to Mao and to China, the most important transborder source of Naxalite inspiration, must be understood in this context (as discussed below). In a significant intervention that justifies placing modern Indian thought within frames of global intellectual history, Shruti Kapila writes: “Rather than derivation,

Globalized horizons among Bengali Naxalites  59

influence, or exchange, which are dominant frames of reference for global intellectual history, India is instructive of the radical transformation of global ideas, whether of liberty, equality, and fraternity or what constitutes the political.”24 In the rest of this chapter, I shall focus on this transformative ambition of Naxalite conceptual militancy.

Spectacular violence, Naxalite aesthetics, and the new man From the late 1960s, one of the distinguishing traits of the Naxalite movement, and what precipitated severe differences between the Naxalites and the “mainstream” left, that is, the Communist Party of India and the Communist Party of India (Marxist), was an ideology of spectacular violence. The Naxalites referred to this as khatam (in Bengali) or annihilation (in English): it was mainly directed against rural elites, especially the jotedars and the moneylenders, as well as against the most visible and quotidian faces of state power, the policemen. Many Naxalites, especially those led by Charu Mazumdar, felt that violence empowered peasants and workers in a manner that non-bloody struggle could never achieve. I would argue that khatam was also what distinguished, in Naxalite eyes, merely economic struggle from a properly political-economic one. While researching in the Intelligence Branch archives of the West Bengal police, I discovered how Naxalite pamphlets, often issued by local branches of the CPI (M-L), gave minute descriptions of khatam campaigns, focusing especially on physical violence, and the affective production of hatred (in Bengali, ghrina) towards class enemies (shreni-shatru). Naxalites gave particular emphasis to beheading the victim. Occasionally the heads were displayed in public places; sometimes the blood was used to write Naxalite slogans. The production of fear in class-enemies was an important stated objective.25 Such incidents were not limited to Bengal. Charu Mazumdar, in an article published in 1970, described how “peasant guerrillas” in Srikakulam in Andhra Pradesh, while countering police violence, “slaughtered (hatya) a class-enemy and hung his head on a bamboo plant.” This aimed to show that: By burning in the fire of armed guerrilla war, the new man (natun manush) has been created, the man who does not fear death, who is not reluctant to sacrifice himself (atmabalidan), who is ready to do any difficult task through compassion for the people. This man who has conquered death (mrityunjayi) cannot be crushed. All reactionary forces fail in front of that man. That man has been created today in Srikakulam, the new man of the new age, the man of the independent India of the future, the man who has dignity (maryadasampanna) in a liberated world.26 The new man, or rather, new human being (with an admittedly masculine inflection), was simultaneously a local, a national, and a global being, produced through the dyad of sacrifice and slaughter (the enemy was the one to be slaughtered without being sacrificed; the rebel was the one who was sacrificed rather than killed),27

60  Milinda Banerjee

and a key agent of renewing the world. It was widely suggested in Naxalite circles that reddening one’s hand in the blood of a class enemy was an absolute prerequisite for being a Communist.28 In contrast, the victims of Naxalite annihilation were given a negative political-theological valence and compared to the demons and vampires of South Asian mythology (raktachosha, shaitan, narapishacha, nararakshasa).29 Rabindra Ray finds resonances of South Asian rituals of animal sacrifice in these techniques.30 While this may be the case, I would also emphasize the global orientation of khatam: the most important (stated) inspiration for this manifestation of revolutionary violence was, after all, not precolonial India, but Maoist China. A statement issued by the Purulia Zilla Committee of the CPI (M-L) in 1970, celebrating the khatam of two rural rich men, is typical: Friends, we have to cut the heads (mundu) of the zamindars. With axes in our hands, we have to take what is ours. There is no more time. We have seized this road. In exchange of much blood, in exchange of much more blood, we shall go forward on this road. We have to give blood. We have to give much blood. We have to sacrifice (tyaga) a lot. By giving this blood, the new man (natun manush) will be created. That man will not be afraid of annihilating (khatam) the enemy. He will be able to courageously annihilate the enemy. He will be able to free his own village. He will establish his own kingdom (raj). He will establish the power of poor and landless peasants. . . . Friends, this road has been shown by Mao Tse-tung, leader of the poor, by Mao Tsetung, liberator of the poor and landless peasants.This road has been shown by Naxalbari. This road has established red power in Srikakulam. Through this road, the valiant peasant of Midnapore has slaughtered (nidhan) the enemy there. This road has been shown by our national leader (jatiya neta) Comrade Charu Mazumdar. We are going forward on this road. Our red party is going forward on this road. We shall move on this road to the very end. We shall create a new world, a new man, and new societies (natun duniya, natun manush, natun natun samaj).31 There is a formulaic consistency and incantatory authority in many of these propaganda texts that were widely distributed in Naxalite militant circles across the cities, small towns, and villages of West Bengal. As the reference to Mao shows, the (spatially) local act of killing acquired a (conceptually) global dimension as Mao became present in the sacrifice, and the act of “freeing” a specific village from its landed elites became also the act of creating a natun duniya or new world. This was an act of constituting sovereignty, whereby the natun manush or new man set himself (more rarely, herself)32 as a sovereign being, possessor of his own raj, builder of a new society, endowed with the sovereign power to kill the class enemy (to draw on Giorgio Agamben,33 the sovereign is he who has the authority to kill). It was a foundational act that was simultaneously local and global. Of course this was a selective globality: not all exemplars could be equally deployed. In an essay published in 1969, while answering charges levelled against his

Globalized horizons among Bengali Naxalites  61

form of militancy by his ally turned critic, the trade union leader Parimal Dasgupta, Charu Mazumdar distinguished Naxalite “guerrilla warfare” from that “advocated by Che Guevara – the guerrilla war which is waged by the petty bourgeois intelligentsia without the peasant masses”, and “relying on arms and weapons” rather than on the strength of peasant action itself.34 Instead, the “correct” model for agrarian militancy was that supposedly followed by Mao while seizing revolutionary power through peasant action in China. This “Maoist” model was supposed to generate the Naxalite new man. As such invocations show, Chinese discourses that projected Mao in super-human and quasi-sacred terms and emphasized the building of a revolutionary new man35 resonated with Naxalite imperatives. But this resonance could occur only because of the specific local political demands within the Indian context, including the desire to cut through caste and sectarian divides by deploying the twin strategy of annihilation and “new man” anthropology: in short, through the dual action of the sovereign, in killing and in founding the new society. The following excerpt, from a CPI (M-L) document of 1970, makes this clear: Though we are a small Party now, we can fulfil this sacred task if we raise our study and application of Chairman Mao’s Thought . . ., entrench ourselves deeply among landless and poor peasants and integrate ourselves with them, promote the landless and poor peasant cadres to higher responsibility, study and concretely apply the correct thesis of Vice-Chairman Lin Piao’s “Guerrilla warfare is the only way to mobilize and apply the whole strength of the people against the enemy”, . . . and realize that the class struggle, i.e., this battle of annihilation, can solve all the problems facing us and lead the struggle to a higher plane, . . . create conditions for the emergence of a new type of man, the man of the Mao Tsetung era who fears neither hardship nor death, develop the People’s Army and can thus ensure the formation of a permanent base area. Thus this battle of annihilation liberates the people not only from the oppression of the landlord class and its state but also . . . removes from the minds of the people poisonous weeds of self-interest, clan interest, localism, casteism, religious superstitions, etc.36 The citation of Mao was a globalizing move, aimed, as the above passage indicates, at erasing “localism” and creating an epistemic aperture towards translocal horizons of freedom. Physical proximity to Mao did not matter as much. Though Naxalite activists occasionally managed to go to China and meet the Communist leadership there (in 1967 and 1970), they seem not to have received much direct encouragement from the latter, and were even confronted with subtle Chinese criticisms of their policies.37 We need more complex frameworks than that of transnational political alliance-building, to appreciate the valence of Mao in West Bengal. One way to do this is to place the Naxalites within a longer time frame. As recent scholarship has made clear, at least from the nineteenth century, Westerneducated Indians had been using “foreign” exemplars to justify various demands for political and social justice, and to outline the kind of future polity that they

62  Milinda Banerjee

desired. For example, British liberalism and constitutional governance (in the metropole), German economic and cultural nationalism, and Soviet socialist statebuilding, all found congenial reception as normative models in Indian minds. Such hybridized transnational references were initially deployed to challenge the British colonial state,38 but, as my case study shows, remained equally significant in the postcolonial period, as Indian actors denounced the Indian state as a tool of ­(American or Soviet) neo-colonial dominance by counter-posing exemplars from China,Vietnam, and the like.39 A transnational orientation of intellection was arguably even more important than any physical density of contact. Naxalites felt a sense of shared subalternity with these countries in terms of their placement within a globally connected imperial planetary order; it was this sensibility that, in a sense, determined their invocations. There are resemblances here with an earlier late nineteenth-and early twentieth-century phase of Bengali identification with Germany that Sartori explains through the lens of “inevitable convergence and familiar recognition”, which “was overdetermined before substantial contact had really occurred.”40 A transnational horizon of militant thought was also significant in peasant activism from much before the 1960s, as visible, for example, in invocations of the German Kaiser in the 1910s by anti-British “tribal” groups in eastern India,41 and in the political-theological, and even messianic, significance of the Ottoman Empire as the Caliphate in popular Muslim worlds and anti-colonial politics across South Asia in the same period.42 An analogous intertwining of localization and transnational reference is visible in Naxalite attitudes towards visual signifiers of authority. Naxalites destroyed statues and photographs of Indian reformist and nationalist heroes like Vidyasagar, Mahatma Gandhi, Subhas Chandra Bose, and Jawaharlal Nehru in street corners, parks, squares, railway stations, and schools, since they identified these individuals with repressive bourgeois and imperial ideologies deployed by the Indian ruling classes to justify their power.43 Annihilation of icons was only the other facet of the annihilation of class enemies. Thus, in 1973, after Naxalites damaged a statue of Subhas Chandra Bose in Calcutta, they put up posters stating the khatam of Bose, denouncing him as the lackey (chela) of Hitler and Tojo.They announced that death was to be meted out to those who opposed revolution, and hence statues of the enemies of the revolution were to be destroyed.44 A new visual and aural order was introduced instead. Naxalites often carried portraits of Mao and shouted acclamations to Mao and Charu Mazumdar in street processions and meetings; they also sometimes put Mao’s images in public sites, thereby welcoming in a tangible glimpse of China into quotidian Indian spaces.45

Martyrdom, heroic leadership, and acclamation Apart from the ideology of khatam, another trait that distinguished the Naxalites from the CPI and the CPI(M) was their emphasis on heroic leadership. The latter two parties of course venerated a pantheon of heroes, from Marx and Engels to Lenin and Stalin. However, the Naxalite emphasis on Mao and Charu Mazumdar was of a

Globalized horizons among Bengali Naxalites  63

much more intense order. In this section, I argue that it is difficult to understand the globality of Naxalite politics without taking into account the role played there by discourses of sacrificial death/martyrdom and quasi-messianic leadership. Without minimizing other economic, political, and cultural aspects of Naxalite insurgency, I nevertheless stress that what ultimately structured the globalized Naxalite man, was the ability to put life itself at stake in the cause of building a new world: one’s own life as well as that of the alleged class enemy. It was the dyad of sacrifice and redemption that structured Naxalite globality: the ordinary Naxalite rebel as well as the leader Charu Mazumdar were both seen as contributing to the production of the new man and the new world through their ability to sacrifice their entire being for the cause of this new world. As I show below, this existential sacrifice rendered the Naxalite leadership, and specifically Charu Mazumdar, “immortal”, gave legitimacy to the movement, and connected the Naxalite leader to a fantasized icon of Mao. Simultaneously, the sheer brutality and almost unrelenting cruelty of Naxalite political practices stemmed from the same globality of horizon: in producing the new world, there was an ever-present imperative to torture and kill. Indeed, the cost of the new world was the degradation and dehumanization of the enemy. In the early 1970s, as the Indian state brought down its full force of repression against the Naxalites, and revolutionary emancipation seemed ever more distant, many Naxalites began to grow disenchanted with Charu’s leadership. Charu was sometimes accused of being a Trotskyite left-deviationist; he was castigated for relying on terror and authoritarianism rather than on patient organizational work among the broader populace.46 However, as my archival research revealed, Naxalite circles in the capital, in small towns and in villages of West Bengal, often accentuated their rhetoric about the immediacy of revolution during this phase.47 In a quasi-millenarian apocalyptic tone, the 1970s were repeatedly hailed as the era of the final revolution. Local and district committees began to emphasize khatam and martyrdom even more sharply and ecstatically than before. After Charu died in police custody in 1972, he was ever more closely associated with Mao. The recurring refrain in these circles was that the path shown by both Mao and Charu was the true path, and could not be deviated from. Further, the shedding of blood was an absolute necessity to avenge the death of Naxalite martyrs, and especially Charu’s own death. Revolution was now conceived almost as an exchange of blood: the blood of the class enemy in return for the blood of the martyr. Revolution became the payment of a blood debt, which in turn, it was believed, would pave the way for the emergence of the new man. In a sense, blood offered one ultimate seal of globality on Naxalite thinking in this phase, for blood guaranteed the very possibility of the new world. A pamphlet issued by the Banga-Bihar Anchalik Committee of the CPI (M-L) in 1974 offers a good example. It began with a description of a committee meeting, which commenced with a remembrance of martyrs (shahid smaran), since: [To] remember martyrs is to avenge (badla newa) the martyrs, to become martyrs, because martyrs are the life of the party. From martyrs are born the

64  Milinda Banerjee

new man (natun manush), the man who does not fear death, the man who destroys all imperialist forms of rule, and establishes the kingdom of the poor (sarvaharar raj). . . . Therefore we have to give blood in our region. . . . The comrades decided that they would become martyrs the moment the meeting ended. . . . Either we shall give blood or we shall take blood. We shall kill or be killed. . . .There is no more sacred (pavitra) task than accepting death in the interest of the people.48 The pamphlet then described in detail the killing of three policemen in Purulia: One of the dog’s offspring (kuttar bachchara) was eating in one place, and two of them were eating in another place. . . . The commander, with tremendous class hatred, struck one of the dogs a blow with his axe, and the other comrade struck the other two dogs on their heads with a broken axe. As soon as they were struck, the dogs fell on the ground. Then the other two comrades, with tremendous class hatred, went on repeatedly hitting two of the dogs with axe and rod. . . . One of the comrades hit a police dog on his face with the butt of his rifle and completely flattened his face.49 The bodies and faces of the other, i.e. of the policemen as the representative of the sovereign state, were here reduced to a raw bestiality, creating a transformative exchange between the sovereign and the animal, relegating sovereignty to its bestial residue.50 I would argue that the place of this destroyed sovereign was occupied by the invocation of Mao and Charu. It is not at all surprising that the pamphlet, like many others of its genre in this period, ended with acclamations: “Long Live Revered Leader (shraddheya neta) Comrade Charu Mazumdar. Long Live Chairman Mao. Long Live CPI (M-L). The revered leader is alive, will forever remain alive, in the CPI (M-L) created by his own hands, and among the people.”51 Revolutionary pamphlets of this type almost always concluded with incantatory acclamations of the “revered leader”. As a pamphlet issued in 1973 by the Purbasthali-Nabadwip-Kalna-Manteshwar Elaka Committee and the Burdwan Anchalik Sangathanik Committee noted: Today, it is certain that the great prediction of our revered leader Comrade Charu Mazumdar is becoming successful – “By 1975, crores and crores of the Indian people will create the epic of liberation”. . . . We shall definitely be victorious since we have the infallible (nirbhul) political line of the revered leader, because we have the party created by his own hands, the party CPI (M-L) created by hundreds of martyrs. . . . Red salute to the apple of our eye, the immortal (amar) martyr, our revered and dear leader, Comrade Charu Mazumdar.52 In a very different context, Ernst Kantorowicz has observed how belief in the Christ-like monarch’s mystical and immortal body helped, in late medieval and

Globalized horizons among Bengali Naxalites  65

early modern Europe, to generate the notion of an undying sovereign state that partook, in some ways, of a sacralised Church-like quality.53 Taking a cue from Kantorowicz, as well as from Alexei Yurchak’s understanding of the Leninist partysovereign,54 I would argue that Mao and Charu (especially Charu, after his death) imparted a quality of immortality to the CPI (M-L). As Charu lived on in the CPI (M-L), so did his party continue to bear his authority, and this authority was in turn also passed on to the militant people as a whole. An analysis of pamphlets, such as the ones quoted above, makes this structure of sovereignty very clear. It is from such a political-theological vantage point that we can also better appreciate the acclamations of long life (in Bengali, zindabad) with which Mao and Charu (even, and especially, the dead Charu) were hailed. In fact, it could be argued that Naxalite sovereignty was constituted, in part, through the very format of acclamation.55 This model of acclamatory sovereignty had authoritarian implications, no doubt, in its insistence on a singular party line. The unity of the leadership, the unity of the party, and the unity of the rebellious masses were supposed to mirror and reinforce one another. But this model also had democratic significance, since – at least after Charu’s death – it enabled every Naxalite rebel to see themselves as bearers of the authority of Charu. Shahid Amin’s classic study on anti-colonial Indian politics in the late 1910s and early 1920s demonstrates the manner in which peasant rebels created the possibility of democratic agency by remaking the image of Mahatma Gandhi in their own fashion, and by acclaiming this constructed icon.56 What was very specific to the Naxalites, and what intensely alarmed the Indian ruling classes, however, was their invocation of a non-Indian leader, Mao. The very act of acclaiming Mao demonstrates the stark globality of the Naxalite imaginary: they did not merely seek to liberate India, but the whole world. The dyad of Mao and Charu shows the simultaneous globality and localization of the Naxalite structure of countersovereignty, even as the vulnerable bodies of ordinary rebels displayed the hoped for production of a new global order from the affective geographies of localized struggles, incarcerations, mortalities, and remembrances within West Bengal. The Naxalite global was forged, at least in part, from an acute self-consciousness about heroic martyrdom and sacrificial activism. The new world, it was thought, would be born through the relentless and remorseless game of sacrifice, of which Charu Mazumdar – under the banner of Mao – became for many Bengali Naxalites the ultimate signifier.

Conclusion By the mid-1970s, due to a combination of factors – including state violence, failures in mass mobilization, and internal dissension – the Naxalite movement had weakened considerably in West Bengal. But its significance endured. Whether via its focus on martyrdom, on sacrificial death and slaughter, or its quasi-messianic belief in creating a new man, a new leadership, and a new society, the movement influenced “tribal populations”,57 as well as, in the long run, contributed to the

66  Milinda Banerjee

emergence of the Maoist politics that affects large parts of India and Nepal today.58 What I have emphasized in this essay, however, is the implications that the Naxalite rebellion had in globalizing political imaginaries in West Bengal. Indeed, this analysis of the Naxalites demonstrates how the global is produced in intellectual terms. The Naxalite case cuts through questions of plurality and connectedness of scale, when thinking about the globality of intellectual history, or, for the purposes of this ­volume, the globality of the sixties moment. It is thus, to some extent, irrelevant that the Naxalites did not receive substantial material help from Mao or China, and were even criticized by the latter. The absence of transnational material contact does not diminish the conceptual transborderness of Naxalite militancy. Further, what the Naxalite example shows is not so much the presence of a multiplicity of scales and connections between them (the focus of Sanjay Subrahmanyam’s critique of global intellectual history, cited at the start of this essay),59 but a fascinating simultaneity of scale. A local act – such as a slaughter of class enemies, the freeing of a village from its landlords, or the acclamation of a leader – was, in its intrinsic constitution, both local and global at the same time. To explain this bivalence has been this chapter’s aim. The planetary dissemination of capitalism certainly explains in part the globality of Naxalite politics. Naxalites could not think about changing class relations in a particular locale of West Bengal, except by conceptualizing it as part of a spatially expansive world-transforming struggle against capitalism and imperialism everywhere. The act of emancipating a village was thus, constitutively, also an act of creating a new world: a manifesto and charter of global counter-sovereignty. But I do not think that it would be adequate to regard Naxalite politics as entirely conceptually overdetermined by capitalism. Naxalite globality stemmed from very precise, very fragile, political choices that differentiated between various local and translocal friends and enemies (valorizing Vietnam, and criticizing Che Guevara, to consider just one example). In analysing such choices, I have argued that it would be fruitful to seek for Naxalite globality by studying the ways in which the rebels constructed themselves as global beings, as new men who would build the new world through their passions, prejudices, and ruthlessness, through the militant politicization and globalization of their very quotidian, vulnerable, and brutalized existence. In Naxalite eyes, to be global – to be a new man, who was sovereign over the kingdom of the poor (sarvaharar raj) in the new world – could only come at the cost of sacrifice. This was a globality thus fashioned, in the ultimate instance, through the ransom of life. Naxalite rebels denuded “class enemies” of their life and their sovereignty, and, simultaneously, offered their own being as a sacrificial offering, a price, for the forging of the new world. The readiness to sacrifice and to annihilate, to die and to kill, to put life at stake – in the hope that others might thereby live a better life – enabled the global orientation of political horizons. Those interested in theorizing about global (intellectual) history – including the global history of the sixties – would benefit from paying serious attention to such economies of life and of death that, at different crucial historical moments, generate new expressions of the global as an existentially experienced category of being.

Globalized horizons among Bengali Naxalites  67

Notes   1 Sumanta Banerjee, In the Wake of Naxalbari: Four Decades of a Simmering Revolution (Calcutta: Sahitya Samsad, 2009).   2 See, for example: Amiya K. Samanta, Left Extremist Movement in West Bengal: An Experiment in Armed Agrarian Struggle (Calcutta: Firma KLM, 1984); Edward Duyker, Tribal Guerrillas,The Santals of West Bengal and the Naxalite Movement (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1987); Rabindra Ray, The Naxalites and their Ideology (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1992); Arun Prosad Mukherjee, Maoist ‘Spring Thunder’: The Naxalite Movement (1967–1972) (Calcutta: K. P. Bagchi and Co., 2007); Pradip Basu (ed.), Discourses on Naxalite Movement 1967–2009: Insights into Radical Left Politics (Calcutta: Setu Prakashani, 2010); Jairus Banaji, “The Ironies of Indian Maoism,” http://isj.org.uk/the-ironies-ofindian-maoism/, accessed February 14, 2016.  3 Mallarika Sinha Roy, Gender and Radical Politics in India: Magic Moments of Naxalbari (1967–1975) (Abingdon: Routledge, 2010); Srila Roy, Remembering Revolution: Gender, Violence, and Subjectivity in India’s Naxalbari Movement (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2012); Lipika Kamra, “Self-Making through Self-Writing: Non-Sovereign Agency in Women’s Memoirs from the Naxalite Movement,” https://samaj.revues.org/3608, accessed February 14, 2016.   4 Rajeshwari Dasgupta,“Towards the ‘New Man’: Revolutionary Youth and Rural Agency in the Naxalite Movement,” Economic and Political Weekly 41 (2006): 1920–27.   5 Sanjay Seth, “From Maoism to Postcolonialism? The Indian ‘Sixties’, and Beyond,” InterAsia Cultural Studies 7 (2006): 589–605; Sanjay Seth, “Smashing Statues, Dancing Sivas: Two Tales of Indian Icons,” http://press.anu.edu.au/wp-content/uploads/2011/02/4Seth-HRC11.pdf, accessed February 15, 2016.   6 Sanjay Subrahmanyam, “Global Intellectual History beyond Hegel and Marx,” History and Theory 54 (2015): 126–37.   7 See, for example: David Armitage and Sanjay Subrahmanyam, eds, The Age of Revolutions in Global Context, c. 1760–1840 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010); Suzanne Desan, Lynn Hunt, and William Max Nelson, eds, The French Revolution in Global Perspective (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2013).   8 Sanjay Subrahmanyam “Connected Histories: Notes towards a Reconfiguration of Early Modern Eurasia,” Modern Asian Studies 31 (1997), 761–62.   9 Nile Green, Terrains of Exchange: Religious Economies of Global Islam (London: Hurst and Co., 2015), 7. 10 Duncan Bell, “Making and Taking Worlds,” in Global Intellectual History, eds Samuel Moyn and Andrew Sartori (New York: Columbia University Press, 2013), 272. 11 Reinhart Koselleck, “Temporal Foreshortening and Acceleration: A Study on Secularization” in Religion and Politics: Cultural Perspectives, eds Bernhard Giesen and Daniel Suber (Leiden: Brill, 2005), 207–30. 12 Charu Mazumdar, “Make the 1970s the Decade of Liberation,” in The Historic Turning Point: A Liberation Anthology, ed. Suniti Kumar Ghosh, vol. 2 (Calcutta: S. K. Ghosh, 1993), 67. 13 Andrew Sartori, “Global Intellectual History and the History of Political Economy,” in Moyn and Sartori, Global Intellectual History, 110–33. 14 Andrew Sartori, Liberalism in Empire: An Alternative History (Oakland: University of California Press), 2014. 15 Samuel Moyn, “On the Nonglobalization of Ideas,“ in Moyn and Sartori, Global Intellectual History, 187–204. 16 The best overview of Naxalite ideology can still be found in Banerjee, Naxalbari. For discussions on developmentalist ideologies in the South Asian context, see, for example: Harald Fischer-Tiné and Michael Mann, eds, Colonialism as Civilizing Mission: Cultural Ideology in British India (London: Anthem Press, 2004); Carey A.Watt and Michael Mann, eds, Civilizing Missions in Colonial and Postcolonial South Asia: From Improvement to Development (London: Anthem Press, 2011).

68  Milinda Banerjee

17 “Declaration of the All-India Co-ordination Committee of Communist Revolutionaries,” in The Historic Turning Point: A Liberation Anthology, ed. Suniti Kumar Ghosh, vol. 1 (Calcutta: S. K. Ghosh, 1992), 31. 18 In thinking about the political/economic binary, I have been stimulated by Chantal Mouffe, The Return of the Political (London: Verso, 1993), The Democratic Paradox (London:Verso, 2000), and On the Political (Abingdon: Routledge, 2005); by Partha Chatterjee, The Politics of the Governed: Reflections on Popular Politics in Most of the World (New York: Columbia University Press, 2004), and Lineages of Political Society: Studies in Postcolonial Democracy (New York: Columbia University Press, 2011); and by Giorgio Agamben, The Kingdom and the Glory: For a Theological Genealogy of Economy and Government (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2011). 19 Charu Mazumdar, “Fight against the Concrete Manifestations of Revisionism,“ in Ghosh, Liberation Anthology, vol. 2, 38–39. 20 CPI (M-L), “CPI (M-L) Mourns the Passing Away of President Ho Chi Minh”, in ibid., 3–4. 21 “Homage to Comrade Saroj Dutta and Other Martyrs,” in ibid., 239. 22 See, for example: Ghosh, Liberation Anthology, vol. 1, 32, 37–38, 43, 47–48, 61, 92, 106, 110, 222–23, 238–39, 264–65, 316–20, 325, 327–28; vol. 2, 1–2, 13–14, 22, 96, 130, 229–32. 23 Carl Schmitt famously noted: “The specific political distinction to which political actions and motives can be reduced is that between friend and enemy.” See Carl Schmitt, The Concept of the Political (1927/32) (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007), 26. 24 Shruti Kapila, “Global Intellectual History and the Indian Political,” in Rethinking Modern European Intellectual History, eds Darrin M. McMahon and Samuel Moyn (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014), 270. 25 See, for example: Extract from the Supervision Note of R. K. Nigam, Superintendent of Police, Purulia, on the P. R. No. II dated 16.8.1970 of Raghunathpur PS case no. 14, dated 14.8.1970 u/s 326/302/34 IPC (Purulia District S. R. No. 56/70), in File No. 1092C-70 (7) (Purulia), 320; Communism – Activity and Propaganda, in File No. 1092C-70 (7) (Purulia), 274–307; Statement of Dilip Kumar Mallick, 11.8.1970, u/s 302 IPC, in File No. 1092C-70 (7) (Purulia), 269; Copy of Leaflet issued by Communist Party of India (Marxist-Leninist), Burdwan Zilla Committee, in File No. 1092C70 (7) (Burdwan), 448; Leaflet issued by Communist Party of India (Marxist-Leninist), Burdwan Zilla Committee, in File No. 1092C-70 (7) (Burdwan), 442–46; Pamphlet of Communist Party of India (Marxist-Leninist), Behala Anchalik Committee, in File No. 1092C-70 (7) (24 Parganas), 1657–58; Pamphlet of Communist Party of India (MarxistLeninist), Bijpur Anchalik Committee, in File No. 1092C-70 (7) (24 Parganas), 1639–40; Pamphlet of Communist Party of India (Marxist-Leninist), Dhakuria Anchalik Committee, in File No. 1092C-70 (7) (24 Parganas); Pamphlet of Communist Party of India (Marxist-Leninist), 24 Parganas Zilla Committee, in File No. 1092C-70 (7) (24 Parganas), 2304–05; Copy of a Leaflet Purported to Have Been Issued by the West Bengal State Committee of Communist Party of India (Marxist-Leninist), Found Pasted in the Canteen of the Blast Furnace of Durgapur Steel Plant on 2.1.1972, in File No. 1092C72 (7) (Burdwan), 1–5. See also Charu Mazumdar, Charu Mazumdar Rachana Sangraha (Calcutta: New Horizon Book Trust, 2008), 22, 92, 107, 109, 125; Ghosh, Liberation Anthology, vol. 2, 77; relevant pages of Deshabrati reprinted in Evam Jalarka (1998–2006), vols. 2, 3, 6, 7, 8, 10. 26 Mazumdar, Charu, 97–98. 27 I draw here on Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998). 28 Mazumdar, Charu, 91; Communism – Activity and Propaganda, in File No. 1092C-70 (7) (Purulia), 292. 29 Pamphlet entitled “E Larai Chalay Naxal Party, E Larai Chalay Gariber Party”, in File No. 1092C-70 (7) (Purulia), 228; Copy of Leaflet issued by Communist Party of India

Globalized horizons among Bengali Naxalites  69

(Marxist-Leninist), Burdwan Zilla Committee, in File No. 1092C-70 (7) (Burdwan), 447–49; Pamphlet of Communist Party of India (Marxist-Leninist), 24 Parganas Zilla Committee, in File No. 1092C-70 (7) (24 Parganas), 2304–05; relevant pages in Deshabrati reprint, vols. 2, 3, 6, 7. 30 Ray, Naxalites, 66–68, 211–13. 31 Pamphlet of Communist Party of India (Marxist-Leninist), Purulia Zilla Committee, entitled “E Larai Chalay Naxal Party, E Larai Chalay Gariber Party”, in File No. 1092C70 (7) (Purulia), 228. 32 Interestingly, Kamra, “Self-Making through Self-Writing”, notices the hesitation of the two women (whose memoirs she studies) to follow the programme of annihilation, though she does not relate this to her interesting model of non-sovereign agency. 33 Agamben, Homo Sacer. 34 Charu Mazumdar,“On Some Current Political and Organizational Problems,” in Ghosh, Liberation Anthology, vol. 1, 224. 35 See, for example: Donald J. Munro, “The Malleability of Man in Chinese Marxism,” The China Quarterly 48 (1971): 609–40; Maurice Meisner, Marxism, Maoism and Utopianism: Eight Essays (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1982); Jiping Zuo, “Political Religion: The Case of the Cultural Revolution in China,” Sociological Analysis 52 (1991): 99–110; David E. Apter and Tony Saich, Revolutionary Discourse in Mao’s Republic (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1994); Joel Andreas, “The Structure of Charismatic Mobilization: A Case Study of Rebellion during the Chinese Cultural Revolution,” American Sociological Review 72 (2007): 434–58; Yinghong Cheng, Creating the “New Man”: From Enlightenment Ideals to Socialist Realities (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2009); Yiu Liu, “Maoist Discourse and the Mobilization of Emotions in Revolutionary China,” Modern China 36 (2010): 329–62. 36 “Political-Organizational Report Adopted at the Party Congress,” in Ghose, Liberation Anthology, vol. 2, 20. 37 Banerjee, Naxalbari, 192–93, 227–31. 38 See, for example: Manu Goswami, Producing India: From Colonial Economy to National Space (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004); Andrew Sartori, “Beyond CultureContact and Colonial Discourse: “Germanism” in Colonial Bengal,” Modern Intellectual History 4 (2007): 77–93; Sugata Bose and Kris Manjapra, eds, Cosmopolitan Thought Zones: South Asia and the Global Circulation of Ideas (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010); C.A. Bayly, Recovering Liberties: Indian Thought in the Age of Liberalism and Empire (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012); Kris Manjapra, Age of Entanglement: German and Indian Intellectuals across Empire (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2014). 39 Manjapra, Age of Entanglement, notices some of the continuities between Indian actors in the colonial and postcolonial eras with respect to their sense of themselves as subalterns in the international order, and their consequent choices in articulating solidarities with other (supposedly similarly positioned) actors beyond South Asia. 40 Sartori, “Beyond Culture-Contact”, 93. 41 Ranajit Das Gupta, “Oraon Labour Agitation: Duars in Jalpaiguri District, 1915–16,” Economic and Political Weekly 24 (1989): 2197–202; Sangeeta Dasgupta, “Reordering a World: The Tana Bhagat Movement, 1914–1919,” Studies in History 15 (1999): 1–41. 42 I have dealt with this in Chapter 5 of my doctoral dissertation (defended at Heidelberg University in 2014), which is forthcoming as the book The Mortal God: Imagining the Sovereign in Colonial India. 43 See, for example: Copy of Report, dated 4.5.1970 submitted by D.I.O. (2) Purulia, in File No. 1092C-70 (7) (Purulia), 95; Letter of Superintendent of Police, DIB, Hooghly of 17.7.1970, to Special Superintendent of Police, IB, WB, in File No. 1092C-70 (7) (Burdwan), 165; Office of the Deputy Inspector General of Police, Traffic and Railways, Memo No. 144/C/C.36–70, 19.5.1970, in File No. 1092C-70 (7) (Burdwan), 82; Copy of a Report of D. I. O., Durgapur, 2.5.1970: Situation of Coke Oven Boys’ School, Durgapur, in File No. 1092C-70 (7) (Burdwan), 76; Copy of a Report of a D.I.O.,

70  Milinda Banerjee

18.7.1970, in File No. 1092C-70 (7) (Jalpaiguri), 89; Extract from Report of SP DIB, Jalpaiguri, 2.5.1970, in File No. 1092C-70 (7) (Jalpaiguri), 19; Statement of Nemai Ch. Mitra, in File No. 1092C-70 (7) (Calcutta), 1054; Pamphlet of Communist Party of India (Marxist-Leninist), Behala Anchalik Committee, in File No. 1092C-70 (7) (24 Parganas), 1657–58; Pamphlet of Communist Party of India (Marxist-Leninist), Bijpur Anchalik Committee, in File No. 1092C-70 (7) (24 Parganas), 1639–40; File No. 1092C-70 (7) (Bihar), 164; Letter of CID, Special Branch, Bihar, 3 September 1971, to the Special Superintendent of Police, Intelligence Branch, West Bengal, in File No. 1092C-71 (7) (Bihar), 228. 44 Copy of D.I.O.’s Report, 11.11.1973, in File No. 1092C-73 (7) (24 Parganas), 687. 45 See, for example: Statement of Bhaskar Chatterjee, 108, and Statement of Sambhu Khan, 101, in File No. 1092C-70 (7) (Purulia), 228; Radiogram to Police WB DIG IB BR SP DIB BWN DM BWN from ADDL SP ASL, in File No. 1092C-70 (7) (Burdwan), 236; Extract from SBDN, 14.7.1969, in File No. 1092C-70 (7) (Burdwan), 121; Copy of a Report of D. I. O., Durgapur, 2.5.1970: Situation of Coke Oven Boys’ School, Durgapur, in File No. 1092C-70 (7) (Burdwan), 76; Deshabrati, vol. 6, 182–83. 46 See, for example: File No. 1092C-70 (7) (Bihar), 156–66; Document “The New Upsurge and Combating Left Opportunism on Some Questions”, in File No. 1092C-70 (7) (Bihar), 134–55; Com. CM’s Comments on the Resolution of Bihar State Committee, in File No. 1092C-70 (7) (Bihar), 130–33; CPI (M)-er Madhyekar Biplabi Amsher Kachhe Khola Chithi, issued by Deshabrati (Ashim’s Group), 1.4.1972, in File No. 1092C-72 (7) (Nadia), K. W. and Paper Cutting Folder, non-paginated. 47 See, for example: Copy of a Pamphlet of the Ausgram, Bhatar, Mangalkot and Katwa Elaka Committee of Communist Party of India (Marxist-Leninist), 1 October 1972, in File No. 1092C-72(7) (Burdwan), 289–90; Letter from ASI, DIB, Purulia, to the O/C, DIB, Purulia, 21.4.1973, in Copy of a Leaflet Purported to Have Been Issued by the West Bengal State Committee of Communist Party of India (Marxist-Leninist), Found Pasted in the Canteen of the Blast Furnace of Durgapur Steel Plant on 2.1.1972, in File No. 1092C-73 (7) (Purulia), 5–6; Pamphlet of Communist Party of India (Marxist-­ Leninist), Baidyabati Chandernagore Area Committee, in File No. 1092C-74 (7) (Hooghly), 42–46; Pamphlet of Communist Party of India (Marxist-Leninist), Howrah Anchalik Committee, in File No. 1092C-74 (7) (Howrah), non-paginated; Gariar Samgramer Report, in File No. 1092C-74 (7) (24 Parganas), 355; Pamphlet of Communist Party of India (Marxist-Leninist), Habra Sangathanik Committee, 10.8.1973, in File No. 1092C-73 (7) (24 Parganas); Extract from W.C.R for the Week Ending 25.5.1973 of DIB (24 Parganas), in File No. 1092C-73 (7) (24 Parganas), 452; Statement of Gopal Talapatra @ Bhaskar Roy, in File No. 1092C-73 (7) (Calcutta), 172; Leaflet of Burdwan District Anchalik Sangathanik Committee, in File No. 1092C-73 (7) (Burdwan), 34–35. 48 Pamphlet of Communist Party of India (Marxist-Leninist), Banga-Bihar Anchalik Committee, 5.5.1974, in File No. 1092C-74 (7) (Purulia). 49 Ibid. 50 On the relation of the sovereign and the animal, I draw on Jacques Derrida, The Beast and the Sovereign, vol. 1 (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2009). 51 Pamphlet of Communist Party of India (Marxist-Leninist), Banga-Bihar Anchalik Committee, 5.5.1974, in File No. 1092C-74 (7) (Purulia). 52 Leaflet of Communist Party of India (Marxist-Leninist), Purbasthali-NabadwipKalna-Manteshwar Elaka Committee and Burdwan Anchalik Sangathanik Committee, 20.5.1973, in File No. 1092C-73 (7) (Burdwan), 97–100; for the original 1971 article by Charu affirming that India will achieve independence by 1975, see “1975 Saler Madhyei Bharatavarsher Koti Koti Janata Muktir Mahakavya Rachana Karben”, in Mazumdar, Charu, 142–44. 53 Ernst H. Kantorowicz, The King’s Two Bodies: A Study in Mediaeval Political Theology (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1957); Ernst H. Kantorowicz, “Mysteries of State: An Absolutist Concept and its Late Mediaeval Origins,” in his Selected Studies, New York: J.J. Augustin, 1965, 381–98.

Globalized horizons among Bengali Naxalites  71

54 Alexei Yurchak, “Bodies of Lenin: The Hidden Science of Communist Sovereignty,” Representations 129 (2015): 116–57. 55 On acclamation, see Ernst H. Kantorowicz, Laudes Regiae: A Study in Liturgical Acclamations and Mediaeval Ruler Worship, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1958 (1946); Agamben, Kingdom. 56 Shahid Amin, “Gandhi as Mahatma: Gorakhpur District, Eastern UP, 1921–2,” in Subaltern Studies, vol. 3, ed. Ranajit Guha (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1999), 1–61. 57 Duyker, Tribal Guerrillas; Ashis Moitra and Ranjan Sen (eds), Jangal Santhal (Calcutta: Radical Impression, 2007). 58 For some interesting studies, see Sudhanshu Sarangi and Laurence Alison, “Life Story Accounts of Left Wing Terrorists in India,” Journal of Investigative Psychology and Offender Profiling 2 (2005): 69–86; Bert Suykens, “Maoist Martyrs: Remembering the Revolution and its Heroes in Naxalite Propaganda (India),” Terrorism and Political Violence 22 (2010): 378–93; Marie Lecomte-Tilouine, Hindu Kingship, Ethnic Revival, and Maoist Rebellion in Nepal (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2009). 59 Subrahmanyam, “Global Intellectual History”. For Subrahmanyam’s own take on examining connected histories and transborder socio-cultural commensurabilities, see, for example, Sanjay Subrahmanyam, Explorations in Connected History: From the Tagus to the Ganges (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2005); Courtly Encounters: Translating Courtliness and Violence in Early Modern Eurasia (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2012).

Selected bibliography Agamben, Giorgio. Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998. Banaji, Jairus. “The Ironies of Indian Maoism.” http://isj.org.uk/the-ironies-of-indian-­ maoism/, accessed February 14, 2016. Banerjee, Milinda. The Mortal God: Imagining the Sovereign in Colonial India. Delhi: Cambridge University Press, 2017. Banerjee, Sumanta. In the Wake of Naxalbari: Four Decades of a Simmering Revolution. Calcutta: Sahitya Samsad, 2009. Dasgupta, Rajeshwari. “Towards the ‘New Man’: Revolutionary Youth and Rural Agency in the Naxalite Movement.” Economic and Political Weekly 41 (2006): 1920–27. Deshabrati, reprinted in Evam Jalarka, vols. 2, 3, 6, 7, 8, 10, 1998–2006. Ghosh, Suniti Kumar, ed. The Historic Turning Point: A Liberation Anthology, vols. 1 and 2. Calcutta: S.K. Ghosh, 1992–93. Mazumdar, Charu. Charu Mazumdar Rachana Sangraha. Calcutta: New Horizon Book Trust, 2008. Moyn, Samuel. “On the Nonglobalization of Ideas.” In Global Intellectual History, edited by Samuel Moyn and Andrew Sartori, 187–204. New York: Columbia University Press, 2013. Sartori, Andrew. “Global Intellectual History and the History of Political Economy.” In Global Intellectual History, edited by Samuel Moyn and Andrew Sartori, 110–33. New York: Columbia University Press, 2013. Schmitt, Carl. The Concept of the Political. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007. Seth, Sanjay Seth, “Smashing Statues, Dancing Sivas:Two Tales of Indian Icons.” http://press. anu.edu.au/wp-content/uploads/2011/02/4-Seth-HRC11.pdf, accessed February 15, 2016.

4 CHALLENGING BRITISH SOVEREIGNTY Transnational activism and political power in Northern Ireland, 1963–1973 Steffen Bruendel

Northern Ireland has been part of the United Kingdom since the partition of Ireland in 1921. After former attempts to introduce “Home Rule” (a legal arrangement providing political autonomy for Ireland) had failed, Britain established an administration in six of the originally nine Irish counties constituting the historical province of Ulster.1 The social, religious, and national conflicts of the late 1960s in Northern Ireland – often trivialized and euphemistically referred to as the “Troubles” – started along with global protest against the Vietnam War and transnational solidarity with third-world liberation movements. Speaking of Northern Ireland as a “British colony,”2 as Irish Republican Army (IRA) leader Gerry Adams put it, left-wing political activists regarded British rule in Ulster as a ruthless form of domestic colonialism. However, the conflict in Northern Ireland has seldom been discussed in the context of the “global sixties.”3 Reaching beyond the traditional centers of action in Western Europe and the USA, the Ulster conflict provides an intriguing case study of the politics of activism and political power in a region that has long been turbulent. Investigating the crisis in Northern Ireland from the sixties to the early seventies, this chapter illustrates the ways in which state sovereignty and transnationalism clashed and examines how individuals, groups, and transnational networks attempted to challenge political systems, resist governments, and mobilize for change. State sovereignty stems both from the state’s power to defend itself against external aggressors and from the state’s monopoly on the legitimate use of force within a territorially defined area. Since the use of force should in principle be legitimate, the rule of law is often considered the central determinant of state sovereignty. Consequently, provocations like civil disobedience or violent resistance may lead to police or military interventions.4 The term “transnational” means transcending national boundaries, representing forces and themes that are cross-national and often global. Cross-border contacts and coalitions constitute transnational relations of individuals and groups as well as

Challenging British sovereignty  73

symbolic and physical interactions across frontiers by non-state or non-governmental actors like NGOs or social movements.5 They often represent a multi-ethnic or multinational group and form a transnational discourse community. Mutual perceptions, exchanges, and entanglements influence them. State authorities frequently reject such organizations and networks. Since they address critical issues and present solutions that include forms of civil disobedience and direct action, governments consider them to be challenges to the nation state’s authority.6 However, social movements do not command the power to induce or even enforce political change. To become effective they need further social agents like politicians, political parties, or the media.7 Movements affect patterns of common perception, public opinion, and political institutions. Moreover, they also influence power relations and values within the movement as well as the individual biographies of the participants.8 This chapter explores how the protests of the 1960s affected Northern Ireland’s political system. It asks: What were the circumstances in which people formed social movements that mobilized for change? When and how did individuals and groups decide to question the existing order, to disapprove of inequalities, and to challenge the state’s monopoly on the use of force? How did political institutions and governments seek to canalize, suppress, or extinguish such collective calls for a political alternative? How did transnational movements influence the individuals, ideas, and themes that shaped political struggle at this time? Answering these questions will illuminate how transnational activism challenged political power in Northern Ireland.

Burntollet Bridge and the Northern Irish state authorities’ legal frame On January 1, 1969, an organization that called itself People’s Democracy began a four-day march from Belfast to Derry. According to activist Michael Farrell, the march would be “the acid test of the government’s intentions.” Either the government would protect the march from attacks by its own Unionist Party “or it would be exposed as impotent in the face of sectarian thuggery, and Westminster would be forced to intervene, re-opening the whole Irish question for the first time in 50 years.”9 This was the strategy behind the civil rights march that was violently crushed on January 4, 1969. During the whole march participants were harassed and physically attacked by Protestant Unionists. At Burntollet Bridge near Derry approximately 200 Unionists ambushed the march violently, attacking the 40 marchers with sticks, stones, and iron bars.10 The police neither protected the protestors nor punished their assailants. Since the Ulster government failed to protect the march, it failed at what Farrell called the “acid test,” exposing its partiality.This incident further alienated the Catholic population from the Northern Ireland state, triggering Irish nationalism and calling into question Northern Ireland’s constitutional position. Northern Ireland was created as a legal entity in 1921 with the Anglo-Irish Treaty ending the Irish War of Independence and permanently dividing Ireland. British

74  Steffen Bruendel

FIGURE 4.1  Civil

rights campaigners in Derry (or Londonderry) demanding equality in housing, employment, and voting rights for Catholics in Northern Ireland, January 10, 1969.

© Bentley Archive/Popperfoto/Getty Images.

rule over 26 counties of Ireland ended, and these soon formed the Irish Free State, which later became the Republic of Ireland. However, six North-Eastern counties remained within Britain, forming a self-governing province with a p­ opulation of approximately 1.2 million people.11 Northern Ireland’s constitution and institutions were based on the Government of Ireland Act of 1920, which remained effective even after Southern Irish independence. The Governor of Northern ­Ireland headed the administration and represented the British monarch by whom he was appointed. It was a position comparable to that of the G ­ overnor-General (Viceroy) of India. Twelve Members of Parliament represented the Northern Irish electorate at the British parliament in London known as “Westminster.” ­Additionally, there was a bicameral Parliament of Northern Ireland consisting of a House of Commons and an indirectly elected Senate. The Governor granted royal assent to Acts of parliament whereas executive power rested with the Prime Minister. Being located in the Stormont Estate area near Belfast, the parliament and government of Northern Ireland were commonly called “Stormont.”12 In 1963 Terence O’Neill was elected Prime Minister of Northern Ireland and leader of the Protestant Ulster Unionist Party (UUP), followed by James ChichesterClark in 1969 and Brian Faulkner in 1971. Leading UUP politicians usually stemmed

Challenging British sovereignty  75

from upper-class families and most of them had been educated in Britain.13 The government’s power relied largely on the Special Powers Act from 1922. Initially adopted to establish order by imposing curfew, banning public meetings, forbidding political expression, and restricting the possession of arms and explosives, it soon served to maintain Ulster’s political structure.14 The Royal Ulster Constabulary (RUC), an armed police force founded in 1922, was the government’s buttress executing the state monopoly on legitimate force, assisted by the Ulster Special Constabulary (USC) or B-Specials, a paramilitary auxiliary police.15 Being a union of diverse regions dominated by England, the “United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland” (UK) is neither a federation nor a classic nation state but rather a unitary state whose administrative entities only can exercise powers delegated by the central government. Hence, the legal and institutional frame of the self-governing province of Ulster set up in 1920/21 changed during the so-called Troubles when Westminster enforced direct rule suspending Stormont in 1972, revealing the Special Powers Act in 1973 and abolishing the office of Governor in the same year. The legal frame of the “artificially-formed Northern state”16 or “British controlled statelet”17 has long been one of the main causes of conflict because it constituted political inequality. Though British citizens in a formally democratic system, Catholic Irish faced discrimination. Due to the British first-past-the-post voting system in combination with constituencies that never properly reflected the composition of the population (i.e. “gerrymandering”), the Catholic Irish political representation was limited. In other words: their votes never translated into power. As a result, Sinn Féin, the Nationalist Party, and its successor, the Social Democratic and Labour Party (SDLP) founded in 1970, followed a policy of abstention by taking part in the elections but not in parliament’s business, a strategy that further weakened Catholic opposition. Consequently, the Protestant UUP governed Northern Ireland continuously from 1921 to 1972. This “elected dictatorship” secured Protestant hegemony.18 Even though Catholics and Protestants were both British citizens, all UUP governments enforced a politics of separation supported by the Orange Order, founded in 1795 to maintain Protestant hegemony. Furthermore, the Special Powers Act, which severely restricted civil rights and gave police almost unlimited power, became a main source of frustration for Northern Irish Catholics.19 Their anger was further fueled by the marginalization of the Irish language that was not taught at Protestant schools.20 Last but not least, the Unionist-dominated city councils secured discrimination with regard to the allocation of public housing and the distribution of jobs. This led to a high unemployment rate and widespread poverty among Catholics.21 Questions of religious and national identity notwithstanding, it was precisely these social and political injustices that caused anger and bitterness. In fact, all legal and political restrictions aimed at Unionist dominance. As early as 1934 Sir James Craig, then Prime Minister of Northern Ireland, had told parliament that “we are a Protestant Parliament and Protestant State” and later spoke of “a Protestant

76  Steffen Bruendel

government for a Protestant people.”22 Catholic Irish citizens did not regard the state authorities – administration and police – as a neutral force but rather as allies of the Unionists and therefore questioned the legitimacy of their actions. All in all they felt like “outsiders living inside.”23 In the wake of the severe economic difficulties Northern Ireland faced in the early 1960s, Terence O’Neill advocated reforms when he became Prime Minister in 1963. Harold Wilson, newly elected British Prime Minister in 1964, pressed him for reforms after a Campaign for Democracy in Ulster (CDU) had been set up at Westminster. However, given strong resistance within the UUP, O’Neill did not take any measures. His inactivity further frustrated the Catholic community, which now sought to publicly press for reforms rather than stay passive. Networks based on communal activities led to the formation of several groups, committees, and organizations. Addressing various needs for reform they ultimately put civil rights on the political agenda and mobilized for change.24

The Northern Irish civil rights movement and its transnational frame Both transnational and national issues mobilized the movements emerging in Western Europe and the USA in the late 1960s. The most influential transnational topic was the Vietnam War. It mobilized people in Britain – including Northern Ireland – and led to the creation of the London-based Vietnam Solidarity Campaign (VSC) in 1966, which became Britain’s most influential protest organization. Many students from Queen’s University Belfast (QUB) joined VSC demonstrations in London. Whereas racial segregation was the key national issue in the USA, activists in Britain focused on racism in Commonwealth countries but also in Britain and later turned to the Ulster conflict. In Northern Ireland, students of QUB took up the topic of civil rights as early as 1964, but it was RUC’s violence against civil-rights marchers in Derry in October 1968 that mobilized hundreds of Belfast students and initiated the formation of a student-led civil rights organization called People’s Democracy (PD).25 The role of both leadership and media is important in framing and shaping the ideas, goals, and strategies of social movements. The British movement was led by established intellectuals and by young dissenters in their mid-twenties. Among the latter was the journalist Tariq Ali, co-founder of VSC and initiator of the movement’s popular newspaper The Black Dwarf. It had been established in May 1968 in order to counterbalance one-sided press reports about the VSC, the Vietnam War, and other topics. The Dwarf and its successor The Red Mole, founded in 1970, associated anti-capitalist liberation movements in Africa, Latin America, and Asia with civil-rights movements in Northern Ireland and the USA, thus presenting a global approach to interpreting political, economic, and social developments.26 Patterns of common perception were shaped both personally and collectively and mobilized activists. In Northern Ireland, especially in Derry and Belfast, community action was an important means of rallying support and influencing social

Challenging British sovereignty  77

attitudes by personally engaging in campaigns, associations, and neighborhood services. These local organizations tackled issues like poverty, housing, welfare, and educational underachievement. In seeking to counterbalance inequality and injustice they paved the way for the future civil-rights movement. The Homeless Citizens League (HCL), for example, was founded in 1963 after Catholic women occupied vacant social housing. It later evolved into the Campaign for Social Justice (CSJ), established in 1964 to publicly denounce anti-Catholic discrimination.27 In March 1968 the Derry Housing Action Committee (DHAC) started protesting against the lack of housing. In taking up topics that were important for everyday life, community activists sought to combine issues of social inequality with the wider problem of political discrimination. According to Gerry Adams, people mobilized around local activities either out of self-interest or when inspired by an idea like civil rights. In August 1968 the Northern Ireland Civil Rights Association (NICRA), the CSJ, and a number of left-wing groups, jointly organized the first civil-rights march in Northern Ireland from Coalisland to Dungannon, two Catholic strongholds.28 Founded in February 1967, NICRA initially offered the citizens advice and addressed Catholics and Protestants alike. The association demanded the protection of the rights of all citizens and guarantees for freedom of speech, assembly, and association. In the beginning they avoided religious and national issues as well as constitutional questions. Their primary aim was to reform Northern Ireland and consequently they demanded “British rights for British citizens.” The argument was, as an activist recalls, that “if we were deemed to be British citizens then we wanted the same rights as other British citizens were entitled to.”29 Like the young dissenters protesting in London, the civil-rights campaigners in Belfast were in their early or mid-twenties. Eamonn McCann became one of the most prominent activists. Born in Derry in 1943 he grew up in a Northern Irish ghetto. He studied at QUB, where students had organized protest marches against the ban on the Workers Party Republican Clubs in March 1967. In February 1968 McCann was one of the founders of the DHAC, which collaborated with NICRA. He actively supported VSC in London before coming back to Ulster in early 1968.30 Alongside him, Bernadette Devlin emerged as a representative of the Northern Irish civil-rights movement. Born in 1947 in Cookstown, Tyrone County, she also had a lower-class background. Devlin studied at QUB in 1968 and quickly became a leading figure of the student-led People’s Democracy (PD). This organization was set up at QUB on October 9, 1968, four days after RUC’s harsh attack on a NICRA march in Derry and when the French May events were “still fresh in our minds,” as activist Michael Farrell recalled.31 Born in 1944 Farrell was also educated at Queen’s University and became cofounder of PD. Under his influence PD was modeled after the student-based US civil-rights organization Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) that consisted predominantly of African-American students. Through Farrell’s involvement in student politics QUB activists were linked to transnational networks. As their name implied, PD proved more radical than NICRA; their demands

78  Steffen Bruendel

included changes to the electoral system (“one man, one vote”), the repeal of the Special Powers Act, fair voting district boundaries, freedom of speech and assembly, and, last but not least, fair allocation of housing and jobs.32 Gerry Adams became interested in Irish Republican politics as a teenager. Born in 1948 into a working-class family, Adams was deeply concerned about social inequalities and injustice. Irish republicanism was rooted in his family since his grandfather had been a member of the Irish Republican Brotherhood. Furthermore, his father had joined the Irish Republican Army (IRA) as a teenager and his mother was a member of IRA’s women’s wing. Gerry Adams actively supported the Northern Irish civil-rights campaign and joined NICRA in 1967. Two years later he affiliated with the newly founded Provisional IRA’s Belfast Brigade, the largest and most active unit in the organization’s armed struggle against Protestant Unionism.33 Bernadette Devlin was elected to the House of Commons in London in April 1969, representing the Mid Ulster constituency – at only 21 she was the youngest Member of Parliament (MP) at that time. She attacked Unionism and rejected attempts to label the civil-rights movement a mere Catholic uprising. During her so-called “maiden speech” in parliament on April 22, 1969, Devlin frankly blamed “the bigoted and sectarian Unionist Party, which uses a deliberate policy of dividing the people in order to keep the ruling minority in power and to keep the oppressed people of Ulster oppressed.” Whereas Catholics and Protestants alike supported the movement, she argued, the ruling UUP and the “so-called impartial forces of law and order” were deliberately “terrorizing” Catholic neighborhoods and beating up Catholic protesters.34 Here, Devlin referred to the NICRA march in Derry of October 5, 1968. The march had taken place despite having been banned, and RUC officers fiercely attacked the marchers. British and international press coverage was critical since a television cameraman had filmed this violent incident. Wilson summoned O’Neill to London and forced him finally to set up a reform plan. In the wake of the October march to Derry relations between Westminster and Stormont changed with Wilson reminding O’Neill that the latter was subordinate to the London government.35 However, none of the “so-called reforms” had been carried out, as Bernadette Devlin stressed in April 1969. The recent announcement to introduce “one man, one vote” came far too late, since there were two incompatible ideals: “the idea of social justice and the ideal and existence of the Unionist Party.” Both, she concluded, “cannot exist in the same society.”36 In Parliament Devlin realized that being “young and female” initially led fellow MPs not to take her seriously.37 She resented that the press continuously tried to identify her as proof that Women’s Liberation was not necessary. In 1971, she told a New Zealand student newspaper: “If you look at the difference between the way people are forced to treat me and the way they treat other women, then I am proof there is need for Women’s Liberation.”38 And indeed there was a need, since Northern Ireland was not only founded on the exclusion of Catholics from full citizenship but also on the exclusion of

Challenging British sovereignty  79

women from politics. The Catholic Church promoted conservative views on social issues, particularly regarding family and sexuality. Given the suppression of Catholics in Ulster, the clergy’s influence grew in Catholic communities, making it even more difficult to question the predominant conservative mentality.39 Nevertheless, Bernadette Devlin declared women’s liberation to be an integral part of “our own struggle.”40 However, this was a rather euphemistic view. Ultimately the civil-rights movement did not challenge gender inequality. Women’s rights were, at most, secondary to the national struggle against Protestant British domination.41 Eventually Devlin acknowledged this problem in 1971. To stress the importance of including women in politics, she recalled the forgotten role of women in the Irish struggle for independence.42 In fact, Catholic women did play active roles in the Irish struggle for self-determination, for example when leading community protests in the early days of the civil-rights movement.43 Devlin spoke at countless meetings in Britain and helped set up the Irish Civil Rights Solidarity Campaign, which established branches in London, Wimbledon, Richmond, Glasgow, Edinburgh, and Birmingham. Devlin also traveled to the USA where she met representatives of the American civil-rights movement.44 Indeed, the African-American civil-rights movement proved highly influential. This can best be illustrated by the way in which the PD appropriated the American movement’s hymn “We shall overcome” during their four-day march from Belfast to Derry in January 1969, a march that mirrored the American civil-rights marches from Selma to Montgomery, the state capital of Alabama in 1956. Many Irish activists identified with blacks in the USA; just as the march in the American South highlighted racial injustice, the Belfast–Derry march focused on social injustice in Ulster.Yet, the influence was not unilateral. Comparisons between the situation of African-Americans and Catholics in Northern Ireland, which had already been popular in the nineteenth century, were repeatedly drawn in the 1960s.45 However, it was the policy of Martin Luther King that inspired Irish civil-rights activists. Ostensibly non-violent actions performed in the USA had proven to be so provocative that state authorities sought to restore order by force. Media coverage of police attacking peaceful demonstrators mobilized previously passive people and thus served the aims of the movement. In other words: “By adopting provocative tactics, the American civil rights movement had achieved its political goals.”46 Irish activists aimed to create a situation in Northern Ireland that would similarly force the British government to intervene. Eamonn McCann recalls that the movement’s “conscious, if unspoken, strategy was to provoke the police into overreaction and thus spark off a mass reaction against the authorities.”47 The NICRA demonstration in Derry on October 5, 1968 initiated by the DHAC became the first march where protesters and police clashed. This incident was of enormous symbolic importance.48 International press reporting on RUC baton-charging NICRA’s marchers at Derry directed public attention to the question of civil rights. Serious rioting followed. Even reticent British press coverage helped to make the incident known

80  Steffen Bruendel

and further mobilized people. Moreover, the transnational character of the movement became apparent since a Unionist MP observed in October 1968 that “these sort of people . . . work . . . all over the globe and much nearer home, at Grosvenor Square in London, in Paris, Dublin, and now in Londonderry.”49 The Stormont and Westminster governments sought to delegitimize the movement calling the activists Communists and blaming them for causing random uproar in order to overthrow law and order.The various arguments were taken up and aggravated by the media.50 On November 16, 1968 a mass demonstration of an estimated 15,000 persons was held in Derry and, despite scuffles with Loyalists, ended peacefully. However, things got worse when approximately 200 Loyalists savagely assaulted the march of 40 PD activists on their four-day march from Belfast to Derry in January 1969.51 Bernadette Devlin recalled being attacked at Burntollet Bridge on January, 4: “The attackers were beating marchers into the ditches, and across the ditches and into the river. People were being dragged half-conscious out of the river. Others were being pursued across the fields into the woods.”52 It was a miracle that no one died. The new level of violence – 13 marchers had to be treated in hospital – was upsetting. Moreover, the fact that police did not hinder the mob but even helped the attackers testified that the representatives of law and order were in fact biased and even hostile to the protesters.53 The situation further deteriorated when on August 12, 1969 fierce rioting took place in Derry during the “Battle of the Bogside.”The Bogside is a mainly Catholic neighborhood where the working class of Derry lived under dreadful conditions with terrible housing and high unemployment. In August 1969 members of the Protestant fraternal society Apprentice Boys of Derry marched along the Bogside, provocatively commemorating the 1689 unsuccessful siege of Protestant Derry by the troops of Catholic King James II. Eventually, Catholics and local Unionists engaged in fierce fighting. After the violence spread to Belfast, bringing Ulster close to civil war, the British government intervened, deploying troops to the Northern Irish counties on August 14, 1969. “Operation Banner” became the longest lasting British military intervention. Since security matters were a preserve of Stormont, the deployment of troops limited the power of the Ulster government headed by newly elected Prime Minister James Chichester-Clark. Catholics who sought protection from Unionist attacks initially cheered British troops before they realized that the soldiers were not impartial.54 When the Bogside incident of 1969 led to greater international awareness of the Troubles, the prime ministers of the UK and of Northern Ireland published a joint communiqué affirming that the responsibility for Northern Irish affairs was “entirely a matter of domestic consideration.” This was meant to rebuff attempts by the Irish foreign minister Patrick Hillary to call for a meeting of the United Nations Security Council to discuss the situation in Northern Ireland, thus making it an international topic. John “Jack” Lynch, the Irish Prime Minister, even called for a UN peacekeeping mission in Ulster, which would have clearly limited British sovereignty and revived the question of Irish unity. According to Lynch, only a reunification of the North-Eastern Counties with the Republic of Ireland could permanently secure order and peace.55

Challenging British sovereignty  81

FIGURE 4.2 An

RUC Police Officer fires a tear gas pistol at rioters during the Troubles, 1969.

© Popperfoto/Getty Images.

Given the rise of violence since October 1968, the Northern Irish civil-rights activists focused more and more on the radical US Black Panther Party (BPP), founded in 1966 to end discrimination and challenge police brutality. Not only was the BPP the most powerful black organization, it was also “the strongest link between the domestic black liberation struggle and global opponents of American

82  Steffen Bruendel

imperialism.”56 Indeed, as Eamonn McCann recalls, the Black Panthers “were enormously popular in the Bogside.”57 Their slogan, “colonized in our own country” matched the widespread feeling that Unionist hegemony in Ulster was colonialism at home.58 In Spring 1969, the US American National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) praised “the valorous efforts of the Catholic minority in Northern Ireland to secure political, economic and social rights.” The Black Panther newspaper added that since “non-violence had not worked out in Northern Ireland”, the Ulster civil rights movement “has started to fight back” against reactionaries and police.59 Travelling to the USA for the first time in August 1969, Bernadette Devlin established personal contacts with BPP leaders. Being “the single most important figure in Irish-American politics” the media covered her role as Northern Irish ­civil-rights activist, British MP, and committed rioter extensively. Parallels with black political prisoners in the USA were especially striking after hundreds of Catholic Irishmen were detained in prison after “internment without trial” was introduced in Northern Ireland on the basis of the Special Powers Act in August 1970. As a result, on a subsequent voyage to the USA in 1971, Devlin visited imprisoned American civil rights activist Angela Davis.60 In contrast to African-Americans, however, Irish-Americans were generally more interested in the question of Irish reunification than in questions of civil rights. Furthermore, they did not appreciate the notion that Catholics were “the Negroes of Northern Ireland.” During her visits to the USA, Devlin confronted Irish-Americans with this double standard—advocating for civil rights in Northern Ireland but rejecting them for African-Americans.This burdened her relations with Irish-Americans.61 In March 1969 the US government refused to officially address discrimination in Northern Ireland and thus intervene in British internal affairs, arguing that Britain was a democracy and securing political freedom.The State Department still hesitated to act when 100 Members of Congress publicly declared that discrimination and intolerance were “encouraged by and rooted in the laws of Northern Ireland.” Even after the Battle of the Bogside, official US policy refrained from criticizing its close ally.62 However, the deployment of British troops to Northern Ireland in August 1969 made the Troubles an international topic. It caused legal problems, with the Republic of Ireland complaining about 47 border incursions and 27 flyovers by the British forces, which in the eyes of the government in Dublin could become a threat to international peace. The British government denied the international dimension of the Ulster crisis and regarded it as a purely internal affair to avoid foreign political intervention.63 Nevertheless, British military intervention finally put the conflict on the agenda of prominent Irish-American politicians. In 1971 Senator Edward Kennedy presented a resolution to the US Senate demanding not only the immediate withdrawal of British troops but also the establishment of a united Ireland. Americans had learned, as he pointed out, that the solution to end injustice “is not repression.” He declared the crisis in Northern Ireland to be “a lesson to the world

Challenging British sovereignty  83

that religious intolerance can run just as deep and be just as cruel and violent as racial discrimination.”64 However, heavy fighting in Derry and the subsequent deployment of British troops under the command of an army General-Officer-Commanding also marked a turning point in the perception of the Troubles in Britain. Instead of quickly ending the crisis, the military intervention actually raised further questions about both authority and resistance and brought the relationship between law and force under scrutiny. The British movement’s newspapers, Black Dwarf and Red Mole, deliberately supported the Northern Irish claim for civil rights. The Dwarf compared the conflict to the liberation struggles in Africa, Asia, and Latin America, and in August 1971 the Mole displayed a collage of fully armed British soldiers on the front page and called for support for the IRA’s fight “against British imperialism,” thus applying a term normally used to interpret foreign policy issues.65 By presenting third-world liberation movements as positive examples from which European campaigns could learn, both papers challenged the traditional Eurocentric view on world politics. Their quest for transnational solidarity implied a shift from the geopolitical distinction between European “centers” and overseas “peripheries” to a global approach to the interpretation of socio-political change. Supporting anti-colonial movements in former British colonies consequently meant advocating self-determination for England’s “domestic colonies.” Northern Ireland was a special case since it could be seen as a “periphery in the center”, i.e., in the UK, or as the “third world in Europe.”66 The British suppression of protests in Northern Ireland culminated in the socalled “Bloody Sunday” of January 30, 1972 when British troops shot 27 protesters in Derry, killing 13. The following day the Mole featured a four-page “Bloody Sunday Special Edition” demanding that citizens “Avenge Derry.” Questioning whether the use of force had been legitimate, they called for a demonstration at Downing Street. The official explanation that the shooting was necessary in self-defense infuriated British and Northern Irish activists alike; 1972 was to become the most violent year with 496 people killed and more than 10,000 bombs planted in Ulster. By defining British policy as a ruthless form of British imperialism, the Dwarf and the Mole effectively changed the perception of the Troubles in Northern Ireland. In so doing, solidarity with the Irish Catholic quest for self-determination became a major topic. The transnational themes of freedom and self-determination were transformed into a national challenge: to “Defeat British Imperialism in Ireland.”67 When Bloody Sunday caused an international outcry, it further tightened the links between the American and the Irish movement. As in the USA, no soldier was ever tried before a military court for participation in the killings of civilians. African-Americans were reminded of the American “Bloody Sunday” of March 7,  1965 when police outside the city of Selma had attacked civil-rights marchers. Pointing out the similarities between both incidents, a US activist stated at a NICRA meeting two weeks after the massacre in Derry that “the struggle for Irish freedom is the same struggle as that going on in the United States.”68 Four weeks after the massacre Edward Kennedy compared the situation in Northern

the IRA. Against British Imperialism,” The Red Mole, Vol. 2 No. 14, August 1971.

FIGURE 4.3 “For

Underground newspaper in the private collection of Steffen Bruendel.

British Imperialism in Ireland,” The Red Mole, No. 34, January 10, 1972.

FIGURE 4.4  “Defeat

Underground newspaper in the private collection of Steffen Bruendel.

86  Steffen Bruendel

Ireland with that in Vietnam. He recalled that violence and massacres had caused international public outcry and thus delegitimized US warfare. Britain was facing this situation now: “Just as Ulster is Britain’s Vietnam, so Bloody Sunday is Britain’s My Lai.”69 In August 1972 the US broadcasting company NBC interviewed Devlin and summed up the situation with words that could have been used by American and Irish activists alike: “The white Catholics in Ulster are the same as the blacks in the United States; they’ve been deprived of their rights, hurried into slums, and denied jobs.”70

Direct action and direct rule As early as October 1967 Austin Currie, a young Irish Nationalist MP at Stormont, had warned that if reforms were not forthcoming extra-parliamentary opposition would develop within a year.71 This prediction proved to be right. The violent clash between civil-rights marchers and Loyalists in October 1968 strengthened the Northern Irish civil-rights movement. Since Devlin regarded any compromise with the UUP as impossible because their power was entirely based on discrimination, she suggested “the most extreme solution” in her maiden speech before the parliament in April 1969: “abolishing Stormont and ruling from Westminster.”72 This would mean direct rule but it could change the situation for the better since the British parliament and government would not be able to restrict civil rights as easily as could the local Northern Irish authorities. With Westminster favoring reforms, Prime Minister Harold Wilson threatened to introduce direct rule in Ulster as a means to enforce stability. However, he was well aware that this might upset Unionists who strongly objected to radical changes. If the system were altered fundamentally the army would eventually face a war on two fronts, fighting not only the IRA but also the Ulster Volunteer Force (UVF) set up by Unionists. Furthermore, establishing an alternative system in Northern Ireland might endanger the constitutional arrangements of 1921. Hoping that Stormont ultimately would handle the crisis, Westminster imposed reforms and set up an inquiry on the Troubles. Published in October 1969, the report that resulted recommended that the RUC be disarmed and the controversial B-Specials disbanded. This caused an outcry among Unionists who rioted in Belfast’s Shankill Road in June 1970, killing one policeman.73 In December 1969, following a split in the organization, the IRA’s military wing formed the Provisional IRA. The Provisional IRA favored a more aggressive attitude towards the government and the British Army. Initially greeted as guarantors of law and order by Protestants and Catholics alike, the British troops’ situation became more and more difficult as Irish Republicans sought to provoke confrontations and further delegitimize the British authorities. The introduction of a curfew in Belfast’s Lower Falls Road from 3 to 5 July 1970 in order to search for weapons inflamed anger. Gerry Adams, who had grown up in Falls Road, joined the Provisional IRA in April 1970, starting to target British soldiers. In February 1971 the army mourned the first victim.74

Challenging British sovereignty  87

Even though the new conservative British government under PM Edward Heath, elected in June 1970, sympathized with the UUP it declined Stormont’s demand to restore security by repression. Hence Chichester-Clark resigned in March 1971 and was replaced by Brian Faulkner, who successfully convinced Westminster of the need for tougher army action. In an interview published by New Zealand student newspaper Salient on August 4, 1971 Bernadette Devlin announced “when violence is used against us, we will assert our right to defend ourselves against the violence of the State.” It would not be an easy fight, she added, but “we’re determined to win this time.”75 The Unionist paramilitary Ulster Defence Association (UDA), formed in September 1971, took up the fight and killed more than 100 people within a year. In October 1972 UDA even declared war on the British Army, thus converting the army’s task into the horror-scenario of a war on two fronts. The introduction of internment without trial in August 1971 proved to be a grave political mistake, for it fueled the conflict and escalated violence. In the following 17 months 610 people were killed. The Derry massacre of January 30, 1972 (Bloody Sunday) unleashed strong anti-British feelings in Ulster and Ireland. Hence, the movement that had initially shown a transnational attitude advocating civil rights transformed into an ethno-national movement demanding a united Ireland. This aim was also widely supported in the South. In the region of 20,000 people demonstrated in front of the British embassy in Dublin on February 2, 1972 and subsequently burnt it down. In the same month, Irish foreign minister Patrick Hillary summed up what was soon to become the slogan “Brits out” in stating: “From now on my aim is to get Britain out of Ireland.”76 British soldiers arrested Gerry Adams in March 1972, at that time one of the IRA’s battalion-commanders. After having been imprisoned and mistreated, Adams was eventually transferred to Long Kesh internment camp. The security forces’ brutality and application of torture to internees initially discredited them so that the IRA gained credibility. Adams was released on short notice in the summer to take part in secret talks with the British government in London over the future of Northern Ireland. When the talks proved inconclusive Adams planned a series of car-bomb attacks but was again arrested on July 19, 1972. Regardless, on Friday, July 21, 1972, approximately 20 bombs exploded in Belfast, killing nine people and injuring more than 100. “Bloody Friday” became the equivalent of previous Bloody Sunday.77 NICRA and PD had initially focused on marches and blockades as a means of direct action. By infuriating the authorities they triggered mobilization. The lesson learned from the Americans was clear: “Provoking the police into attacking seemingly peaceful protestors was the only certain way to wrest the political initiative from the government.”78 From Bloody Sunday of January 1972 both the NICRA and the PD advocated violence. Devlin slapped British Conservative Home Secretary Reginald Maudlin and stated, referring to the South-African Sharpeville Massacre of 1960, that the Derry massacre “was our Sharpeville and we shall never forget it.”79 Unionists also mobilized. Emerging from a split in the UUP the Ulster

88  Steffen Bruendel

Vanguard movement demanded that Ulster stayed British. On March 18, 1972, more than 60,000 uniformed people gathered in Belfast for a fascist-style mass rally. In this way, they confronted Stormont and Westminster with Protestant strength and the prospect of violence.80 The British government, fearing that Northern Ireland’s administration was incapable of maintaining state authority, took over control of law and order. On March 30,  1972 the Northern Ireland Temporary Provisions Act became effective, introducing direct rule in Northern Ireland. The newly created post of Secretary of State for Northern Ireland assumed the duties of the Governor and the Northern Irish government. The Stormont parliament was indefinitely prorogued.81 In a sense the imposition of direct rule in 1972 can be understood as the government yielding to the movement’s demands, since Devlin had already advocated this measure as early as 1969. However, it was Stormont’s reluctance to enforce reforms that forced Westminster to act. Given that the constitutional and legal frame of Ulster had proven inappropriate to secure civil rights for all citizens, a profound political change was inevitable. This illustrates how the movement affected political institutions and finally influenced the power relations between Stormont and Westminster. The fall of Stormont ended half a century of Unionist rule in Northern Ireland. To Catholics this seemed like a victory but Unionists regarded direct rule as inappropriate interference, claiming—in the words of displaced Prime Minister Brian Faulkner—that Ulster was no “coconut colony.”82 Direct rule nevertheless changed Ulster’s political system. On March 20, 1973 the British government proposed a Northern Ireland Assembly to finally replace the ­suspended Stormont parliament. It was to be elected by proportional representation, finally introducing a more just electoral system. Eventually, the Northern ­Ireland Assembly Bill was passed on May 3, 1973 so that elections for the new assembly could be held on 28 June. On July 18, 1973 the Northern Ireland Constitution Act received royal assent thus paving the way for a new executive chosen by the Northern Ireland Assembly.83 Reflecting the Catholic’s demands to end discrimination it also stated that all existing Acts as well as all new Acts were to be void if they discriminated against an individual or group of persons on the basis of their religious or political beliefs. At last state sovereignty in Ulster was based on a new legal frame.84 However, the Northern Ireland Constitution Act also declared “that Northern Ireland remains part of Her Majesty’s dominions and of the United Kingdom.”85 This was directed at the increasingly disloyal Unionists to impress upon them that Northern Ireland was to remain part of the UK. The Northern Ireland Emergency Provisions Act of July 25, 1973 aimed at modernizing penal law and at ensuring internal security. It abolished the death penalty for murder but also banned membership under penalty of law in certain organizations, e.g., the IRA and the Unionist paramilitary UVF. In addition, the British government sought to introduce power sharing in Northern Ireland to end direct rule. The so-called Sunningdale Agreement of December 1973 aimed at introducing proportional representation and a consultative Council of Ireland whose members were partly selected by the

Challenging British sovereignty  89

Republic of Ireland. And yet, this initiative proved unacceptable to Unionists. It was not until 2007 that Westminster finally reached an agreement.86 Introducing direct rule had problematic consequences: a conflict that had arisen about social matters but become a question of civil rights was now transformed into an ethnic national issue. The case of Northern Ireland shows how social movements change in the course of events. What had started in the late 1960s as an inclusive, reformist movement transformed into an exclusivist ethno-nationalist campaign. The slogan “Brits out” illustrated that by the early 1970s nationalism replaced civil rights as the main political issue. This made any attempts to introduce reforms or even reconcile the two conflicting parties even more difficult.87 Devlin summarized that the task “was not to free the Six Counties but to start all over again the national revolution.”88 Ultimately this meant civil war in which guerrilla warfare met military oppression. Between 1968 and 1972 more than 300 persons died in violent clashes.89 After 1972 both radical Catholic and Protestant activists believed that terror was the most promising means to either enforce or prevent change. IRA as well as Ulster Loyalists applied more violent means of direct action including sabotage, property destruction, assaults, and assassinations.This led to civil disorder and terror. The spiral of violence endangered the rule of law and threatened civilians as well as police officers and soldiers.90 The transnational civil-rights community disintegrated when the protest movements in Western Europe declined in the early 1970s and were followed by terror groups in several countries that explicitly challenged the state’s monopoly on legitimate force or even sought to overthrow the existing political order. In Britain it was the IRA that posed a continuous threat for decades. Far from being limited to Northern Ireland, the IRA’s bombings and assassinations were directed at institutions and persons throughout the UK. Until the official end of British military intervention in Ulster in 2007, approximately 3,700 people lost their lives.91

Summary Severe social, economic, and political inequalities between Catholics and Protestants ultimately caused the Troubles in Northern Ireland. Hence, discord did not primarily arise over religion but over discrimination. The civil-rights movement started along with emerging protests in Britain against the Vietnam War, colonialism, and racism and was embedded in the global student unrest culminating in 1968.While the British protest movement is often referred to as merely a cultural phenomenon, the Northern Irish challenge to British sovereignty underscores that the protest was eminently political, encouraging a rethinking of traditional understandings of the decade. The supranational consciousness of the protest movements rather than the transnational connections of individuals and groups were historically specific in the late 1960s and catalyzed successful – even if short-lived – mass mobilization across borders. The fierce attack on marchers in Derry on October 5, 1968 synchronized the civil rights’ campaigners’ perception of power structures and led them to challenge the state’s monopoly on the use of force.The protesters were non-state actors like students

90  Steffen Bruendel

and intellectuals, but whereas the protagonists in Ulster had predominantly workingclass backgrounds, their counterparts in Britain were mostly middle-class men and women. In seeking to co-operate across national borders they created a transnational discourse community exchanging ideas and means of action. Alternative publications played a significant role in mobilizing the movement and addressing issues omitted by mainstream media. They linked British suppression in Northern Ireland with global issues like imperialism, colonialism, and exploitation. NICRA and PD activists sought to challenge extant power structures. They saw themselves as colonized by Britain and interpreted their struggle for civil rights as a fight for freedom and self-determination. This scheme of perception led them to identify with liberation movements in the so-called “Third World” and with the US civil-rights movement. New forms of protest like marches, sit-ins, and barricades were adopted from the African-American movement, provoking harsh reactions from Unionists and the police. Ultimately, fighting against “British imperialism” in Ulster was seen as another side of the same coin: the global struggle for freedom, peace, and a new society. The governments in Belfast and London met demands for a political alternative by following a double strategy: they sought to canalize complaints by announcing political and social reforms and suppressing protest by force. Furthermore, Westminster hoped that Stormont would handle the crisis such that they could avoid direct involvement. However, the deployment of British troops in 1969 increased international public awareness and undermined the British government’s notion that the Troubles were a domestic crisis. Perceiving them as an international issue, the Republic of Ireland and the USA questioned that the London government alone should determine the legal frame of Ulster. But reforms were discussed too late.The violent suppression of protest – which culminated in Bloody Sunday on January 30, 1972 – was interpreted as a ruthless form of British imperialism at home, and the British power in Ulster was openly questioned by Northern Irish activists. The slogan “British out” marked the transition from a transnationally oriented civil-rights movement to an ethno-national liberation movement. Whereas many Northern Irish activists initially remained loyal to the UK and only questioned the use of force by the Northern Irish government, they rejected British authority after direct rule was imposed in 1973. What had started in 1967 as a question of equal rights for all citizens now became an issue of Irish national self-determination. As the conflict became more violent after 1973, British troops were increasingly perceived as a foreign power and targeted by the IRA accordingly. Challenging British sovereignty ultimately resulted in a paramilitary assault on the United Kingdom. Direct rule ultimately changed the political system, with the Northern Ireland Parliament being suspended in 1972, abolished in 1973, and finally replaced by new institutions. Here lies the political impact of the movement that had exposed Stormont’s resistance to reforms and thus forced Westminster to act. However, neither the new structures nor the reforms imposed under the Northern Ireland Constitution Act served to pacify Ulster. Catholics and even Protestant Unionists both remained alienated from Britain.

Challenging British sovereignty  91

The fall of Stormont in 1973 was problematic for the protest movement and the British government alike. On the one hand the Northern Irish civil-rights movement faced the fact that direct rule changed the controversial political system but it also ended any form of self-governance. Consequently, the movement’s aims changed, now focusing on independence and thus challenging British sovereignty directly. On the other hand, the British government realized that it could only uphold British sovereignty via direct rule by force. However, the transnational activism that had started in 1967 had a lasting effect on political power in Northern Ireland since it irreversibly changed the power relation between Belfast and London authorities.

Notes   1 The official name is Northern Ireland. Ulster is often used by Protestant Unionists but seldom by Catholic Irish nationalists who recall the partition of the province. Here both terms are used synonymously.   2 Gerry Adams, Cage Eleven – Erinnerungen an Long Kesh (Cadolzburg: ars vivendi, 1995), 24. See also Dietrich Schulze-Marmeling, Die irische Krise. Dritte Welt in Europa (Wien: Promedia, 1988), 23.   3 See, for example, Max Hastings, Ulster 1969. The Fight for Civil Rights in Northern Ireland (London: Victor Gollancz, 1970); Ronald Fraser (ed.), 1968: A Student Generation in Revolt (New York: Pantheon, 1988); Tim Pat Coogan, The Troubles: Ireland’s Ordeal 1966–1996 and the Search for Peace (New York: Palgrave, 2002); Simon Prince, Northern Ireland’s ’68. Civil Rights, Global Revolt and the Origins of the Troubles (Dublin: Irish Academic Press, 2007); Brian Feeney, Pocket History of the Troubles (Dublin: The O’Brian Press, 2010); Simon Prince and Geoffrey Warner, Belfast and Derry in Revolt. A New History of the Start of the Troubles (Dublin: Irish Academic Press, 2012); Chris Reynolds, Sous les pavés . . .The Troubles. Northern Ireland, France and the European Collective Memory of 1968 (Frankfurt/M.: Peter Lang, 2014).  4 Dieter Grimm, “Das staatliche Gewaltmonopol”, in Herausforderungen des staatlichen Gewaltmonopols. Recht und politisch motivierte Gewalt am Ende des 20. Jahrhunderts, eds, Freia Anders and Ingrid Gilcher-Holtey (Frankfurt, New York: Campus 2006), 18–38; Terry Nardin, “Conflicting Conceptions of Political Violence”, in Political Science Annual 4 (1972), 75–126.   5 Pierre-Yves Saunier, “Transnational”, in The Palgrave Dictionary of Transnational History, eds, Iriye Akira and Pierre-Yves Saunier (Basingstoke: Macmilllan 2009), 1047–1055, here 1048, 1051; Akira Irye, “The Transnational Turn”, in Diplomatic History 31, 3 (2007), 373–376; Robert Keohane and Joseph Nye (eds), “Transnational Relations and World Politics. An Introduction”, in International Organisation 25, 3 (1971), 329–349; Robert Keohane and Joseph Nye, International Relations Theory. Power and Interdependence (New York: Pearson, 2000).  6 Ingrid Gilcher-Holtey, “Introduction”, in Revolution of Perception? Consequences and Echoes of 1968, ed. Ingrid Gilcher-Holtey (New York: Berghahn, 2014), 1–14, here 6; Stanley J. Tambiah, “Transnational Movements, Diaspora and Multiple Modernities”, in Daedalus 129, 1 (Winter 2000), 163–194; David Apter, “Political Violence in Analytical Perspective”, in The Legitimization of Violence, ed. David Apter (New York: New York University Press, 1997), 1–32, here 4–6, 10–11 (Quote 5).  7 Gilcher-Holtey, Introduction, 6. See also Ingrid Gilcher-Holtey, Die 68er Bewegung. Deutschland – Westeuropa – USA (München: Beck, 2001), 113–125.  8 Lorenzo Bosi and Marco Giugni, “The Impact of Protest Movements on the Establishment: Dimensions, Models, and Approaches”, in The Establishment Responds: Power,

92  Steffen Bruendel

Politics, and Protest since 1945, eds, Kathrin Fahlenbach, Martin Klimke, Joachim Scharloth and Laura Wong (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), 17–28, here 18. See also Lorenzo Bosi, Marco Giugni and Katrin Uba (eds), The Consequences of Social Movements. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015).   9 Michael Farrell, Northern Ireland.The Orange State (London: Pluto Press, 1976), 249. 10 Ibid., 250; Bernadette Devlin, Irland: Religionskrieg oder Klassenkampf? (Reinbek bei Hamburg: rororo, 1969), 93–108. 11 Marc Mulholland, Northern Ireland: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), 23–25; Prince, Northern Ireland’s ’68, 12–14; Hastings, Ulster, 26; Gretchen M. MacMillan, State, Society and Authority in Ireland. The Foundations of the Modern Irish State (Dublin: Gill and Macmillan, 1993), 165–185. 12 Martin Wallace, Northern Ireland. 50 Years of Self Government (Newton Abbott: Barnes & Noble, 1971), 27–44; Aaron Edwards, The Northern Ireland Trouble. Operation Banner 1969–2007 (Oxford: Osprey, 2011), 15–16; Henry Kelly, How Stormont Fell (Dublin: Gil and Macmillan, 1972), v–vii; Hastings, Ulster, 21, 26, 33. 13 Graham Walker, A History of the Ulster Unionist Party (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2004). 14 Laura K. Donohue, “Regulating Northern Ireland: The Special Powers Acts, 1922– 1972”, in The Historical Journal, 41, 4 (I998), 1089–1120. 15 David McKittrick and David McVea, Making Sense of the Troubles. A History of the Northern Ireland Conflict (London: Penguin, 2012), 12; Wallace, Northern Ireland, 23–26; Hastings, Ulster, 28–30; Mulholland, Northern Ireland, 50–51. 16 Kelly, Stormont, 72. See also Schulze-Marmeling, Krise, 38. 17 Gerry Adams, Before the Dawn. An Autobiography (Dublin: Brandon, 2001), 4. 18 Gerard DeGroot, The Seventies Unplugged. A Kaleidoscopic Look at a Violent Decade (London: Macmillan, 2010), 65; Lorenzo Bosi, “From ‘British Rights for British Citizens’ to ‘British Out’. Dynamic Social Movement Development in the Northern Ireland Civil Rights Movement, 1960s to 1972”, in Protest Beyond Borders: Contentious Politics in Europe since 1945, eds, Hara Kouki and Eduardo Romanos (New York, Oxford: Berghahn Books, 2011), 125–139, here 128; Coogan, Troubles, 48–50; Mulholland, 37–48; Feeney, 32, 135. 19 McKittrick/McVae, 12, 15–19; DeGroot, 65; Caroline Kennedy-Pipe, The Origins of the Present Troubles in Northern Ireland (London, New York: Longman, 1997), 22; Hastings, Ulster, 30; Mulholland, Northern Ireland, 51. 20 Arthur Aughey/John Oakland, Irish Civilization: An Introduction (London, New York: Routledge, 2013), 115–116. 21 Kennedy-Pipe, Origins, 39–42; Hastings, Ulster, 26–36; Mulholland, 37–48; Adams, Before the Dawn, 5. 22 Reported in: Parliamentary Debates, Northern Ireland House of Commons, Vol. XVI, Cols. 1091–1095; Parliamentary Debates, Northern Ireland House of Commons, Vol. XVII, Cols. 72–73. See also: Jonathan Bardon, A History of Ulster (Belfast: Blackstaff, 1992), 538–539; Hastings, Ulster, 26. 23 DeGroot, Seventies, 66. See also Prince, Northern Ireland’s ’68, 7; Coogan, Troubles, 49. 24 Bosi, British Rights, 128–133; McKittrick/McVae, 30–33, 42–46; Feeney, 6–12. 25 Steffen Bruendel, “Global Dimensions of Conflict and Cooperation. Public Protest and the Quest for Transnational Solidarity in Britain, 1968–1973”, in Ingrid Gilcher-Holtey, Revolution, 35–68, here 48–49; Bob Purdie, Politics in the Streets. The Origins of the Civil Rights Movement in Northern Ireland (Belfast: Blackstaff, 1990), 198–205, 209–211; Prince, Northern Ireland’s ’68, 155; Prince/Warner, Belfast and Derry, 135–139. 26 Bruendel, Global, 37–38, 39–43, 47, 50–53; Reynolds, Sous, 104–110. 27 Roisín McDonough, “Independence or Integration?”, in Power, Politics, Positionings. Women in Northern Ireland (Belfast: Democratic Dialogue, 1996), 25–32, here 26. 28 CAIN Web Service, A Chronology of the Conflict – 1968, accessed July 4, 2016, URL: http://cain.ulst.ac.uk/othelem/chron/ch68.htm; Rosemary Sales, Women Divided. Gender, Religion and Politics in Northern Ireland (London, New York: Routledge, 1997), 41; Kelly, Stormont, vii; Adams, Before the Dawn, 83.

Challenging British sovereignty  93

29 Ferhus O’Hare quoted in: Bosi, British Rights, 130. See also Prince, Northern Ireland’s ’68, 115–117; Prince/Warner, Belfast and Derry, 103–104, 134–135; DeGroot, Seventies, 68 (quote ibid.). 30 Prince, Northern Ireland’s ’68, 135–137, 154; Prince/Warner, Belfast and Derry, 32–33; Reynolds, Sous, 94–97; Dooley, Black and Green, 140; Hastings, Ulster, 48–49; Eamonn McCann, War and an Irish Town (London: Pluto, 1993). 31 Quoted in Fraser, 1968, 238. See also Dooley, Black and Green, 136, 139; Coogan, Troubles, 78–80; Hastings, Ulster, 63–65. 32 DeGroot, Seventies, 67; Dooley, Black and Green, 53, 139; Purdie, Politics, 206–210; Prince, Northern Ireland’s ’68, 147–149, 154, 194–208; Michael Farrell, Northern Ireland. The Orange State (London: Pluto, 1976); Bernadette Devlin, The Price of My Soul (London: Pan Books, 1969), 101–103; Niels Seibert, Vergessene Proteste. Internationalismus und Antirassismus (Münster: Unrast, 2008), 99. 33 Brian Lalor (ed.), The Encyclopaedia of Ireland (Dublin: Gill & Macmillan, 2003), 7–8, 38. Ed Moloney, A Secret History of the IRA (London, New York: Allen Lane, 2002), 38, 46; Adams, Before the Dawn, 3–8, 18–20, 26–28, 50–56, 75–85. 34 Commons Sitting of 22 April 1969, Series 5 Vol. 782, cc262–324, accessed October 29, 2015, URL: http://hansard.millbanksystems.com/commons/1969/apr/22/northern-ireland. 35 McKittrick/McVae, 47–55. 36 Commons Sitting of 22 April 1969, Series 5 Vol. 782, cc262–324, accessed October 29, 2015, URL: http://hansard.millbanksystems.com/commons/1969/apr/22/northern-ireland. 37 Interview with Bernadette Devlin, in: Salient. Victoria University Student Newspaper. Volume. 34, No. 15, August 4, 1971, 10–13, here 10, accessed July 4, 2016, URL: http:// nzetc.victoria.ac.nz/downloads/Salient34151971.pdf. 38 Interview, 11. 39 Sales, Women Divided, 4–5. 40 Interview, 11. 41 Sales, Women Divided, 5. 42 Interview, 11–12. 43 Begona Aretxaga, Shattering Silence.Women, Nationalism, and Political Subjectivity in Northern Ireland (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1997), 1–6 (quote 1); Sales, Women Divided, 5. 44 Dooley, Black and Green, 83–92, 139. 45 Dooley, Black and Green, 4–6, 10–17, 25–27, 54–55; Prince/Warner, Belfast and Derry, 106, 110, 128–129; Farrell, Orange, 295. Irish radicalism has been transnational and anticolonial since the foundation of the Fenian Irish Republican Brotherhood in 1858. Eventually, Irish refugees founded a Fenian Brotherhood in New York. Both were connected in their struggle for an independent Ireland. See Owen McGee, The IRB: The Irish Republican Brotherhood from The Land League to Sinn Féin (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2005), 15, 46–60. 46 Prince, Northern Ireland’s ’68, 123–125 (quote 123). 47 Ibid., 123–125, 156; Eamonn McCann, War and an Irish Town (London: Pluto Press, 1993), 91. 48 Reynolds, Sous, 55; Purdie, Politics, 159–162; Prince, Northern Ireland’s ’68, 162; Bosi, British Rights, 133. 49 Prince, Northern Ireland’s ’68, 161–163 (quote 161); Prince/Warner, Belfast and Derry, 85, 89–99; Hastings, Ulster, 52–56, 62. 50 Dooley, Black and Green, 105–107, 110–113; Coogan, Troubles, 348–384; Hastings, Ulster, 151. 51 Reynolds, Sous, 73–79; Purdie, Politics, 189, 193, 196; Prince, Northern Ireland’s ’68, 167– 168, 209. 52 Devlin, Price, 125. See also Frances Molloy, “Burntollet”, in: Geschichten aus der Geschichte Nordirlands, eds, Rosaleen O’Neill and Peter Nonnenmacher (Darmstadt: Luchterhand, 1987), 152–160. 53 Hastings, Ulster, 78–94; McKittrick/McVea, 61–66; Coogan, Troubles, 80–82; Dooley, Black and Green, 57.

94  Steffen Bruendel

54 Prince/Warner, Belfast and Derry, 179–202; Prince, Northern Ireland’s ’68, 127; Kelly, Stormont, viii; Hastings, Ulster, 124–141; Edwards, Northern Ireland, 9, 29–32. 55 Paul Arthur and Keith Jeffery, Northern Ireland since 1968 (Oxford: Blackwell, 1996), 82–83 (quote ibid.); Paul Dixon and Eamonn O’Kane, Northern Ireland since 1969 (Harlow: Pearson, 2011), 25; Wallace, Northern Ireland, 173–174. 56 Joshua Bloom and Waldo E. Martin, Black against Empire: The History and Politics of the Black Panther Party (Oakland, CA: University of California Press, 2013), 3. See also, Curtis J. Austin, Up Against the Wall:Violence in the Making and Unmaking of the Black Panther Party (Fayetteville, AR: University of Arkansas Press, 2006); Seibert, Proteste, 102–104. 57 Quoted in Prince, Northern Ireland’s ’68, 214. 58 Dooley, Black and Green, 65; Prince, Northern Ireland’s ’68, 213. 59 Quoted in Dooley, Black and Green, 61. 60 Dooley, Black and Green, 65–67, 83 (quotes) 91; Seibert, Proteste, 116–122. 61 Dooley, Black and Green, 78–80, 87–88. 62 Dooley, Black and Green, 80 (quote ibid.). 63 Arthur/Jeffery, Northern Ireland, 97–98; Wallace, 173. 64 Dooley, Black and Green, 80–81 (quotes), 92, 137–138. 65 Arthur/Jeffery, Northern Ireland, 10; Bruendel, Global, 42, 50, 99. 66 Schulze-Marmeling, Krise, 23–28 (quotes 23, 24, 26); Bruendel, Global, 53. 67 Red Mole 3, No. 34, (10 January 1972), 1; Bruendel, Global, 50; Dixon/O’Kane, 3, 33. 68 Dooley, Black and Green, 67. 69 Quoted in Dooley, Black and Green, 81. 70 Quoted in Dooley, Black and Green, 110. 71 Dooley, Black and Green, 45–46. 72 Commons Sitting of 22 April 1969, Series 5 Vol. 782, accessed October 30, 2015, URL: http://hansard.millbanksystems.com/commons/1969/apr/22/northern-ireland. 73 McKittrick/McVae, 66; Dixon/O’Kane, 27–28; Hastings, Ulster, 159–161, 178–187; Prince/Warner, Belfast and Derry, 222–227, 235–238; Kennedy-Pipe, Origins, 47, 51. 74 Moloney, Secret History, 44–46, 73; Adams, Before the Dawn, 4–6, 139–143, 149–150; Dixon/O’Kane, 28–29; DeGroot, Seventies, 71; Kennedy-Pipe, Origins, 53; Kelly, Stormont, 101–103. 75 Interview, 13. 76 Dixon/O’Kane, Northern Ireland, 26–30 (quote 30); Coogan, Troubles, 154, 161 (quote); Edwards, Northern Ireland, 26; Mulholland, 77–79. 77 Moloney, Secret History, 101–102; Mulholland, 85–86; Adams, Cage Eleven, 13–14. 78 Prince, Northern Ireland’s ’68, 160–161. 79 Quoted in DeGroot, Seventies, 72; Coogan, Troubles, 161–167; Kelly, Stormont, 118–120. 80 Adrian Guelke and Jim Smyth, “The Ballot Bomb: Terrorism and the Electoral Process in Northern Ireland”, in Political Parties and Terrorist Groups, ed. Leonard Weinberg (London: Frank Cass, 1992), 103–124, here 106; Mulholland, 86–88; Kelly, Stormont, 121–129. 81 Coogan, Troubles, 165; McKittrick/McVae, 91–96; Kelly, Stormont, 134–142. 82 Mulholland, Northern Ireland, 85 (quote ibid); Coogan, 165–166; Kelly, Stormont, 1–3. 83 Kennedy-Pipe, Origins, 62–71; Mulholland, Northern Ireland, 94–95. 84 Dixon/O’Kane, Northern Ireland, 35. 85 Northern Ireland Constitution Act, accessed January 5, 2016, URL: http://www. legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/1973/36/pdfs/ukpga_19730036_en.pdf. 86 Kennedy-Pipe, Origins, 56; Dixon/O’Kane, Northern Ireland, 33–39; Mulholland, Northern Ireland, 93–98; Schulze-Marmeling, Krise, 14–15. 87 Dooley, Black and Green, 92; Bosi, British Rights, 125. 88 Quoted in Hastings, Ulster, 200. 89 Kelly, Stormont, ix, 56, 68, 100–101. 90 Mulholland, Northern Ireland, 75–77, 91–92, 100–106; Prince/Warner, Belfast and Derry, 252; Coogan, Troubles, 149–153; John Black, Killing for Britain (Edinburgh: Frontline Noir, 2011); Edwards, Northern Ireland, 33, 35, 38; Dieter Rucht, “Violence and New

Challenging British sovereignty  95

Social Movements”, in International Handbook of Violence Research,Volume I, eds, Wilhelm Heitmeyer and John Hagan (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 2003), 369–382. 91 DeGroot, Seventies, 19–29, 72, 101–155; Edwards, Northern Ireland, 7; Tim Pat Coogan, The IRA (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002).

Selected bibliography Aretxaga, Begona. Shattering Silence. Women, Nationalism, and Political Subjectivity in Northern Ireland. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1997. Arthur, Paul, and Keith Jeffery. Northern Ireland since 1968. Oxford: Blackwell, 1996. Coogan, Tim Pat. The Troubles: Ireland’s Ordeal 1966–1996 and the Search for Peace. New York: Palgrave, 2002. Dixon, Paul, and Eamonn O’Kane. Northern Ireland since 1969. Harlow: Pearson, 2011. Gilcher-Holtey, Ingrid (ed.). Revolution of Perception? Consequences and Echoes of 1968. New York: Berghahn, 2014. McClenaghan. Dermie (ed.). Spirit of ’68 – Beyond the Barricades. Derry: Guildhall, 2009. McKittrick, David, and David McVea. Making Sense of the Troubles. A History of the Northern Ireland Conflict. London: Penguin, 2012. Prince, Simon, and Warner, Geoffrey. Belfast and Derry in Revolt. A New History of the Start of the Troubles. Dublin: Irish Academic Press, 2012. Prince, Simon. Northern Ireland’s ’68. Civil Rights, Global Revolt and the Origins of the Troubles. Dublin: Irish Academic Press, 2007. Purdie, Bob. Politics in the Streets. The Origins of the Civil Rights Movement in Northern Ireland. Belfast: Blackstaff, 1990. Reynolds, Chris. Sous les paves.. . .The Troubles. Northern Ireland, France and the European Collective Memory of 1968. Frankfurt am Main.: Peter Lang, 2014. Sales, Rosemary. Women Divided. Gender, Religion and Politics in Northern Ireland. London, New York: Routledge, 1997.

5 SOCIAL SCIENCE, CULTURAL IMPERIALISM, AND THE FORD FOUNDATION IN LATIN AMERICA IN THE 1960s Patrick Iber

In a major speech in 1972, Fidel Castro’s brother Raúl Castro, head of Cuba’s armed forces, spoke out against cultural imperialism. The U.S. government was trying to destroy Cuban socialism, he argued, not just by military means but through a nexus of official and quasi-official propaganda, made possible in part by disguising CIA agents as scholars and arming them with grants from major U.S. foundations. But these foreign intellectuals were no longer hostile liberals, he observed: now, they were socialists who feigned sympathy and friendliness. “ ‘Anticommunist intellectuals’ cover their subversive ideas with socialist phrases,” he said. “They cry out for economic and cultural relations with socialist countries, noting that they are blocked by the Marxist-Leninist character of socialism. They propose all possible recipes for the ‘perfection’ of socialism, for its ‘humanization’ and ‘democratization.’ . . . Imperialist reaction is prepared to accept any kind of socialism, except socialism with Communists based on strict Marxist-Leninist principles.”1 The enemy of Cuban socialism was no longer liberalism (which he thought discredited), but imported “humanist” forms of socialism. Both scholarly and popular memory have long associated the 1960s with the development of the New Left and of struggles for liberation around the globe. Sixties radicals launched systemic critiques of institutions—from governments to foundations—associated with liberalism, marking the 1960s as a time of heightened polarization between liberal and radical traditions.2 Liberalism in the U.S. in the 1960s, represented by Presidents Kennedy and Johnson, advanced civil rights legislation and a War on Poverty that sought to address segregation and “underdevelopment” within the United States. But liberalism was also anti-radical, responsible for the Bay of Pigs invasion, assassination attempts on Fidel Castro, the occupation of the Dominican Republic in 1965, domestic surveillance of activists, and the escalation of the war in Vietnam. Liberals in government, major foundations, and ­academe—and there was often overlap and movement between these

Latin America in the 1960s  97

categories—saw themselves as doing good in the world; radicals saw liberals as part of a delusional, self-congratulatory, and corrupt establishment. Liberals understood foreign policy failures as the result of good intentions gone awry, while radicals saw them as the deeply predictable consequences of capitalist imperialism.3 In their critique of liberal institutions, radicals employed the idea of “cultural imperialism,” which depicted a liberal campaign of spiritual and intellectual colonization aimed at destroying the revolutionary potential of the world’s population. They also leveled serious criticism at the actions of the wealthiest and most influential foundation of the era, the Ford Foundation. But despite their differences, both radicals and (generally) liberal U.S. institutions held the view that the knowledge produced by sociologists and other researchers was a vital tool for social change. Both understood the role that scholarship could play in the exercise of power. The major U.S. foundations favored a kind of technical knowledge that they hoped could be used to build effective, moderate governments and programs that would, in small but growing ways, improve standards of living along generally measurable metrics. Radicals hoped to use scholarship to inspire calls for deeper social transformation. These contrasting views have been represented in the historiography as well. Scholars have documented the ways in which the arts and sciences were shaped by a complex network of government, foundation, and university funding during the early Cold War.4 Many have linked the actions of major U.S. foundations to cultural imperialism and the disarming of social revolution in the service of U.S. empire.5 Some have defended the role of foundations in advancing liberal causes, while others have noted that the institutional evolution of the major foundations included many unexpected turns, and that the interests of foundation elites and those whose projects were eventually funded often diverged.6 This chapter examines the development of the critique of cultural imperialism that emerged amongst Latin American leftists in the 1960s through an analysis of the work of the Ford Foundation in the region. In that decade, the Ford Foundation expanded its efforts to fund the modernization of the social sciences in Latin America, as well as to promote related projects in literature and the arts. It understood its overseas work to be in line with its priorities for the U.S. domestic space: incorporating marginalized populations and addressing social injustice. But it did so in a broadly anti-Communist framework and had very real ties to both the U.S. government and the CIA. Latin American radicals therefore saw it as the tip of the spear in a broad project of cultural imperialism. The radicals were right about those government connections: evidence supporting the U.S. cultural imperialism thesis piled up during the decade, generating an intense climate of suspicion in Latin America around the work of social scientists from the United States. But as Raúl Castro’s speech indicates, suspicions extended not just to liberals but also to all manner of non-conforming leftists. In Latin America in the 1960s, the idea that the left—in the sense of the broad socialist left beyond liberalism—should be responsible for social transformation was practically hegemonic among intellectuals. But who would speak for the left? Would the voices be authoritarian or democratic? Nationalist or cosmopolitan? The first

98  Patrick Iber

half of the decade revealed the limits of the liberal agenda for social change. The critique of cultural imperialism, and self-criticism within the Ford Foundation, led in the second half of the decade to sponsorship of projects whose underlying politics were socialist, or even Marxist. Yet these various initiatives—including the last years of the Congress for Cultural Freedom, the “marginality project” in Chile and Argentina, and anthropologist Oscar Lewis’s poverty research in Cuba—still reinforced the climate of suspicion. This chapter argues that the interaction between liberal and radical arguments, and the particular things that each one could not see, made the shared goal of emancipatory social science difficult to realize, or even to imagine.

Modernization theory and its discontents Latin America had long been of interest to major U.S. foundations, including the Rockefeller and Ford. Early in the twentieth century the Rockefeller Foundation was especially active in public health campaigns that served, after a fashion, the demands of international trade in agricultural commodities.7 By midcentury it was also supporting a wide array of research and academic institutions for the development of social scientific knowledge.8 The Ford Foundation took much longer to direct special attention to Latin America, but by the 1960s it also was doing so. Both foundations were working to institutionalize “area studies” and in the 1960s Latin America, in the shadow of the Cuban Revolution, was a key region of concern for the United States.9 In 1967, for instance, the Joint Committee on Latin American Studies (JCLAS)— a Rockefeller Foundation-sponsored body that promoted research cooperation between U.S. and Latin American scholars—was planning a conference on economic history. Mainstream scholarship on development in the 1960s focused on obstacles to growth and how they might be overcome. Walt Rostow’s Stages of Economic Growth was perhaps the most influential, positing linear stages of development that eventually led to self-sustaining “take-off ” and to the possibility of a capitalist, democratic modernity—so this form of analysis was called modernization theory. Arthur Schlesinger Jr., a historian who, like Rostow, served as an advisor to President Kennedy, called modernization theory “a very American effort to persuade the developing countries to base their revolutions on Locke rather than Marx.”10 Proponents of modernization theory located the problem of poverty in “developing” countries as a product of flawed institutions, and they sought to remove obstacles to growth. But others saw the roots of poverty differently: they believed that world systems disadvantaged and exploited poorer countries.This “dependency” school, which developed in the thinking of the Argentine economist Raúl Prebisch over the course of the 1940s, spread from Latin America to the rest of the world.The dependency school featured moderates (like Prebisch) who emphasized the need for state-led industrialization to solve the problem of growing differences between world market prices for agricultural primary goods and finished goods. But it also contained a vocal group of radicals, frequently Marxist and inspired by the Cuban Revolution, who thought that the only way to break the bonds of dependency was via socialist revolution and withdrawal from capitalist exploitation.11

Latin America in the 1960s  99

It was into this polarized scholarly environment that the JCLAS stepped with its proposed forum on economic history. The committee invited the GermanAmerican economist Andre Gunder Frank without realizing that his interpretation of the inter-American economic relationship had developed into a radical form of dependency theory.12 To the JCLAS invitation, Frank replied: [T]he fundamental purpose and practices of your organization [are] to serve the vital interests of American imperialism by financing the generation of the ideas on which it thrives and by bribing scholars at home and abroad to prostitute not only their body but also their mind. You evidently understand Thomas W. Braden, the man who supervised the cultural activities of the CIA, when he says, “The cold war was and is a war, fought with ideas instead of bombs.” I am not interested in prostituting myself to the CIA, the Pentagon, or to any other institution of imperialism that is engaged in the self-same effort, however noble sounding its name and work. . . . Instead, I shall dedicate my work as a human being and social scientist to improving the social circumstances of Latin Americans and others, first by exposing and combating the cultural imperialism of the reactionary social pseudoscience under your sponsorship . . . and then by contributing all I can to the development of revolutionary social science consistent with our social responsibility.13 Frank’s letter—sent just days after the death of Che Guevara in the Bolivian j­ ungle— demonstrates the growing power of the radical critique of cultural imperialism. By the late 1960s, the experiences that sustained Frank’s rejection of mainstream liberalism had been accumulating. In 1964, for example, a U.S. Department of Defense project in sociology known as “Project Camelot” sought—in its words— to “develop a general social systems model which would make it possible to predict and influence politically significant aspects of social change.”14 The project aimed to study the conditions that could lead to revolution and identify state actions that might prevent it. It was still in the planning stages when it was exposed, denounced, and cancelled. (Similar projects, however, continued.)15 Those involved with the project purportedly saw it as a scholarly way to contribute to the prevention of a catastrophic revolution and did not see themselves as spies.16 Those who did not believe that revolution was inherently catastrophic, however, could easily conclude that the Camelot scholars were practicing social science in the service of empire. Frank also had a point about JCLAS itself: since the beginning of the 1960s many of its “Latin American” participants had viewed the discipline of sociology as a tool for bringing much-needed change to their countries (a perspective shared by sympathizers like Frank). Most North American participants, by contrast, were frustrated when empirical and quantitative studies of Latin American societies were described as a form of Yankee imperialism.17 But at least some North American scholars proudly accepted the charge. For example, one participant at a JCLAS meeting argued that “one of the most effective ways of limiting and countering the influence of ideologies among Latin American intellectuals [is] through the

100  Patrick Iber

introduction of training in research methodology of the social sciences.”18 Looking back from the 1980s, a member of the Social Science Research Council Committee (which sponsored JCLAS) declared, like Schlesinger, that the purpose of the organization “was to formulate a non-Communist theory of change and thus to provide a non-Marxian alternative for the developing nations.”19 In the mid-1960s the Ford Foundation began a number of projects in Latin America that reflected the modernization-tinged optimism associated with the Kennedy and Johnson years. In 1965, for example, it authorized the Brookings Institution to undertake a study, drawing on observations of Chile and Colombia, to create “politically useful development theory” so that policymakers could adapt institutions in a conscious and planned way. When it closed four years later, it was described as “ill conceived from the beginning,” a “colossal failure,” and “hampered by a certain naive and well motivated insensitivity . . . which characterized much of the era.”20 But the Ford Foundation’s most important and controversial project was funding the Congress for Cultural Freedom (CCF). The CCF was founded in 1950 as an anti-Communist counterweight to Soviet-aligned political and cultural groups for intellectuals. It was also covertly funded by the CIA, and agents and officers staffed important positions. Based in Paris, the CCF quickly began to establish a global presence, sponsoring a sophisticated suite of magazines, publishing books, running a news service, hosting concerts, staging art exhibitions, and hosting major international conferences.21 The CCF was also involved in promoting modernization theory. In 1965, it sponsored a major academic conference in Montevideo, Uruguay, on the theme of the “Formation of Elites in Latin America,” co-sponsored by Aldo Solari of the University of Montevideo and Berkeley’s Seymour Martin Lipset.22 “[W]e are interested in elites,” the organizers of the conference wrote in their introduction to its compiled papers, because while there are many factors that affect development, “it is clear that regardless of differences in social systems, one of the requisites for development is a competent elite, motivated to modernize their society.”23 Their argument reflected modernization theory’s hopes that elite-led development could avoid the tumult of revolutionary change carried out by popular action. This was not lost on critics from the left. Uruguayan literary critic Ángel Rama observed with trepidation the expanding interest in Latin American affairs in the United States and the growing number of U.S.-sponsored conferences and workshops. He wondered if the United States was truly interested in a dialogue on “education” or if it was instead “training” Latin American political elites.24 Solari, the organizer, defending his involvement by writing that he would stop collaborating with the CCF if he believed it to be financed by the CIA, but that [t]he systematic campaign to represent sociologists as spies and potential spies of imperialism tends to increase the difficulty that sociology encounters in every under- or semi-developed country. Its surest effect is to impede research, because everything that is asked in a survey, for example, could be argued that it serves imperialism. . . [The effect of such an attitude] is to help maintain the status quo.25

Latin America in the 1960s  101

Solari followed a rhetorical strategy common to the 1960s: claiming to be the true leftist who could bring change where change was needed. Rama responded in kind, arguing that attempts to stimulate disinterested and objective sociology, to purge “values” from scholarship, fostered conservative thought and the maintenance of the status quo.26 The doctrine of the “end of ideologies” (popularized as a result of CCF conferences) assumed that future problems would be solved through the growth of prosperity within a mixed capitalist economy and promised that future conflicts would be technical, not ideological.27 This was the sort of scholarship that the Congress for Cultural Freedom was trying to promote, and in this context, Rama wrote, it didn’t matter whether the CIA paid for the Congress or not, for “[o]ne way or another, the [Conference] will serve its ends.”28

Opening to the Left: Mundo Nuevo and the marginality project The depoliticization Rama warned against was indeed part of CCF strategy to promote greater openness to the political left. While the CCF’s members initially supported the struggle against the Cuban dictator Fulgencio Batista at the end of the 1950s, and were even enthusiastic about the first months of Fidel Castro’s government, growing Cuban–U.S. tension and Castro’s turn towards internal repression and the Soviet Union led them to reconsider.Yet most on the Latin American left admired revolutionary Cuba; in the face of widespread injustice, Cuba seemed to offer an alternative. Cuba’s appeal to artists and intellectuals throughout Latin America was deep. The novelist Mario Vargas Llosa, then a socialist, announced while accepting a prize in 1967 that “[l]iterature is fire. It means nonconformism and rebellion. . . . Literature is a form of permanent insurrection.”29 Many saw social science the same way: committing to stand with the Cuban Revolution seemed to put one’s intellectual work on the side of justice. But for the CCF in Latin America, Castro came to represent the totalitarian threat once embodied by the Soviet Union. The bitter ex-Marxists who had been mainstays of the organization in the 1950s were forced to retire and were replaced by a younger group, often socialist, that wanted to question Cuban orthodoxy rather than inveigh against it. But even as it sought to engage the left, reports of CIA involvement surfaced. As Rama was debating with Solari, The New York Times wrote about the CIA–CCF connection as part of a large-scale investigation into the history of the CIA.30 The article was translated for Marcha’s Uruguayan and Latin American audience.Those who had collaborated with the Congress were also concerned. Lipset asked for clarification, was lied to, and then reported to another participant: As far as [the people in the Paris headquarters] know . . . they have not received any funds directly or indirectly from the CIA. . . . The reason that they decided not to make a categorical denial was a fear that investigations of the CIA by a congressional committee might show extensive use of American foundations as transmittal sources by the CIA.31

102  Patrick Iber

And that was the issue. The CCF had been financed by a combination of major foundations—especially Ford—and pass-through foundations, like the Farfield and Hoblitzelle, set up by the CIA to disguise its activities. The line between the two was not always clean. In the early 1950s, Ford and the CIA had jointly funded research programs producing scholarship in the modernization framework.32 In 1954, the Ford Foundation formalized its working relationship with the CIA. CIA officials had frequently approached the Foundation, asking it to provide cover for covert operations or for permission to use its fellows for the purposes of ­intelligence-gathering. Though in frequent contact with U.S. government officials, Ford Foundation officers believed that there should be no “joint operations.” But officials worried that a complete prohibition on working with the CIA would simply result in the Agency recruiting individuals from within the Foundation, so in mid-1954 it negotiated a set of guidelines that would govern cooperation with the CIA in ways that the Ford Foundation hoped it could channel and control.The agreement limited cooperation to a few individuals and areas of mutual interest while prohibiting the CIA from doing anything to co-opt its officers. “I don’t think we could have kept clean if our policy had been never to talk to the government,” reflected the vice-president of Ford’s International Areas division, so it opted to choose the manner of its collaboration. Those discussions led to the Foundation’s first contributions to the Congress for Cultural Freedom.33 A dozen years later in 1966, McGeorge Bundy left the Johnson Administration to take over as president of the Ford Foundation. A Cold War liberal, Bundy led the Ford Foundation to support causes that ranged from arms control to affirmative action to public broadcasting.34 But his close ties to government remained. As the CCF sought to separate itself from government financing on a permanent basis, its only real alternative was the Ford Foundation. At mid-year a deal was worked out that would put the CCF fully on the books of the Ford Foundation, providing more than 6 million dollars over six years on the condition that ties with the CIA were broken.The Ford grant took full responsibility for the Congress in November of 1966. Key CIA personnel, however, remained in place.35 On January 1, 1966—before Ford took over financial responsibility—the Congress spun off its Latin American division, calling it the Instituto Latinoamericano de Relaciones Internacionales (ILARI). ILARI remained connected to the Congress; the name change was primarily for purposes of public obfuscation. The Ford Foundation-sponsored Congress was responsible for two major projects in Latin America that reflected a greater openness towards the left: the literary magazine Mundo Nuevo and the sociological journal Aportes. Mundo Nuevo, launched in mid1966, replaced the moribund Cuadernos as the Congress’s flagship literary magazine for the Spanish-speaking world. Its editor, the Uruguayan Emir Rodríguez Monegal, was a moderate socialist who was well-connected to writers throughout the Spanish-speaking world and said he wanted a “thaw” in the Cold War in literature. Mundo Nuevo’s early issues featured writers identified with the political and artistic left, from Pablo Neruda to Gabriel García Márquez. “It was,” Chilean writer José Donoso wrote, “the voice of Latin American literature of its time.”36 It combined

Latin America in the 1960s  103

sixties fashion and abstract art with bold and experimental fiction, justifying the words of the scholar who wrote that whereas Cuba’s flagship cultural magazine Casa de las Américas offered to Latin American intellectuals “revolutionary social practice,” Mundo Nuevo offered a “revolution in style.”37 Even before the first issue launched, it attracted controversy. Rodríguez Monegal said he wanted a magazine of “dialogue,” and invited Cuban writers, even supporters of the Cuban Revolution, to participate. But the Cuban poet Roberto Fernández Retamar, editor of Cuba’s rival, the official Casa de las Américas, said that Cubans would not fall for this trap. “Because it is financed by the United States,” Fernández Retamar wrote,“[the CCF]’s only mission is the defense of U.S. imperial interests, not the defense of ‘cultural freedom.’ ”38 Rodríguez Monegal insisted that the U.S. government did not finance the CCF, and that Mundo Nuevo’s relationship with the Congress was not one of dependence. (The Ford Foundation arranged a separate grant for Mundo Nuevo some time after it took over funding the CCF.)39 And he insisted that those who had contributed to the Congress for Cultural Freedom had always been independent of the politics of the United States, and had, for example, criticized the military occupation of the Dominican Republic that had taken place in 1965. “I will not accept the role that is being eagerly designed for me as the enemy of Cuba and of Cuban writers,” he wrote. “I will continue to believe in the virtues of dialogue.”40 Mundo Nuevo was open to criticism of U.S. foreign policy. In its second issue it ran a critical assessment of intellectuals involved in the war in Vietnam.41 Rodríguez Monegal wrote to a friend, “The political commentary about Vietnam, to be completely frank with you, reflects a necessarily critical attitude in a magazine that has been accused of maintaining connections with the CIA”. That didn’t mean that the criticism was insincere, but Rodríguez Monegal remained liberal in an important way: he was also critical of the Cuban government’s idea that revolutionary intellectuals owed it their allegiance.42 “The essential function of the writer,” Rodríguez Monegal said in an interview with Mexican writer Carlos Fuentes in the first issue, “is to call into question the world [as it exists] through the use of words.” For Rodríguez Monegal and Fuentes, the writer’s commitment was revolutionary because it cast doubt on existing relations of power, not because it submitted to revolutionary discipline.The writer’s freedom consisted, Fuentes said, in “maintaining some room for heresy.”43 But soon after Mundo Nuevo appeared, the second shoe dropped regarding the CIA’s connections to the CCF. In March of 1967, Ramparts, a San Francisco-based journal of the New Left, published an account that traced CIA contributions through their proxy foundations to their intended recipients, which included the Congress for Cultural Freedom.The CIA official who had overseen such programs in the early 1950s confirmed the account. (It was his piece that Andre Gunder Frank quoted in his letter to JCLAS, insisting that the Cold War was fought with ideas instead of bombs.)44 The revelations immediately damaged Emir Rodríguez Monegal’s reputation. “We have no interest in defending the Congress publicly or privately,” he wrote to

104  Patrick Iber

a friend, “much less the CIA whose intentions are very difficult to champion.”45 But in a bit of private bravado, he later wrote: My position is that if the CIA is surreptitiously paying for Mundo Nuevo, blessed be the CIA because this magazine does not play their game, it reflects an authentically Latin American position. . . . I don’t see why we, who are making a truly independent magazine, have to carry around the skeletons of our inglorious ancestors.46 But wishing them away could not make those skeletons disappear, and they haunted other programs that the Ford Foundation tried to initiate at around that time. In 1967, Kalman Silvert, a scholar of Latin America who was sympathetic to the need for social change in the region, became a program advisor to the International Division of the Ford Foundation.47 The grants that Ford gave directly to Latin American social science also illustrated the twin features seen in the CCF at that time: attempts to seize ground on the left, and a failure to do so effectively.The most important grant went to the “marginality project.”48 Authorized in early 1967, it was set up to provide research support through Chile’s Centro de Estudios para el Desarrollo Social para América Latina (DESAL), an institute run in the Catholic Action tradition by the Belgian Jesuit Roger Vekemans. DESAL had significant influence over the policies of Chile’s center-left Christian Democratic president Eduardo Frei (1964–1970) and his administration, and the marginality project hoped to support techniques of “popular promotion” that would effectively incorporate marginal populations into national politics.49 In many ways DESAL mirrored Ford’s interest in urban poverty in the United States, with similar core concerns, from internal migration and social integration to the eradication of pockets of endemic poverty. Silvert viewed Vekemans as a “red priest,” but this was a misreading: Vekemans was fiercely anti-Marxist, and DESAL was rumored to have been a conduit for the CIA dollars that had gone to Frei’s election campaign in 1964.50 The Ford Foundation asked Vekemans directly about any relationship with the CIA; he first denied it, then gave the name of a German foundation through which he had unknowingly received CIA funds.51 Silvert marked DESAL as ineligible to receive future grants but unwisely trusted his assurance.Vekemans was responsible for funneling millions of CIA dollars to Frei, and would later play a leading role in combating the influence of liberation theology in Latin America.52 When the marginality grant was given, the Ford Foundation took steps to ensure outreach to the left. In addition to DESAL, the research was jointly sponsored by the Instituto Latinoamericano y del Caribe de Planificación Económica y Social (ILPES) (headed by Brazilian sociologist Fernando Henrique Cardoso) and by the U.N.’s Chilean outpost at the Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean. Most importantly, the young Argentine sociologist José Nun, who had been a student of Seymour Martin Lipset and David Apter at Berkeley, was put in charge of research. Although he had been Lipset’s student, the Ford Foundation

Latin America in the 1960s  105

thought of Nun as a “soft” Marxist (as with Cardoso): someone who worked in the Marxist tradition for the purpose of sociological inquiry but did so without specific party commitments.Vekemans and Nun seemed to be able to work together, agreeing that marginality had to be studied by examining the social forces that produced it, not just by looking at the characteristics of the poor.53 But DESAL and ILPES fired Nun’s team in July; the Ford Foundation then took the unusual step of renegotiating the grant for Nun, via the Instituto Torcuato di Tella in Buenos Aires, in part because it did not want to seem as if it were terminating a grant because its authors were Marxists.54 Nun chose a research team to include both critics of the Ford Foundation and other Marxists: Ernesto Laclau was a research associate and the historian Eric Hobsbawm one of the project supervisors.55 When the Ford Foundation made the Argentine award it specified that the ­two-year grant was nonrenewable.56 Still, the work proved tremendously controversial.57 Critics came from both nationalist and Marxist corners. Student radicals denounced it in spite of its Marxist staff, accusing its authors of being CIA agents, McCarthyists, traitors, and sellouts to Yankee imperialism. (Nun suspected the students of belonging to organized Peronist groups.)58 Across the Río de la Plata, Uruguay’s Marcha deemed its work too similar to Project Camelot, and published several articles attacking it on the grounds that all of the Ford Foundation’s work, including its sponsorship of civil rights organizations, was part of a global counter-revolutionary plot: The study of marginal populations permits the freezing of explosive situations, the obliteration of the embryo of rebellions and the destruction by every possible means of internal cohesion. There is as much need for antiguerrilla training as there is for the propagandist-spy performing the spadework every day and permanently; napalm and the helicopter are on an equal plane with the survey and civic action to forestall the critical burgeoning of violence. . . . Social scientists should not agree to collaborate with the enemy.59 None of the project’s prominent advisors would defend it. Nun countered by attacking his critics from the left, saying: [They] not only distrust the revolutionary capacity of Latin America’s exploited classes, but also belong to the increasingly small number of those who still believe (both here and in the United States) in the efficiency of the operations of US aid. . . .They overestimate imperialism’s capacity for integration while they underestimate the growing power of the popular movement and all this comes with the speculative calm of the petit bourgeois, who calls himself left-wing, and while he takes his hot baths, believes that the workers will become corrupted if they have water to wash their hands.60 At the same time, Nun burned with anger that his grant had expired as expected, and cut his losses by publicly alleging that he had been cut off by the Ford

106  Patrick Iber

Foundation for political reasons.61 Nun published a single, largely theoretical article on the subject of marginality, analyzing the marginal populations of Latin America in Marxist terms as the industrial reserve army of underdeveloped capitalism.62 When the marginality project was formally closed, the Ford Foundation judged it to be “as costly in terms of the Foundation’s credibility, its relations with the scholarly community, and its ability to assist research on important but sensitive issues [as any in Latin America].”63

Working in the climate of suspicion: Oscar Lewis, Aportes, and Guillermo O’Donnell The marginality project produced virtually no usable scholarship, but in combination with Project Camelot and the revelations surrounding the CCF, it had helped create a climate of suspicion around the study of Latin American society. Soon other funded projects began to encounter insurmountable troubles. The anthropologist Oscar Lewis, for example, was well-known for his work on urban poverty in Latin America and for his imprecise theory of the “culture of poverty.” Lewis, a socialist, intended his work to evoke sympathy for the poor, and suspected that the damaging culture of poverty would not exist under socialism. He had many champions on the left, who believed that his work humanized the plight of the poor and powerfully underscored the continued existence of poverty to those who wanted to deny it.64 In late 1966, a translation of one of Lewis’s articles was featured in Mundo Nuevo.65 The article might have been read as an alternative explanation of poverty to that of dependency theory, except that the last paragraph spoke up for revolution in places where those in the culture of poverty made up a significant percentage of the population. Lewis wanted to test his theory that socialism might eliminate the culture of poverty in Cuba: he had done research there in 1946, and then returned again briefly after the Revolution in 1961. In 1968, Lewis received Fidel Castro’s permission to conduct a major study there. “We are probably the only socialist country in the world that would allow you to do your kind of studies with the complete freedom you need,” Fidel told him.66 Lewis was by no means seen as a reactionary: the same article that was published by Mundo Nuevo also appeared in the Cuban journal Pensamiento Crítico, and Lewis’s books were reviewed positively in Cuba’s Casa de las Américas.67 For “Project Cuba” Lewis supervised a large team—Fidel insisted that it include young Cubans, who would be trained in the anthropologist’s ethnographic methods. One field site was chosen to test Lewis’s theory of the disappearance of the culture of poverty under socialism, and others were selected to examine the effectiveness of the Cuban Revolution’s social programs. The State Department agreed to allow the travel, and the Ford Foundation agreed to fund the work. But just as he arrived in 1969 against a background of “sociological espionage,” the Cuban government announced that it would cease cooperation with Ford-financed work. It nonetheless allowed Lewis to proceed, at least temporarily. But troubles mounted. Lewis was disappointed by his findings, even depressed. He

Latin America in the 1960s  107

realized that characteristics of the culture of poverty persisted in Cuba, and that he had been “overly optimistic about the possibility of eliminating the culture of poverty so rapidly.”68 In 1970, the Cuban government encountered serious economic difficulties and began to be criticized by formerly sympathetic writers for unnecessary authoritarianism. It, in turn, accused them (falsely) of being CIA agents. After Lewis had conversations with a government critic who gossiped about the love lives of high officials, and foolishly used the Israeli diplomatic pouch to send personal correspondence around the embargo, rumors circulated that he too was a spy. Some of his team’s research files were seized. Manuel Piñeiro, the head of Cuba’s secret police, visited him a few days later and said that he had read the material and was convinced that Lewis was not a CIA agent. Still, the government would no longer allow his research to proceed, and Lewis realized that he and his team had actually been under close surveillance for some months. Lewis returned to Illinois and died, not long after, of a heart attack.69 In spite of Piñeiro’s confidence in Lewis, in 1972 Raúl Castro made his speech against cultural imperialism, labeling other critics as CIA agents and naming Lewis as someone connected to counterrevolutionary elements. “The principal objective of imperialist reaction in the ideological war against socialist countries,” Raúl argued, “is to undermine socialist forces from within. . . . Bourgeois propaganda has endeavored to hide the true nature of this political course, presenting it as a ‘new politics,’ as a politics of ‘mutual comprehension’ and ‘building bridges’ with socialist countries.” He accused Lewis of “political, economic, social, cultural, and military espionage,” disguised by his progressive and friendly face.70 In his denunciation, Castro also mentioned the work of ILARI, by then also fully funded by the Ford Foundation, and its affiliated magazines, Mundo Nuevo and Aportes. Mundo Nuevo had precisely followed the “building bridges” approach that Castro found so objectionable, but Aportes was somewhat different. Its editor, Luis Mercier Vega, was not a socialist but a life-long anarchist. He had fought with the famous Buenaventura Durruti during the Spanish Civil War, and didn’t fit into the standard dichotomies of critical versus orthodox socialism. In his own way, in his magazine Aportes he quietly achieved the kind of dialogue that had eluded Rodríguez Monegal. The quarterly journal printed long, analytical papers, primarily by European and Latin American academics. Aportes hosted an extended debate between Aldo Solari and Orlando Fals Borda on the merits of “value-free sociology” in Latin America, which was a proxy for differences in broadly liberal and radical approaches.71 Mercier was interested in the condition of poor and marginalized populations, but criticized the “modernization” prescriptions of North American economists: One would hope that at least the Europeans and North Americans who are so prodigal in recipes they have not tried out would be prudent in their offer of magic solutions, even if they are afraid of being overtaken by a revolution [in Latin America]. Too much emphasis on economic indices and figures which measure economic expansion frequently leads experts and planners

108  Patrick Iber

to forget what human suffering is. Without suspecting it, they form part of a technocratic tradition.72 The amount of the Ford Foundation’s funding decreased each year, placing ILARI in a perpetual budget crisis. Aportes ceased publication in 1972, and Mercier was embittered, feeling that he too had been squeezed out because of his politics. But Mercier’s skepticism of the modernization theory that U.S. foundations had once sought to foster was coming closer to the mainstream. Modernization had long postulated a positive correlation between economic development and political democracy, but the events of the 1960s and early 1970s, as many of the richest countries in Latin America succumbed to military rule, undermined those convictions. Argentine political scientist Guillermo O’Donnell formalized those doubts in his 1972 work about bureaucratic-authoritarianism, in which he argued that industrialization and economic modernization could also—and were perhaps likely to—lead to authoritarian systems that shut out popular participation and demands.73 Like many others, the Ford Foundation found itself forced by current events to abandon some of the assumptions that had attracted its support in the early 1960s. In 1972 it tried to fund O’Donnell’s work, well aware that doing so would explode many of the key assumptions of modernization theory. But O’Donnell had to reject the grant, thinking that with Ford Foundation support he would neither be able to carry out interviews with Argentina’s military leaders (for whom the Ford Foundation was too far to the left) nor hire student assistants (for whom the Ford Foundation was too far to the right). O’Donnell returned the money.74 In this case, the Ford Foundation was unable even to undermine a part of its own institutional legacy.

Conclusion Whether the Ford Foundation’s actions provide evidence of cultural imperialism or of something more complex is largely a matter of optics. The U.S. government and the Ford Foundation were part of a common anti-Marxist-Leninist network, just as Raúl Castro suspected, even if the assumption that socialist utopias would blossom if the propaganda cloud could only be lifted was deeply unrealistic. If the Ford Foundation sometimes tried to avoid these entanglements, and grew irritated that it could not find groups who were not also getting CIA money, it had only its own previous decisions to blame. The confluence of interests between government and foundations, and the sharing of personnel, meant that the radical critique of liberal institutions was frequently on target. But Raúl Castro’s speech from 1972 was a reminder that the idea of “cultural imperialism” could also be used as a weapon in the service of authoritarian ends. He invoked the Prague Spring—a popular movement to build a more open and responsive socialism in Czechoslovakia that was crushed by Soviet tanks—not as an example of Soviet imperialism but of the danger of alternative socialisms. “Building bridges,” he warned, “was nothing less than a tactic with the goal of provoking the ideological decomposition of socialist countries. The events of Czechoslovakia

Latin America in the 1960s  109

in 1968 remain fresh in our minds as a clear example of the danger that surrounds walking over the bridges that imperialism extends.”75 He left no room for internal criticism, and his false accusations that friendly critics were CIA agents in disguise was a strategy of delegitimization, not debate. Perhaps both radicals and liberals overestimated the power of social science to bring about social change. Perhaps both underestimated the transformations that ideas undergo in becoming policy, and then again in implementation. Yet what remains striking about the Ford Foundation’s actions in Latin America in the late 1960s are the lengths it went to in order to engage the socialist left—and how badly it failed. The marginality project collapsed as the result of what historian Mariano Ben Plotkin calls “structural misunderstandings” between the Foundation and its grant recipients—fundamentally different outlooks and expectations rather than straightforward cultural imperialism.76 The same could be said for the Congress for Cultural Freedom’s late projects in the region, which could not outrun the consequences of CIA involvement. Still, the kind of work the CCF sponsored, as with Oscar Lewis’s Cuba project, was not simply reactionary propaganda. Those most damaged by the climate of suspicion were socialists like Lewis, Rodríguez Monegal, and José Nun. Still, they did not want to see the ways that they were part of a propaganda apparatus for maintaining U.S. hegemony in the Cold War; their critics did not want to see the ways that they were not. In the 1920s and 1930s, the Ford Motor Company had tried to build a rubber plant and an American-style town in the Brazilian rainforest, christening it Fordlândia. It proved poorly adapted to local conditions, and failed.77 In the 1960s, it was the Ford Foundation’s turn to have a similar experience. Even the Foundation recognized that its U.S.-inspired recipes, like modernization theory, could not be so easily transplanted. Thinkers in the 1960s made much of both the possibilities of emancipatory social science and of the threat of cultural imperialism. But the Ford Foundation’s experience in Latin America in the 1960s suggests that cultural imperialism, both real and imagined, ultimately made social science more difficult to carry out, and less likely to deliver the social transformation so many hoped for.

Notes   1 Raúl Castro, Educación, no. 5 (Julio–Sept. 1972): 25.The transcript appears without a title; the copy I located is in the Oscar Lewis papers, box 204, folder “Raúl Castro speech”, University of Illinois University Archives, Urbana, Illinois.   2 More recent scholarship on the U.S. has also emphasized the participation of conservatism in 1960s polarization, but that is not especially relevant to this chapter. Michael Flamm and David Steigerwald, Debating the 1960s: Liberal, Conservative, and Radical Perspectives (Lanham, M.D.: Rowman & Littlefield, 2008). On the complex interaction of Latin America and the U.S. New Left, see Van Gosse, Where the Boys Are: Cuba, Cold War America and the Making of a New Left (London and New York, N.Y.:Verso, 1993).   3 Abraham Lowenthal, “United States Policy toward Latin America: ‘Liberal,’ ‘Radical,’ and ‘Bureaucratic’ Perspectives,” Latin American Research Review 8, no. 3 (Autumn 1973): 3–25.   4 Recent work on the general picture of this nexus includes Joy Rohde, Armed with Expertise: The Militarization of American Social Research during the Cold War (Ithaca and London:

110  Patrick Iber

Cornell University Press, 2013); Audra Wolfe, Competing with the Soviets: Science,Technology, and the State in Cold War America (Baltimore, M.D.: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2013); Scott Lucas, Freedom’s War: The US Crusade against the Soviet Union (New York, NY: New York University Press, 1999); Mark Solovey, Shaky Foundations:The Politics-Patronage-Social Science Nexus in Cold War America (New Brunswick, N.J. and London: Rutgers University Press, 2013); Jamie Cohen-Cole, The Open Mind: Cold War Politics and the Sciences of Human Nature (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2014). On the CIA’s particular role, see especially Frances Stonor Saunders, The Cultural Cold War:The CIA and the World of Arts and Letters (New York, N.Y.: New Press, 2000); Hugh Wilford, The Mighty Wurlitzer: How the CIA Played America (Cambridge, M.A.: Harvard University Press, 2008).   5 For a recent example of this type of argument, see Inderjeet Parmar, Foundations of the American Century: The Ford, Carnegie, and Rockefeller Foundations in the Rise of American Power (New York, N.Y.: Columbia University Press, 2012), 2. Earlier scholarship that establishes a critical view of the major US foundations includes Robert F. Arnove, ed., Philanthropy and Cultural Imperialism: The Foundations at Home and Abroad (Boston, MA: G.K. Hall, 1980); Edward H. Berman, The Ideology of Philanthropy: The Influence of the Carnegie, Ford, and Rockefeller Foundations on American Foreign Policy (Albany, N.Y.: State University of New York Press, 1983).   6 A notably apologetic account is Olivier Zunz, Philanthropy in America: A History (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2012). Accounts that emphasize occasional divergence include Barry D. Karl and Stanley N. Katz, “Foundations and Ruling Class Elites,” Daedalus 116, no. 1 (Winter 1987): 3–5, 30–32; Mariano Ben Plotkin, “US Foundations, Cultural Imperialism and Transnational Misunderstandings:The Case of the Marginality Project,” Journal of Latin American Studies 47, no. 1 (February 2015): 65–92; Patrick Iber, “The Cold War Politics of Literature and the Centro Mexicano de Escritores,” Journal of Latin American Studies 48, no. 2 (May 2016): 247–272.  7 Marcos Cueto, ed., Missionaries of Science: The Rockefeller Foundation and Latin America (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1994); Steven Palmer, “Central American Encounters with Rockefeller Public Health, 1914–1921,” in G. M. Joseph, Ricardo D. Salvatore, and Catherine LeGrand, eds, Close Encounters of Empire:Writing the Cultural History of U.S.–Latin American Relations (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1998), 311–332.  8 Álvaro Morcillo Laiz, “La dominación filantrópica: La Rockefeller Foundation y las ciencias sociales en español (1938–1973),” in Álvaro Morcillo Laiz and Eduardo Weisz, eds, Max Weber en Iberoamérica: Nuevas interpretaciones, estudios empíricos y recepción (Mexico City: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 2016), 573–605.   9 See, for example, Stephen G. Rabe, The Most Dangerous Area in the World: John F. Kennedy Confronts Communist Revolution in Latin America (Chapel Hill, N.C.: University of North Carolina Press, 1999). 10 Arthur Meier Schlesinger, A Thousand Days: John F. Kennedy in the White House (Boston, M.A.: Houghton Mifflin, 1965), 589. On Rostow, see David Milne, America’s Rasputin: Walt Rostow and the Vietnam War (New York, N.Y.: Hill and Wang, 2008). On modernization theory and its politics more generally, see Michael E. Latham, Modernization as Ideology: American Social Science and “Nation Building” in the Kennedy Era (Chapel Hill, N.C.: University of North Carolina Press, 2000); Nils Gilman, Mandarins of the Future: Modernization Theory in Cold War America (Baltimore, M.D.: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003). 11 Peter F. Klarén and Thomas J. Bossert, Promise of Development: Theories of Change in Latin America (Boulder, C.O.:Westview Press, 1986), 3–35; Fernando Henrique Cardoso, “The Consumption of Dependency Theory in the United States,” Latin American Research Review 12, no. 3 (1977): 7–24. On Prebisch’s structuralism, see Joseph Love, Crafting the Third World: Theorizing Underdevelopment in Rumania and Brazil (Stanford, C.A.: Stanford University Press, 1996); Joseph Love, “Economic Ideas and Ideologies in Latin America since 1930,” in Leslie Bethell, ed., Ideas and Ideologies in Twentieth-century Latin America (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 207–274.

Latin America in the 1960s  111

12 Andre Gunder Frank, Capitalism and Underdevelopment in Latin America: Historical Studies of Chile and Brazil, Revised and enlarged edn. (New York, N.Y,: Monthly Review Press, 1969), xi, 318. 13 Andre Gunder Frank to Bryce Wood, 30 October 1967, Social Science Research Council (SSRC) papers, record group (RG) 2, series 1, subseries 64, box 254, folder 2994, Rockefeller Archive Center (RAC), Tarrytown, New York. 14 Irving Louis Horowitz, The Rise and Fall of Project Camelot: Studies in the Relationship Between Social Science and Practical Politics (Cambridge, Mass.: M.I.T. Press, 1967), 47. 15 Ellen Herman, “Project Camelot and the Career of Cold War Psychology,” in Christopher Simpson, ed., Universities and Empire: Money and Politics in the Social Sciences during the Cold War (New York, N.Y,: New Press, 1998), 113; Rohde, Armed with Expertise, 63–89. 16 Horowitz, Rise and Fall of Project Camelot, 7–8. 17 Report on the Inter-American Conference on Research and Training in Sociology, Stanford, California, 25–27 August 1961, SSRC papers, RG 2, series 1, subseries 64, box 254, folder 2987, RAC. 18 Minutes of the meeting of the Joint Committee on Latin American Studies, New York, 12 November 1965, SSRC papers, RG 2, series 1, subseries 64, box 254, folder 2992, RAC. 19 Quoted in Mark T. Berger, Under Northern Eyes: Latin American Studies and U.S. Hegemony in the Americas, 1898–1990 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995), 74. 20 James A. Gardner to William D. Carmichael, 15 May 1972, “Terminal Evaluation,” PA65–127, Ford Foundation Archives (FFA), now held in the Rockefeller Archive Center, Tarrytown, New York. 21 I explore the history of the Congress for Cultural Freedom in detail in Patrick Iber, Neither Peace nor Freedom:The Cultural Cold War in Latin America (Cambridge, M.A.: Harvard University Press, 2015). See also Jean Franco, The Decline and Fall of the Lettered City: Latin America in the Cold War (Cambridge, M.A.: Harvard University Press, 2002); María Eugenia Mudrovcic, Mundo Nuevo: cultura y guerra fría en la década del 60 (Rosario, Argentina: Beatriz Viterbo Editora, 1997); Claudia Gilman, Entre la pluma y el fusil: debates y dilemas del escritor revolucionario en América Latina (Buenos Aires: Siglo Veintiuno Editores Argentina, 2003); Olga Glondys, La guerra fría cultural y el exilio republicano español: Cuadernos del Congreso por la Libertad de la Cultura (1953–1965) (Madrid: Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas, 2012). 22 Lipset was an influential scholar working in the modernization framework and frequent collaborator with the CCF. 23 Seymour Martin Lipset and Aldo E. Solari, Elites in Latin America (New York, N.Y.: Oxford University Press, 1967), viii. 24 Angel Rama, “Las condiciones del diálogo,” Marcha, no. 1258 (11 June 1965): 29. 25 Aldo Solari to Director of Marcha, Marcha, no. 1303 (13 May 1966): 28. 26 Angel Rama, “Los intelectuales en la época desarrollista,” Marcha, no. 1305 (27 May 1966): 31. 27 See Howard Brick, “The End of Ideology Thesis,” in Michael Freeden, Lyman Tower Sargent and Marc Stears, eds, The Oxford Handbook of Political Ideologies (New York, N.Y.: Oxford University Press, 2013), 90–112. 28 Angel Rama, “Nota de redacción,” Marcha, no. 1303 (13 May 1966): 29. 29 Mario Vargas Llosa, Contra viento y marea, 1962–1982 (Barcelona: Seix Barral, 1983), 134–135. 30 Tom Wicker et al., “Electronic Prying Grows,” The New York Times, 27 April 1966, 28. 31 Seymour Martin Lipset to Henry Landsberger, 7 June 1966, International Association for Cultural Freedom (IACF) series VI, box 6, folder 4, University of Chicago Special Collections Research Center (UC-SCRC). 32 Allan Needell, “ ‘Truth is Our Weapon’: Project TROY, Political Warfare, and G overnment–Academic Relations in the National Security State,” Diplomatic ­ ­H istory 17, no. 3 (1993): 417.

112  Patrick Iber

33 Kai Bird, The Chairman: John J. McCloy, The Making of the American Establishment (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1992), 426–427, 720; Volker Rolf Berghahn, America and the Intellectual Cold Wars in Europe: Shepard Stone between Philanthropy, Academy, and Diplomacy (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2001), 223–240. 34 Kai Bird, The Color of Truth: McGeorge Bundy and William Bundy, Brothers in Arms: A Biography (New York, N.Y.: Simon & Schuster, 1998), 377–393. 35 Berghahn, America and the Intellectual Cold Wars in Europe, 237–240. 36 José Donoso, Historia personal del “boom” (Santiago de Chile: Alfaguara, 1998), 122. 37 John King, Sur: A Study of the Argentine Literary Journal and its Role in the Development of a Culture, 1931–1970 (Cambridge and New York, N.Y.: Cambridge University Press, 1986), 185. 38 Roberto Fernández Retamar, “Los Dichos y los Hechos: Cartas Vistas,” Marcha, no. 1295 (11 March 1966): 29. 39 Mundo Nuevo was given a three-year, $225,000 grant in 1968. Howard R. Dressner to Shepard Stone, 22 April 1968, PA68–335, FFA. 40 Emir Rodríguez Monegal, “Cartas vistas (III)”, Marcha, no. 1302 (6 May 1966): 29. 41 On the politics of Mundo Nuevo, see Russell Cobb, “Promoting Literature in the Most Dangerous Area in the World: The Cold War, the Boom, and Mundo Nuevo,” in Greg Barnhisel and Catherine Turner, eds, Pressing the Fight: Print, Propaganda, and the Cold War (Amherst and Boston: University of Massachusetts Press, 2010), 231–250; Russell Cobb, “The Politics of Literary Prestige: Promoting the Latin American ‘Boom’ in the Pages of Mundo Nuevo,” A Contracorriente 5, no. 3 (Spring 2008): 75–94; Deborah Cohn, The Latin American Literary Boom and U.S. Nationalism during the Cold War (Nashville, T.N.: Vanderbilt University Press, 2012). 42 Quoted in Mudrovcic, Mundo Nuevo, 47. 43 Carlos Fuentes y Emir Rodríguez Monegal, “Situación del escritor en América Latina,” Mundo Nuevo 1, no. 1 (July 1966): 20. 44 Thomas W. Braden, “I’m glad the CIA is ‘immoral,’ ” Saturday Evening Post, 20 May 1967. 45 Emir Rodríguez Monegal to Homero Alsina Thevenet, 7 March 1967, IACF series VI, box 26, folder 10, UC-SCRC. 46 Emir Rodriguez Monegal to Homero Alsina Thevenet, 21 March 1967, IACF series VI, box 26, folder 10, UC-SCRC. 47 Silvert had been a critic of Project Camelot. Richard Morse, “Kalman H. Silvert (1921– 1976): A Reminiscence,” Hispanic American Historical Review 57, no. 3 (August 1977): 504–510; Rohde, Armed with Expertise, 78; Abraham F. Lowenthal and Martin Weinstein, eds, Kalman Silvert: Engaging Latin America, Building Democracy (Boulder, C.O.: Lynne Rienner, 2016). 48 On the Marginality Project, see Plotkin, “Marginality Project”; Adriana Petra, “El ‘Proyecto Marginalidad’: los intelectuales latinoamericanos y el imperialismo cultural,” Políticas de la Memoria no. 8/9 (Summer 2009): 249–260. 49 Nita R. Manitzas to Peter D. Bell, “Terminal Evaluation, Torcuato di Tella Institute, Research on Marginal Populations,” 4 April 1973, PA68–143, FFA. On these strategies in the Frei administration, see Heidi Tinsman, Partners in Conflict: The Politics of Gender, Sexuality, and Labor in the Chilean Agrarian Reform, 1950–1973 (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2002). 50 Janice E. Perlman, The Myth of Marginality: Urban Poverty and Politics in Rio de Janeiro (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1976), 123. 51 Kalman Silvert to William D. Carmichael, 26 June 1973, PA68–143, FFA. 52 “Religion: Cope-and-Dagger Stories,” 11 August 1975, Time; Joaquín Fermandois, Mundo y fin de mundo: Chile en la política mundial, 1900–2004 (Santiago: Ediciones Universidad Católica de Chile, 2005), 300; Phillip Berryman, Liberation Theology: Essential Facts about the Revolutionary Movement in Latin America and Beyond (Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press, 1987), 98. 53 Kalman Silvert to William D. Carmichael, 26 June 1973, PA68–143, FFA.

Latin America in the 1960s  113

54 Nita R. Manitzas to Peter D. Bell, “Terminal Evaluation,” 4 April 1973, PA68–143, FFA. The “di Tella” was associated in every respect with Argentine “modernization,” and had a good relationship with the Ford and Rockefeller Foundations as well as the CCF. John King, El Di Tella y el desarrollo cultural argentino en la década del sesenta (Buenos Aires, Argentina: Ediciones de Arte Gaglianone, 1985).When ILARI closed, Luis Mercier Vega donated its book and periodical collection to the di Tella’s library, where it remains. 55 Along with Hobsbawm, the other members of the Advisory Board were David Apter of Berkeley and Alain Touraine of the University of Paris. In addition to Laclau, the research team included Miguel Murmis and Juan Carlos Marín. 56 Secretary HRD to Enrique Otaiza, 29 January 1968, Enrique Otaiza and Jorge GarcíaBousa to John Nagel, 30 November 1967, and Nita R. Manitzas to Eric J. Hobsbawm, 6 November 1968, PA68–143, FFA. The grant was for $194,000. 57 Beatriz Sarlo and Carlos Altamirano, La batalla de las ideas: (1943–1973) (Buenos Aires: Emecé, 2007), 99. 58 Horacio Daniel Rodríguez to Luis Mercier Vega, 9 December 1968, IACF series VI, box 11, folder 4, UC-SCRC. 59 Daniel Goldstein, “Sociológicos argentinos aceitan el engranaje,” Marcha (10 January 1969): 15, 22. Translation by the Ford Foundation, found in PA68–143, FFA. 60 Quoted in Plotkin, “Marginality Project,” 84. 61 José Nun, carta abierta a los estudiantes de sociología de la Universidad de Buenos Aires, November 1968, PA68–143, FFA. 62 José Nun, “Superpoblación relativa, ejército industrial de reserva y masa marginal,” Revista Latinoamericana de Sociología V, no. 2 (1969): 178–236. The article resulted in a largely technical dispute with Fernando Henrique Cardoso about the validity of the idea of the “epistemological break” in the thought of Marx, then in vogue because of the work of Louis Althusser. All of the articles in their exchange have been compiled in José Nun, Marginalidad y exclusión social (Buenos Aires: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 2001). 63 Nita R. Manitzas to Peter D. Bell, “Terminal Evaluation,” 4 April 1973, PA68–143, FFA. 64 On the work and reception of Oscar Lewis, see Susan Rigdon, The Culture Facade: Art, Science, and Politics in the Work of Oscar Lewis (Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 1988); Karin Alejandra Rosemblatt, “Other Americas: Transnationalism, Scholarship, and the Culture of Poverty in Mexico and the United States,” Hispanic American Historical Review 89, no. 4 (2009): 603–641. 65 Mudrovcic, Mundo Nuevo, 117. Oscar Lewis, “La cultura de la pobreza,” Mundo Nuevo, no. 5 (November 1966): 42. The article was a translation of “The Culture of Poverty,” Scientific American 215, no. 4 (October 1966): 19–25. 66 Oscar Lewis, Ruth M. Lewis, and Susan M. Rigdon, Four Men: Living the Revolution: An Oral History of Contemporary Cuba (Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 1977), x. 67 Haydée Santamaría to Oscar Lewis, 26 August 1968, Oscar Lewis papers, box 204, folder “Casa de las Américas,” Illinois; Oscar Lewis, “La cultura de la pobreza,” Pensamiento Crítico, no. 7 (August 1967): 52–65. 68 Lewis to Muna Muñoz Lee, 6 August 1970, in Rigdon, Culture Facade, 281–282. 69 Lewis, Lewis, and Rigdon, Four Men: Living the Revolution: An Oral History of Contemporary Cuba, xxi. The Israeli pouch was first used to get him manuscript galleys; after that he used it for things like Christmas cards and professional correspondence. “Items mailed 12/5/69,” Oscar Lewis papers, box 204, folder “Israel Consulate (Re: Cuba) for Diplomatic Pouch,” Illinois. 70 Raúl Castro, Educación, no. 5 (Julio–Sept. 1972): 23, 28. 71 Orlando Fals Borda, “Ciencia y compromiso: problemas metodológicos del libro ‘La subversión en Colombia’,” Aportes, no. 8 (April 1968): 117–128; Solari, “Algunas reflexiones sobre el problema de los valores, la objetividad y el compromiso en las ciencias sociales,” Aportes, no. 13 (July 1969): 6–24; Orlando Fals Borda, “La crisis social y la orientación sociológica: una réplica,” Aportes, no. 15 (January 1970): 62–76; Aldo Solari, “Usos y abusos de la sociología: una dúplica,” Aportes, no. 19 (January 1971): 42–53.

114  Patrick Iber

72 Louis Mercier Vega, Roads to Power in Latin America (New York, N.Y.: Praeger, 1969), 200. 73 Guillermo A. O’Donnell, Modernization and Bureaucratic-Authoritarianism: Studies in South American Politics (Berkeley, CA: Institute of International Studies University of California, 1973), 84, 110. 74 Nita R. Manitzas to Peter Hakim, 7 December 1972, PA72–265, FFA. 75 Raúl Castro, Educación, no. 5 (Julio–Sept. 1972): 23. 76 Plotkin, “Marginality Project,” 67. 77 Greg Grandin, Fordlandia: The Rise and Fall of Henry Ford’s Forgotten Jungle City (New York, N.Y.: Metropolitan Books, 2009).

Selected bibliography Berger, Mark T. Under Northern Eyes: Latin American Studies and U.S. Hegemony in the Americas, 1898–1990. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995. Cohn, Deborah. The Latin American Literary Boom and U.S. Nationalism during the Cold War. Nashville, TN:Vanderbilt University Press, 2012. Franco, Jean. The Decline and Fall of the Lettered City: Latin America in the Cold War. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002. Gilman, Claudia. Entre la pluma y el fusil: debates y dilemas del escritor revolucionario en América Latina. Buenos Aires: Siglo Veintiuno Editores Argentina, 2003. Glondys, Olga. La guerra fría cultural y el exilio republicano español: Cuadernos del Congreso por la Libertad de la Cultura (1953–1965). Madrid: Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas, 2012. Iber, Patrick. Neither Peace nor Freedom: The Cultural Cold War in Latin America. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2015. Latham, Michael E. Modernization as Ideology: American Social Science and “Nation Building” in the Kennedy Era. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2000. Love, Joseph. Crafting the Third World:Theorizing Underdevelopment in Rumania and Brazil. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1996. Mudrovcic, María Eugenia. Mundo Nuevo: cultura y guerra fría en la década del 60. Rosario, Argentina: Beatriz Viterbo Editora, 1997. Parmar, Inderjeet. Foundations of the American Century:The Ford, Carnegie, and Rockefeller Foundations in the Rise of American Power. New York, N.Y.: Columbia University Press, 2012. Plotkin, Mariano Ben. “US Foundations, Cultural Imperialism and Transnational Misunderstandings: The Case of the Marginality Project.” Journal of Latin American Studies 47, no. 1 (February 2015): 65–92. Rigdon, Susan. The Culture Facade: Art, Science, and Politics in the Work of Oscar Lewis. Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 1988. Rohde, Joy. Armed with Expertise: The Militarization of American Social Research during the Cold War. Ithaca, N.Y. and London: Cornell University Press, 2013. Rosemblatt, Karin Alejandra. “Other Americas: Transnationalism, Scholarship, and the Culture of Poverty in Mexico and the United States.” Hispanic American Historical Review 89, no. 4 (2009): 603–641. Saunders, Frances Stonor. The Cultural Cold War: The CIA and the World of Arts and Letters. New York, N.Y.: New Press, 2000. Solovey, Mark. Shaky Foundations:The Politics-Patronage-Social Science Nexus in Cold War America. New Brunswick and London: Rutgers University Press, 2013. Wilford, Hugh. The Mighty Wurlitzer: How the CIA Played America. Cambridge, M.A.: Harvard University Press, 2008. Wolfe, Audra. Competing with the Soviets: Science, Technology, and the State in Cold War America. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2013.

6 THE GLOBAL EROTICS OF THE FRENCH SEXUAL REVOLUTION Politics and “Arab Men” in post-decolonization France, 1962–1974 Todd Shepard

A 1967 newspaper article assessing that fall’s literary output lamented, “for a long time, the French have relegated Algeria to literary purgatory.” Finally, however, five years after the victory of pro-independence nationalists, what critic Xavier Gall termed “An Algerian Harvest” gave the French public an opportunity to gain perspective on “the physical and moral drama of the [Algerian] war” (1954–1962). There were, he noted, “easily a dozen titles I could cite,” but he focused on Pierre Guyotat’s Tombeau pour cinq cent mille soldats (A Tomb for Five Hundred Thousand Soldiers). Although Gall regretted its obsession with violence, he embraced what he takes to be the book’s greatest insight: “it remains true that the Algerian war had something notably erotic about it.” A note that Guyotat wrote to himself to describe the manuscript that became Tombeau more acutely raises, I think, some of the issues at stake in 1967: “decolonization and ‘de-eroticization’.”1 With this coupling, Guyotat gave voice to the hope that the mid-twentiethcentury tide of decolonization had laid low not just European colonialism, but the foundations on which, historians tell us, orientalist erotic fantasies (and nightmares) had long flourished: the institutions that affirmed clear distinctions (between groups; between metropoles and colonies; between colonized and colonizer); the hierarchies of power that relied on such claims; as well as the endemic play of difference and sex that proposed “desire” as the primary agent driving modern European colonialism, rather than brute force or the pull of ideology (“conquest . . . not by the Cross nor the Sword but the Penis,” as ethnologist Roger Bastide put it).2 Guyotat’s 1967 novel forces attention to how the mixture of violence and desire exploded during the Algerian war; it works to exaggerate and disable—to de-­eroticize—what made this recent history so sexual. This conflicted past is what Gall’s commentary tames into “something notably erotic.” As I read their contradictions, both statements are more compelling as primary sources than as histories: they evidence how quickly after the “tide” of decolonization (which supposedly left

116  Todd Shepard

new possibilities in its wake), familiar sexualized claims about “Arabs” reemerged— claims that now, however, primarily described people, relationships, and events located within France even as they always also referenced Algeria.3

The global, the local, the anti-colonial, and the sexual: an introduction This chapter provides a new perspective on both the global sexual revolution and on what made this phenomenon “French” in France. For both, it insists on the foundational role of the worldwide anticolonial movements of the mid-twentieth century. Recently, historians have struggled to bring detailed cultural histories that situate “metropole and colonies in the same frame” into dialogue with wide-lens global histories: what follows traces the outlines of one model. In broad terms, the French sexual revolution and French controversies about sex in the 1960s and 1970s can be fruitfully mapped onto a transnational chronology of crises and evolutions, a global movement that produced clear parallels in other countries (in the USA, Germany, and the UK, for example). Yet, as this article indicates, what was particular here—what made these controversies “French,” rather than “Western” or “late modern”—were the central roles that invocations of Arab men and Algeria played in them and the ways that such invocations altered the contours and, at key moments, the substance of debates about contemporary sexuality. Close attention to this French history foregrounds what previous celebratory accounts of the global sexual revolution writ large have obscured. These focus on the dramatic increase in discussions about sex, of public claims that sexuality should be treasured and liberated, and in the availability of new technologies that made it easier to pursue erotic pleasures. Such scholarship seeks to explain the decline in the persecution, stigmatization, or prosecution of sexually heterodox acts or individuals and, subsequently, the liberalization of legal restrictions. In this perspective, desired freedoms, too long repressed, found full expression in conjunction with new scientific knowledge and growing individualism.Yet none of these developments, either in France or elsewhere—as historians like Beth Bailey, Dagmar Herzog and Frank Mort have argued—were straightforward.4 Attending to the admixture of anticolonialism and racism that defined this French sexual history maps out large areas where the terrain of sexual liberation was more perilous than usually thought. Furthermore, it illuminates how reactionary and conservative activists, critiques, and questions, some retrofitted and some quite innovative, were part of the sexual revolution, not outside it. Algerian independence—like other decolonizations— was not a definitive break between before and after.Yet presumptions that the end of French rule in the Maghreb was exactly such a rupture—as well as the developments that supported such arguments—fashioned what came after. This is why the category of “post-decolonization” is useful to historians (more useful, perhaps, than the much-abused “postcolonial” or “post-colonial”). A post-decolonization focus adds new depth to the fundamental lesson that the sexual revolution—as its name suggests—forced contemporaries to learn: sex, sexuality, gender, and, more broadly,

Global erotics of the French sexual revolution  117

culture were not natural, they were deeply political. For the French, an Algerian lens helped make this visible.5 An erotic charge linked to Algeria surged into French discussions around “May ’68.” To analyze this history, what follows focuses on a period that begins with the 1967 emergence of “sexual liberty” in public debates sparked by protests at Nanterre University, and culminates in 1974 (when government decisions suspending legal immigration altered the discussion). Most claims were strikingly similar to those that had accompanied empire, yet decolonization (the 1962 forced withdrawal of the French state from Algeria) redefined why such talk was widespread and the work it did.What follows maps the intersection of sex talk,“Arab men,” and politics as they played out in the writings of radical political activists and journalists. It first sketches out why developments during the Algerian war made sex talk so important to French post-decolonization efforts to grapple with the history and ongoing effects of the war; French Algeria; and empire more broadly. As historians of the modern West have shown, sexuality has been a “persistent and recurring way of enabling the signification of power,” to borrow Joan W. Scott’s description of the field of gender. Several specificities of the Algerian revolution, however, explain why the post-decolonization reinscription of sexual orientalism in “’68 years” France was gendered male and fixated on representations of men, masculinity, and virility. The article then turns to the little noticed gesturing of the far-right press in the months around the events of May ’68.While brief, this section makes clear how many continuities there were between longstanding orientalist certainties about North African men and sex and post-decolonization invocations. It also suggests how far-right maneuvers in Spring 1968—notably, efforts to erase connections to the history of French empire in Algeria—repositioned these stereotypes in ways that facilitated their subsequent re-emergence in more mainstream public discussions. The final section moves forward into the 1970s, to examine publications of the “revolutionary” far-left press—via the writings of self-proclaimed gay liberationists. Here, the place of “Arab men” was striking, controversial, and emblematic of larger developments on the far left. Gay liberationists merit special attention because they sought at once to celebrate and politicize the erotics of Algerian difference, which others vilified and/or essentialized. They did so by insisting on the contemporary pertinence of histories of colonial domination and anti-colonial struggle.6 This history speaks to scholarship on empire and race, to studies of the ’68 years, as well as to the history of sexuality. During the ’68 years, I argue, public debates about sex and sexuality repeatedly offered French people a chance to assess, evoke, even analyze histories and memories of French Algeria, the war, and empire. An examination of the unexpected intersections of public sex talk and Algerians also renders visible the foundational roles post-decolonization concerns played in French political developments over the course of the sixties. Finally, while influential recent analyses of this period describe arguments linked to sex as either impediments to or after-effects of politics, or limited to the realm of “identity politics,” this history tells one of the ways that they were constitutive of political understandings and actions.7

118  Todd Shepard

The history explored here deepens the insight of numerous cultural critics that the Algerian war was a context that directly shaped France’s ’68 years. It shows that sex talk at once framed this dynamic and made it visible. It takes up the argument advanced by Kristin Ross for the formative role of the Algerian revolution in order to reject her effort to sideline the politics of sex and show, instead, how sexual questions were central to the Algerian politics of ’68 years France.8 This works to extend the history of France’s sexual revolution backwards, “pre-1968.” After Algerian independence, what I term “the erotics of Algerian difference” proved useful to political efforts to grapple with wide-ranging uncertainties about gendered and class identities and the post-decolonization boundaries of the French nation. The crucial terrain was immigration and the most important focus of claims and disagreements were the erotic relationships of France and the French to Algerian men. To misuse Freudian terminology, all engaged the unspoken question of whether the libidinal links between Algerian men and the French/France were to be repressed through demonization, or cathected, through emulation or objectification.9

The Algerian revolution and sex The Algerian revolution, which began on November 1, 1954, produced the context for this French debate. In 1962, the fact of Algerian independence redefined legal bonds, ended French sovereignty and concurrent claims that Algeria was a purely French domestic affair; it affirmed that, on the international stage, the two were now distinct entities: two states and two wholly different peoples. Formal decolonization also cast into doubt long-standing, explicitly sexualized explanations for French domination, which included claims that Arab culture was profoundly decadent, that Algeria was peopled by brutes, that Islam was all-consuming and stultifying, and that all three embraced the abasement of women—the result of obsession and frustration and signaled by the veil and the harem. The victory that Algerian nationalists won against the French Republic seemingly gave the lie to arguments that an overarching absence of sexual morality and self-control made the very possibility of civilization or (as advanced by the mid-twentieth century) modernity necessarily a gift from the outside—as David Harvey sums it up “the submission of East to West [as] as necessary to the progress of civilization as the submission of female to male authority and control.”10 Yet the intensity with which the Algerian revolution, and militants’ invocations of this event, framed political arguments that invoked sex and men in the late 1960s and early 1970s did not derive, primarily, from the fact of decolonization itself. During the struggle for independence, anti-imperialist writers and Algerian nationalist propagandists forced attention to and redefined the erotics of empire. Their tactics and arguments upset longstanding certainties and undercut French efforts to deploy them. While this dynamic can be identified in diverse struggles over colonialism in the mid-twentieth century, the Algerian revolution rendered it strikingly visible. Anti-imperialist critics directly targeted pro-French Algeria arguments that relied on long-standing orientalist and colonialist claims about how sex and gender were (and should be) organized.11

Global erotics of the French sexual revolution  119

The most well-known contretemps was what The New York Times Magazine termed, in 1958, the “Battle of the Veil.” In the struggle to garner international sympathy, nationalist propaganda successfully countered official French claims, which proposed that “Arab Muslim” misogyny, sexual obsession, and barbarism forced women to wear the so-called Islamic veil in order to deny their humanity. Critics of French imperialism instead insisted that, currently, the murderous violence and dehumanizing effects of French rule were far more responsible for women’s suffering and restricted choices than religious backwardness or problems particular to Maghrebi heterosociability.12 Although little discussed by scholars, anti-colonial critics had even more success in destabilizing French certainties about masculinity and male sexuality, notably during the war-time debates around torture. These, here again, brought existing certainties to the fore, specifically the joined idea that some combination of barbarity, climate, Islam, immorality, and primitive physiology made Arab men, sexually, adepts of sodomy and accepting of man/boy pederasty as well as, socially, either overly-virile brutes or decadent effetes. A 1960 analysis of Maghrebin demography invoked this congeries of traits to categorize North African Muslim men as “homo eroticus.”13 Domestic political debates during the Algerian war saw both troubling questions raised about French masculinity and, more unexpectedly, celebratory depictions of Algerian masculinity. “European” Frenchmen repeatedly tarred each other with “Oriental” vices, accusations of male sexual deviance that aimed to discredit political opponents. Critics from all sides joined in, left and right, pro-independence, and anti-. In debates over torture, for example, anti-colonial critics described how colonialism had rendered French men soft and perverted, suggesting that the painful humiliation sadistic torturers inflicted on rebellious bodies revealed deviant desires to possess their manliness. “Revolutionary” Algerian men, to the contrary, emerged in anti-imperialist depictions as the embodiment of healthy, virile, heterosexual masculinity. Just as some French radicals argued that the Algerian revolution was the yeast that would raise a world revolution, so books such as The Gangrene, The Question, or The Wretched of the Earth proposed that valiant rebels could remind the French of what it meant to be a man.14 Anti-colonial struggle engaged issues of sex and gender that would be at the heart of the so-called sexual revolution. In a set of key war-time debates about Algerian and French men and women (and their bodies), anti-colonial critics countered gendered and sexualized orientalist presumptions. What they challenged was the claim that “civilizing” colonialism could impose sexual normalcy.Yet, inadvertently, the links they laid bare made it newly possible to think that sexual norms more generally might be understood with reference to colonial oppression. The questions they raised about the erotics of empire, that is, proved durably destabilizing and difficult to silence. This ongoing messiness helps explain why this nexus became a privileged site where wide-ranging concerns about difference (which decolonization supposedly had resolved) could be talked about. And they were.15 Over the course of the ’68 years, most claims focused on Algerian or “Arab” men, in part because the vast majority of the large numbers of Algerians in France were young and male.Yet numbers alone do not explain why—as public debates and, even more

120  Todd Shepard

FIGURE 6.1 Revolutionary

masculinity: “Ali la pointe” (nom de guerre of FLN fighter Ali Amar (1930–1957)).

Police photograph; reproduced by courtesy of L’Humanité, Paris. All rights reserved.

clearly, confidential government assessments after 1968 reveal—most French discussions about “immigrants” were specifically about Algerians. Nor do the overwhelming percentages of men among them (although lower than among contemporary South Asian immigrants in Britain, for example) fully explain either why war-time government attention to “Muslim families” in the Metropole shifted, after 1962, to a focus on “Algerian young men,” or why longstanding orientalist interest in “Arab Muslim women” was less central during the ’68 years than talk of men.16 Also important, I would suggest, was how successful anti-colonial critics had been in positioning the “revolutionary” Algerian Man as the embodiment of (universal and true) manliness, a figure who had confronted the overwhelming force—and the sadistic unmanly

Global erotics of the French sexual revolution  121

masculinity: Brahim Haggiag as Ali la pointe in The Battle of Algiers (1965).

FIGURE 6.2 Revolutionary

tactics—of France and freed his nation and family from colonial oppression. On the world stage, the talismanic importance that Gillo Pontecorvo’s film The Battle of Algiers (1965) and the “Algerian” writings of Frantz Fanon achieved in “Third Worldist” and gauchiste circles—notably, among the US Black Panther Party—amplified the effects of wartime debates. In addition, whereas the “veiled woman,” even when revalorized for her heroic resistance to the colonizers, remained definitively not French (and too associated with Islam), anti-colonial and Third Worldist representations of the heroic Algerian Man staked their claims on the same ground that French voices considered their own, i.e. (necessarily masculine) universalism. For some, such as ’68-years new leftists, this meant that “Arabs” could be models and allies. For others, first and foremost far-right activists, this meant that the need to reject both such claims and an Algerian presence on French territory, alongside or with French people, could appear quite pressing. Both contributed to how immigration, “Arab” immigration above all, became an important political topic over the course of the ’68 years.17

The far right, Algerian “perversion,” and May ’68 By mid-1967, the small world of the French far right was abuzz with discussions anticipating May 1968. They published books and polished arguments that aimed to take advantage of all the coming publicity to advance far-right arguments. They did not expect what actually happened, of course: the stunning, fast-moving, and seemingly revolutionary left-wing upheaval that began early in that month, which saw student protesters join up with striking workers in the public spaces of Paris and beyond, thereby shutting down the country. What ultranationalists had been waiting for, instead, was the ten-year anniversary of May 1958, the year that

122  Todd Shepard

pro-French Algeria crowds in Algiers and their allies in the armed forces toppled the Fourth French Republic and brought Charles de Gaulle back to power. What had been true since at least 1954 remained the case: the far right was traumatized by Algeria. Yet what these discussions brought into view was how this agitated coterie of activists and writers was conflicted about why they should talk about Algeria and Algerians. Most wrote as if to keep the Algerian war—memories, recriminations, and comparisons—front and present. Some, however, explicitly privileged identifying Algerian immigrants as a current danger to France. The actual events of May 1968 both highlighted this tension and allowed the latter to emerge more prominently: far-right reactions to “May,” that is, advanced the efforts of the small group of theoreticians who (over the course of the 1970s) would come to be known as the the French New Right to pivot from “nostalgérie/nostalgeria” toward a focus on the Algerian “invasion” that, they argued, threatened France. Public debates that linked sex, violence, and politics made this happen.18 In their efforts to alert their fellow French citizens to the dangers of the “Arab invasion,” far-right journalists in the 1960s systematically linked Algerians to sexual crimes. Such an approach relied on longstanding certainties that first orientalist commentators and later French journalists, academic experts, and law-­ enforcement officials had invoked to warn of the dangers that Algerian migrants posed to France.19 What is noteworthy, however, is that affirmations that “Arabs” embodied animalistic sexual excess were more than just long-available ideological crutches or far-right verbal tics: they reflected a well theorized set of tactics, which a small group of far-right young men (e.g., Alain de Benoist, Dominique Venner and Jean Mabire) associated with the influential if short-lived journal Europe-action (1963–1966) had defined and convinced others journalists and politicians to pursue. This fragment of the far right sought to analyze why they had failed to keep Algeria French and how it was that, in this failed effort, most on the French far right had come to insist that “Algerian Muslims” were wholly French. Together, they argued, these two strategic failures explained why their political family now found itself even more isolated than it had been at the end of World War II. Insisting that Algerians and French were wholly distinct peoples who needed to be kept apart, they posited, would end their isolation.20 The “Arab invasion” tactic was repeatedly and enthusiastically deployed (see Figure 6.3) over the course of the 1960s, but had failed to advance its primary goals, which were to replace depictions of Algerians victimized by French colonialism with understandings of “Arabs” as victimizers of innocent French people and, on these grounds, to reconnect the far-right to the broad mainstream of the French right. The (right-wing) government continued to encourage immigration, notably from Algeria, and to provide (limited) social services to immigrants; right-wing politicians continued to avoid any connection with public figures or political movements that had been linked to the OAS (Secret Army Organization, a terrorist group that emerged in 1961 to reject any move toward Algerian independence) or too closely to French Algeria; far-right politicians continued to see their extremely small electorate shrink.Yet in spring 1968, these xenophobic efforts gained substantial traction.

FIGURE 6.3  “Wanted:

Mohammed el-Prick, Born in Algeria, Living in France. This Man is Dangerous! Liable to Kill! Rape! Steal! Plunder! etc., etc.You Won’t Have to Look Very Far to Find Him … All Around You,There Are 700,000 Just Like Him!”

Europe-action 22 (1964), back cover.

124  Todd Shepard

In early 1968, an editorial in Minute re-launched the campaign, with the proclamation that “the Algerian colony has set up camp,” and summoned the weekly’s journalists and readers “to expose the dangers posed by this invasion, which is now growing in leaps and bounds.” Letter writers quickly responded to the editorial’s summons. They produced not only numerous examples of Algerian criminal deviance, but analyses of why this was allowed to happen. In one response the author explained that “an FLN [nationalist] leader, while speaking in Tunis [during the Algerian war], said that ‘France is a bitch nation, which will resist the male for a while, but always ends up giving in.’ He was, it pains me to say, correct.” Another Minute article, this one in early May and entitled “Now That’s Cooperation, mon’zami,” first reproduced an editorial from a Dijon daily that claimed that “every day, young girls and women are being harassed by North Africans,” before revealing the story of “another North African with an overly developed sense of sociability, who accosted two young soldiers the other evening in Nancy in order to involve them in a very special form of cooperation.” A March article in Rivarol made the implication a bit clearer, drawing attention to “the large number of Algerian ‘tourists’ who cruise the dark streets and public gardens of Paris.”21 In linking Algerian men to rape, sexual harassment, and homosexual promiscuity, far-right journalists worked to substantiate a larger, traditional argument: only the French far right embodied a normal and healthy manliness capable of defending the French from their perverted enemies. Certain legal facts aggravated far-right outrage. Notably, they bemoaned how French law—as a result of the Evian Accords, which French officials had negotiated with Algerian nationalists in order to end the Algerian war—authorized Algerians to enter, live, and work in France. Their arguments repeatedly insisted that healthy connections between French people—most importantly, between men and women—depended on maintaining natural and necessary divisions—between normal and abnormal, healthy and perverted, French and Algerians—all of which the growing numbers of Algerians present in France actively undermined. The invaders’ most potent weapons, farright writings suggested, derived from their uncontrollable sexual lusts.22 It was during the fast-moving and seemingly revolutionary upheaval of May 1968—when student protests joined up with a general strike and shut down the country—that the far right’s anti-Algerian campaign took root among larger audiences.As soon as the events of May began, far-right journalists reached for Algeria. They presented the student “enragés” as at once buffoons and a danger: indeed, it was their fundamentally unmanly “clowneries” that menaced France, through further devirilization. Rather than continue to focus on the Gaullist regime as the primary danger, most on the far right turned their attention to other internal enemies: the Communist Party, as always, but especially the perverted cohort of leftists eager to sap the nation’s ability to defend its purity.23 Ironically, the absence of left-wing violence provided the far-right with their main argument that this May was not a real revolution but an effeminate farce. The context was “nostalgeria.” In every venue, far-right commentators compared May 1968 to pro-French Algerian activism, with its embrace of OAS violence. The

Global erotics of the French sexual revolution  125

most obvious difference—in a comparison that even some Gaullist politicians took up—was leftists’ lack of patriotism.Yet they also found the leftists wanting in terms of revolutionary ability and vigor. One headline contrasted the “Red-White-andBlue May” of 1958 to the current “Red May,” but the article’s central claim was that in 1958, “French Algeria activists crossed the Mediterranean” while, in 1968, “the enragés hardly dared to cross the Boul’ Mich [the main thoroughfare of the Latin Quarter].” The movement’s “failure” to be suitably virile took visual form through repeated images of female protestors and served to explain, as made clear through captions and accompanying articles, the movement’s inability to act like true revolutionaries. The front cover of the May 16 issue of Rivarol, for example, presents a be-skirted young woman on top of a burned-out car; the caption mockingly proclaims that “a cutie complains . . . she has a blister; the car has been roughed up as well.” The text also highlights another leitmotif of far-right representations of the events, which was the failed masculinity of leftist men: she is said to complain “as her bored companion (who’s unfit to help her in any case) looks on.”24 In the first week of May, in contrast with the pro-French Algeria “men” of 1958– 1962, Rivarol’s editorial picked out the word that would be taken up across the farright press: “twinks” (minets): “nos ‘minets’ révoltés/ our angry twinks”; the “ ‘minets’ de Nanterre/ the twinks of Nanterre”; “minets marcusiens/ Marcusian twinks.”25

FIGURE 6.4 

The front cover of Rivarol, May 16, 1968.

126  Todd Shepard

Through insistent presentations of the protestors as either women or (mainly) devirilized, unnatural, and womanly men, far-right journalists set the stage for the shift from “nostalgeria,” with its attendant fixation on de Gaulle and his “regime” as responsible for French decadence, to a new source: leftists.This shift in focus allowed far-right journalists to connect French leftists to the larger “Algerian danger”/ “Arab invasion” that, they proclaimed, worked to transform France into a “bitch nation,” and a mongrel one at that. An early June report in Minute, “Genet Has It Bad for the Red-Head” described the leftist and homosexual writer’s visit to the occupied Sorbonne and told of how “Genet swooned at the power this boy [redhead and student leader Cohn-Bendit] exudes,” before noting that,“in the red head’s absence, he found other Sorbonne twinks to his taste: ‘Joy is pumping through my body,’ he confided . . . ‘It’s just so pretty, to see all these young men rebelling’.” Minute uses Genet to define the students as eliciting homosexual perversion: “Let’s hope,” the journalist wrote, “that the ‘young men’ of the Sorbonne had enough tact to erase the slogan that the most conformist among them had spray-painted on the walls: ‘Students, don’t let yourself be enc-—[buggered]’.” Like the North Africans of Nanterre, the activists both attracted perverts and spread deviance.The article ended with an insistent return to the far-right’s Algerian fixation—and Genet’s: “The ‘enragés’ must have writhed in delicious agony; Jean Genet already had revealed the secret source of his political opinions in a Playboy interview:‘perhaps if I hadn’t gone to bed with [Algerian men] I might not have been in favor of the FLN’.”26 A few recent studies of “May ’68” compellingly examine how Algerian references shaped and served activists on the new left: leftist students and writers repeatedly sought inspiration in the Algerian revolution. It was one of the exemplary victories that the forces of progress and justice had won against international imperialism, capitalism, and the power of the French government. During these same months, however, far right journalists and activists also looked to Algeria.They did so in order to incite orientalist fears of contamination and to link leftist calls for revolt and revolution—sexual or other—to an “Arab invasion.” No matter that they had supported Algérie française [French Algeria]: this was what would lead, they proclaimed, to a “France algérienne [Algerian France].”27 What distinguished this far-right deployment of orientalist stereotypes was that, in the intense rush of May ’68, their efforts directly targeted leftist arguments based in solidarity and tiers-mondisme. This allowed a supposed French fifth column (of “twinks” and their ilk) to displace the unmanly (Fifth) Republic as the traitors who, the far right warned, were opening France up to invasion. Notably, the far right latched onto leftist arguments for sexual liberation, which the far right identified as foundational to the leftist movement, in order to link proponents to the Arab danger that supposedly menaced France. Their writings charged that the new left militants, like the Algerians whose revolution they so admired, were themselves perverted savages or, at best, the “Arabs’ ” effete accomplices. In either case, they threatened the nation. Such interpretations of what was at stake and of how to respond proved very attractive to many people in France. They help explain, I would suggest, new

Global erotics of the French sexual revolution  127

restrictions on Algerian immigration and the start of a police policy of tabulating how many sexual crimes in France were committed by foreign nationals, which were both announced in the summer of 1968. Both were greeted as victories by the far-right press. They helped set the stage for an outpouring of French antiAlgerian violence, which began in the Goutte d’Or neighborhood of Paris in 1971 and exploded around Marseille in the summer of 1973. They would take on a new intensity around the government’s 1974 announcement that it was suspending all immigration. (One effect was that current immigrants would be tempted to stay in France, rather than return home for holidays; some commentators asserted that this might exacerbate the effects of immigrant “sexual misery,” on North Africans most particularly. The Ministry of Social Affairs began targeted campaigns in cities such as Marseille, which used references to Islam and health warnings to encourage “selfcontrol.” In 1975, the newly recognized principle of family reunification became the primary authorized mechanism for legal immigration.)28 Over the course of the 1970s, the public link between a supposed “Arab invasion” and sexual danger continued to develop. This shaped the context in which leftist political organizations took up the immigrant question, including groups formed by “Third World”— notably Maghrebin—immigrants themselves.29

“We have been buggered by Arabs”: sex radicals’ invocations of Algerian men and the fight for sexual revolution A December 1972 program on the public radio network France-culture, which interviewed the proverbial Parisian taxi driver, gives some indication of the purchase of far-right efforts to link French decadence and Algerian male deviance: QUESTION:  Mr., excuse

me, can I ask what you think about homosexuals? who? Q: Homosexuals R: Oh! Homos, well you know . . . merde, they’re fags . . . queers . . . We don’t like ‘em, that’s for sure. We had to deal with Algeria, now the homos: we’re not going to take it anymore! ANSWER: The

A bit later, in response to a follow up, the taxi driver explained: course, the foreign influence is obvious, all those bougnoles [dirty Arabs] wandering around Paris; they say they’re here to work but what they love is to get [bleep]. . . If the French government doesn’t start to limit foreign immigration, well, faggotry is just going to become even more widespread. Take my word for it.30

R:  Yes, of

These accusations, of course, echoed longstanding orientalist tropes. Yet, as with far-right pronouncements that “Arab” males around Nanterre University were catalyzing sexual deviance, it was proponents of sexual liberty—many of whom talked

128  Todd Shepard

in terms of a revolution—who had launched the debate. A more substantial difference from previous episodes was how some on the left responded. Rather than argue that, to find the perverts, chercher la droite [look Right], some contemporaneous French activists made clear that making “faggotry . . . even more widespread” was something they dreamed of: writers associated with a new organization, the Homosexual Front for Revolutionary Action, which went by its French acronym, the FHAR, argued that this would open up new possibilities for political action. They, like the far right, linked these developments to male “Arab” immigrants.31 It was through public evocation and exaltation of sex between “Arab” immigrant men, most particularly Algerians, and (“French” and “European”) homosexual men that the FHAR staked a claim to be at the vanguard of revolutionary action. In April 1971, the “Maoist Spontex” group Vive la Révolution! handed control of the twelfth issue of its magazine Tout! (the largest circulation leftist publication) to members of the FHAR. Diagonally splayed across part of the centerfold, in the midst of articles, collages, and headlines, they printed a more complete version of the already cited statement from Genet, which he made in Playboy: “Perhaps if I hadn’t gone to bed with Algerians I might not have been in favor of the F.L.N. That’s not so; I probably would have sided with them anyway. But perhaps it was homosexuality that made me realize Algerians are no different from other men.” In June 1968, Minute had truncated the quote, to intimate that the students, like Genet, were driven by unnatural lusts rather than rational politics.The extended quote, published in Tout!, at the center of four pages of calls for revolution and sexual liberation, read quite differently. Here, Genet’s quote suggested that revolutionary political understandings and actions could result from thinking about sexual ­connections—such as that between the French writer and Algerians—because they established bonds between types of people whom oppressive social structures at once constructed (repressed “homosexuals” and colonized Algerians) and worked to keep apart. FHAR-­associated militants embraced such claims.32 During its brief existence, the FHAR shared with others on the new left—in France and elsewhere—a reliance on the joined struggles of anti-colonialism and anti-racism that had gained such leverage over public debate as well as political organizing and action in the post-World War II era.33 It is no coincidence that the initial group of FHAR’s activists—overwhelmingly women—had found inspiration in the inaugural issue of Tout!, which included a translation of imprisoned Black Panther Party leader Huey Newton’s “Declaration in Support of the Just Struggle of Homosexuals and Women” (August 1970), nor that, after a group of FHAR women engaged in their first public action in March 1971, they registered with the authorities under the name Humanitarian Anti-Racist Front (Front humanitaire anti-raciste, or FHAR), rather than Homosexual Front for Revolutionary Action.34 References to the Black Panthers, like the inspirational model of the ­Stonewall-Riots that catalyzed the US Gay Liberation Movement, remind us of how much trans-Atlantic exchanges shaped the sexual revolution—and radical same-sex sexual activism—in France.35 Yet attention to this current has obscured the central role of anti-colonial movements in ’68 years politics (both European

Global erotics of the French sexual revolution  129

FIGURE 6.5 “Arab or leftist?” “Faggot.” Cartoon taken from Front homosexuel d’action

révolutionnaire, Rapport contre la normalité (Paris: Champs Libre, 1971). First published in Tout! 13.

and North American), notably for sexual revolutionaries. The most significant anti-racist and “Third Worldist” touchstone in the FHAR’s writings, bar none, were images and descriptions of Algerian men, which were omnipresent; a 1978 critic affirmed that “not a scrap of pseudo-sexo-lutionary writing didn’t caress le sexe Arabe [Arab erogenous zones], as if to hug close an FLN they never knew.” Through this reference, FHAR writers made the role of the Algerian revolution in defining the French New Left explicit. In another special issue produced by members of FHAR, this one in the journal Recherches (1973), the central section was entitled “Arabs and Fags.” In one article (“20 Years of Cruising”) the author dated his political awareness to the Algerian revolution, reminiscing that “I became Algerian: I am Arab Algeria. If they lose, I’m out of luck; if they win, I, too, could triumph . . .” As in this example, these texts identified Algerians as comrades in struggle and as models for action, exaggerating arguments widespread on the French far left. Yet, beyond their greater frequency, references to anti-colonialism and racism were sharply inflected by the particular roles that representations of Algerian and North African men played.36 Tout! no. 12 presented a petition, which made this role clear: “We are more than 343 sluts. We’ve been buggered by Arabs. We’re proud of it and we’ll do it again. Sign and circulate this petition”37 (see Figure 6.6):

130  Todd Shepard

FIGURE 6.6  This

FHAR “petition” parodied the famous 1971 “Manifesto of the 343” circulated by French feminists who advocated legalizing abortion in France. Reproduced from Front homosexuel d’action révolutionnaire, Rapport contre la normalité (Paris: Champs Libre, 1971).

First published in Tout! 12.

The author of “20 years . . .” not only argued that “everything about my homosexuality can be linked to [the Algerian war]”: he claimed that his obsession with “[cruising] the toilets of Arab bistrots” was part of “this history.” Getting “buggered by Arabs” and being willing to come out about it signaled homosexuals’ claims to have a unique understanding of the experience of racism. “Arabs” were central to these stories because this reference worked both in terms of identity and ideologically: to collapse boundaries between a tiny minority who did these things and the large majority who—like them—suffered from “sexual misery” and to connect “revolutionary homosexual action” to other forms of revolutionary politics.38 FHAR’s Arab obsession made explicit both the centrality that Algeria and Algerians continued to play in French definitions of themselves and the importance of sex in these discussions. Rather than deny the stereotypes, FHAR’s emblematic tactic was to embrace and reinterpret them: “Arabs” and homosexuals did do what folklore and pontificating experts said. As their Manifesto and other stories made clear, they attributed great importance to a particular form of sexual relations, which created complicity between those who, together, “had committed the

Global erotics of the French sexual revolution  131

act that bourgeois morality most denigrates,” i.e. sodomy. In doing this, they drew explicit attention to orientalist certainties about “Arab” deviance and also homophobic beliefs that male same-sex sexual desire resulted from failed masculinity.The former presented active sodomy (“buggery”) as emblematic of the excessive virility of “Arab” and Muslim societies, an uncontrolled, uncivilized, and crude exercise of male power, which used sexual penetration to dominate women and boys and, even, to degrade other men. The latter fixated on male effeminacy and sexual passivity as emblematic of how homosexual desire and identity resulted from moral weakness, neuroses, and/or organic sickness. In FHAR writings, “Arabs” and “fags” were perverts, but the definition of perversion was historical and political, part of wide-ranging efforts to control and limit what people could do with their bodies and other people. All people suffered from how these harsh restrictions on who and how they could connect alienated their desires: in 1974, out of a world population of roughly 3 billion, the special issue of Recherches identified “3 Billion Perverts.” Certain people, however, blatantly violated the rules. Some—FHAR’s sex radicals pointed to revolutionary homosexuals—suffered for their transgressions yet also came to recognize their need for and pleasure in them; their confrontation with what this meant provided the grounds on which political insight into how power worked and how to resist became possible. Due to the types of sex they enjoyed (notably anal sex), they claimed that homosexual men were able to understand the psycho-sexual position of women; because of the intense disdain they faced, they were singularly situated to articulate the “sexual misery, from which we all suffer, homos, women, blacks, Indians, immigrants, proles, high schoolers, youth, the insane . . . ”39 To explain the supposedly widespread incidence of Algerian men in France having sex with French men, FHAR’s male sex radicals pointed to the sexual misery of immigrants in France, a theme widely invoked on the left; yet they also took up the orientalist certainty that “Maghrebin” culture facilitated such sexual encounters. In their telling the former was indicative of how the existing order limited the human potential of all people; they presented the latter as another way that North Africa could serve as a model for French liberation. FHAR’s sex radicals claimed, as part of their revolutionary agenda, to decolonize eroticized Arab references. Texts situated (“European”) Frenchmen’s current sexual encounters with Algerian men in France in the context of histories of colonial domination and anti-colonial resistance. An article in Tout! 12 insisted that the sex they celebrated was no longer the “old European fag getting off on little Arab boys,” rather it was now a form of anti-colonial critique: “Let us note that, in France, it’s our Arab friends who bugger us and never the reverse. Isn’t it obvious that this is a form of revenge, offered to them by us, against the Western colonizer?” A short story in “3 Billion. . .” placed political agency onto the “colonized,” when it pretended that “in buggering me the way he did, Hassan had wanted to wipe away the French presence from Morocco.” The continued importance of colonialism in France, such statements suggested, explained why French male homosexuals and Maghrebi male immigrants had different relationships to

132  Todd Shepard

history and, therefore, different sexual needs. The Algerian war, according to the 1973 text “20 Years of Cruising,” had given Algerians back their virility (“to be colonized is to lose some of one’s manliness”); in turn, the FHAR argued that its embrace of effeminacy, of transvestism, of sexual “passivity,” of “perversion,” its rejection of bourgeois morality, directly challenged repressive norms on which patriarchy depended and made possible the connection forged with immigrant Arab men. References to this unlikely couple functioned as empirical evidence— on the ground, flesh and blood—of the acuteness of their analysis and the promise of their vanguardist vision.40 What orientalist arguments—reframed by the far right for post-decolonization France—pronounced to be perversions typical and revelatory of “Arabs” and “Muslims,” this FHAR discourse presented as the grounds and model for radical politics. A left-wing politics of group difference, what Michel Foucault termed “coalition politics” (yet here framed by the lessons of anti-colonialism), becomes visible in FHAR writings.41 It was possible, these arguments suggested, to recognize that different people had particular needs (sexual, among others) and struggles that were distinct from other groups because of history and politics and, at the same time, to make revolutionary connections (through sex as well as other means). On the nonLeninist far-left in the early 1970s, the code words were “specificity,” “autonomy,” and “particularity”: the Corsican and Occitan peoples, each fighting to maintain their culture against the French language, state and society had “specific” needs; women’s fight for equality and against misogyny was “specific”; even the industrial strikes by Renault workers at the Flins factory, or the women of the Lip watch company had their “specificity,” which could not be reduced to “the workers’ struggle”; and the Movement of Arab Workers highlighted its fight for the “autonomy” of “Arab workers” to direct their struggles in France.42 Yet all of these “particularities,” gauchistes argued, were part of a joint and universal struggle for freedom and liberation, against oppression and capitalist exploitation. This was one of the ways they distinguished themselves from the “Stalinists” and all other “reductive” Marxists who insisted that only class mattered. As the FHAR-associated philosopher Guy Hocquenghem stated in defense of East Pakistan’s revolt against West Pakistan, “revolutionary analysis is universal in that its point of departure is the particular, and not when it refuses the particular as abnormal.” As the East Pakistan reference suggested, this vision of the importance of difference derived directly from far-left, notably “tiers-mondiste,” analyses of the “revolutionary nationalism” that proponents identified as emblematic of anti-imperialist movements, most especially in Palestine, Cuba,Vietnam, and Algeria.43 In this context, one claim that FHAR writers posited was that their sexual relations with Algerian immigrants both linked together two “specific” struggles—of immigrant North African workers and homosexuals—and sharpened the revolutionary consciousness of each: through anti-colonial buggery, perhaps, but also through mutual recognition and assistance. There were boundaries, which history and politics had created, that required “autonomy” and yet it was revolutionary to make the mutual choice to connect across them. These arguments tell us relatively little about

Global erotics of the French sexual revolution  133

the accuracy of what they promised or of the lived experiences and lessons drawn that they evoked. They make obvious, however, the fact that they are part of something larger.

Conclusion Expanding the chronology and the field of analysis, to look far to the right as well as to the left, makes clear that FHAR invocations of “Arabs” tells us about more than homosexual identity politics. It was not just, as a number of critics have astutely noted, that (French) male homosexuals, then and since, have a problem with exoticism, racial fetishism, or “desiring Arabs”; it suggests that the reason certain activists articulated it in the early 1970s and in these ways was because of structural problems in French politics. Similarly, while far-right activists actively advanced racist claims, their sexual echo reveals larger dynamics. French public discussions in the late-twentieth century recurrently framed assertions about male sexual deviance— notably, homosexuality—through references to Algerians because sex (male and “perverted”) emerged as privileged terrain for assertions about Algerian “difference” and efforts to negotiate France’s colonial history. Sex and Algerians also take their place as part of what made “the 1968 years” politically important. In spring 1968, the sparse forces of the French far right invoked and reinscribed sexual fears and fantasies about “Arabs” in ways that obscured their own ties to recent and widely disdained histories of political action (around Vichy; in collaboration with Nazi Germany; against de Gaulle; for French Algeria). By displacing history, they facilitated new connections with the mainstream right. The ways they had learned to frame their Algerian obsession—to transform talk of colonialism (and Gaullist betrayals) into sex talk, with warnings of French victimization by sexually-deviant immigrants—proved a much-used toolbox for mainstream French politicians in subsequent years. In their effort to define their claims as political, even revolutionary, FHAR militants insistently pointed to what their sex talk about “Arabs” revealed about France’s Algerian history; their reveries suggested how crucial claims of meaningful difference between French and Algerians were both to French politics, on the far left as well as more broadly, and to ongoing efforts by French people to define themselves. Largely accurate, left-wing accusations that such statements were deeply problematic (which included numerous critiques published by other FHAR militants) closed down this discussion.44 The tactical and strategic successes and failures of these political groups set the stage for subsequent developments.The French left more broadly, French sex radicals, and the nascent gay rights movement all quickly moved away from engaging with the very explicit claims FHAR publications made about how (at least some) French people enjoyed the Algerian presence in France. Ironically, this silence reaffirmed the belief of some that racism was black and white and could be avoided by ignoring the multiple registers and hierarchies through which difference functions. As President Georges Pompidou warned in September 1973, in the face of heightened racial tension and the murder of dozens of Algerian immigrants: “Let’s not let France get

134  Todd Shepard

dragged into a cycle of accusations of racism. Sometimes, just pronouncing the word summons to mind such ideas, and sometimes reality follows on from those ideas.”45 At the same time, of course, the far right continued to talk about sex and “Arabs” to advance their agendas. Anti-racist calls for silence failed to close this down. Many others, from the Parisian taxi-driver heard on France-culture in 1972 to a veritable avalanche of more comfortably situated recent voices since 2001 have taken up their arguments. Recent debates in France continue to be particularly dense with references to the post-decolonization reformulation of sexual orientalism this article has outlined. This is the case both for those that focus on female bodies and sexuality, such as the “burkini” and “the veil question,” those that fixate on male deviance, such as claims that the murderous terrorist who attacked the 2016 Bastille Day celebration in Nice had engaged in male prostitution and gay sex, and those that turn around homo- versus heterosexual couples, notably the vicious mass campaigns in 2012 and 2013 to block gay marriage.Yet the global echoes are even more remarkable, from Pim Fortuyn in early 2000 Netherlands, to intense recent interest around the world in the so-called Islamic State (ISIS) and its sexualized acts and claims, or many reactions in the US to the 2016 massacre, inspired by ISIS, that devastated (mainly young, gay, and latino) patrons of the gay nightclub Pulse in Orlando. The sexual revolution, this article insists, was deeply inspired by anticolonialism and decolonization, notably in “Arab” Algeria. To understand current developments, this history makes clear, it is necessary to continue to understand how global and transnational actors and discussions shaped developments that we too often tether to “the West,” the “North,” the “Arab world,” or the “South.” Sexual liberties, efforts to shut them down, and campaigns to target groups that are associated with the triumphs of the sexual revolution share a common history. Its complications and contradictions surely are linked to why these questions still matter, and still provoke mobilization and urgency from all sides.46

Notes   1 Xavier Grall, “Une moisson algérienne,” Le cri du monde 13 (December 1967), 52–53; Guyotat, Tombeau pour cinq cent mille soldats, sept chants (Paris: éd. Gallimard, 1967); the citation is from his work notebook, collected in Pierre Guyotat, Carnets de Bord, v. 1 (1962–1969), ed. Valérian Lallement (Paris: Lignes & Manifestes, 2005), 200. Unless noted, all translations from French to English are by the author.  2 For Bastide’s 1953 summary of the claims of the Brazilian anthropologist Gilberto Freyre about “the Portuguese conquest of the world,” see his Anthropologie appliquée (Paris: Payot, 1971), 101.   3 There has been much work on sexuality and modern imperialism. Key texts include Edward Said, Orientalism (New York:Vintage, 1978); Ann Laura Stoler, Race and the Education of Desire (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1995); Anjali Arondekar, “Without a Trace: Sexuality and the Colonial Archive,” Journal of the History of Sexuality 14 (2005), 10–27; on male homosexuality in post-1945 French-ruled North Africa, see esp. Robert Aldrich, Colonialism and Homosexuality (New York: Routledge, 2003), 344–411; on decolonization and sexual liberation in the West, see Henry Abelove, “New York City Gay Liberation and the Queer Commuters”, in Deep Gossip (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2005), 70–88. .   4 Beth Bailey, Sex in the Heartland: Politics, Culture, and the Sexual Revolution (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002); Dagmar Herzog, Sex after Fascism: Memory and Morality in

Global erotics of the French sexual revolution  135

Twentieth-Century Germany (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005); Frank Mort, Capital Affairs: London and the Making of the Permissive Society (New Haven, CT:Yale University Press, 2010). On the need to “regionalize” the history of the sexual revolution, see Dagmar Herzog, Sexuality in Europe: A Twentieth-Century History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 133; see also the essays in Alain Giami and Gert Hekma, eds, Sexual Revolutions (Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014).   5 On how the sexual revolution forced contemporaries to expand their understanding of the political, see, especially, Alain Giami, “Therapies of Sexual Revolution: Society, Sex, and Self,” in Giami and Hekma, eds, Sexual Revolutions, 155–172; 157; 161.   6 Joan W. Scott, “Gender: A Useful Category of Historical Analysis,” The American Historical Review 91 (1986), 1053–1075, 1069. On the limited discussion of men and masculinity in scholarship on North Africa, see Lahoucine Ouzgane, “Masculinity as Virility in Tahar Ben Jelloun’s Work,” Contagion: Journal of Violence, Mimesis, and Culture 4 (1997), 1–13. The way this question played out in the reception of novels, films, and plays; the writings of intellectuals; and political debates about immigration and sexual violence is one focus of my Sex, France, and Arab Men, 1962–1979, op cit.  7 On the “’68 Years,” see Michelle Zancarini-Fournel, “Conclusion,” in G. DreyfusArmand, R. Frank, M. F Lévy, and M. Zancarini-Fournel, eds, Les années 68: le temps de la contestation (Brussels: éd. Complexe, 2000), 495–502.   8 On the Algerian Revolution and May ’68 see, especially, Kristin Ross, May ’68 and its Afterlives (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2002); Robert J. C. Young, White Mythologies: Writing History and the West (New York, NY: Routledge, 1990); Daniel A. Gordon, Immigrants and Intellectuals: May ’68 and the Rise of Antiracism in France (Pontypool, UK: Merlin Press, 2012); see also Donald Reid, “The Politics of Immigrant Workers in Twentieth-Century France,” in Camille Guérin-Gonzales and Carl Strikwerda, eds, The Politics of Immigrant Workers (New York, NY: Holmes and Meier, 1993), 245–278, 269; Michael M. Seidman, The Imaginary Revolution: Parisian Students and Workers in 1968 (New York, NY: Berghahn Books, 2004), 175; 247.   9 The dismissal of sex by Ross (2002) is a direct response to claims that “’68” politics produced only “liberal-libertinism,” an argument linked to Régis Debray. On the “pre-1968 Sexual Revolution,” see Michael Seidman, “The Pre-May 1968 Sexual Revolution,” Contemporary French Civilization 25 (2001), 25–41. 10 David Harvey, Paris, Capital of Modernity (New York, NY: Routledge, 2003), 273. Malek Alloula, The Colonial Harem (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1986); Leila Ahmed,“Western Ethnocentrism and the Perceptions of the Harem,” Feminist Studies 8 (1982), 522–534; Zahia Smaïl Salhi, Politics, Poetics, and the Algerian Novel (Lewiston, NY: Lampeter, 1999); Robert Aldrich, “Colonial Man,” in Christopher E. Forth and Bertrand Taithe, eds, French Masculinities: History, Culture and Politics (New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), 123–140. 11 Kumari Jayawardena, Feminism and Nationalism in the Third World; Mrinalini Sinha, “Gender in the Critiques of Colonialism and Nationalism: Locating the Indian Woman,” in Joan W. Scott, ed., Feminism and History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), 477–504; Partha Chatterjee, “The Nationalist Resolution of the Women’s Question,” in Kumkum Sangari and Sudesh Vaid, eds, Recasting Women. Essays in Indian Colonial History (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1990), 233–253. 12 Hal Lehrman, “Battle of the veil,” New York Times Magazine, July 13, 1958, 14–18. For the classic analysis of how depictions of “native” female victimization authorized empire, see Gayatri Spivak, “Can the Subaltern Speak?,” in Cary Nelson and Larry Grossberg, eds, Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture (Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 1988), 271–313; 297; On the veil, see, especially, Frantz Fanon, “Algeria Unveiled,” in A Dying Colonialism, trans. Haakon Chevalier (New York, NY: Grove Press, 1967), 35–67; Diana Fuss, “Interior Colonies: Frantz Fanon and the Politics of Identification,” Diacritics 24 (1994), 19–42; Shepard (2008), 186–192. 13 Mahmoud Seklani, “La fécondité dans les pays arabes: données numériques, attitudes et comportements,” Population 15 (1960), 831–856; 836. The most well-known variant of this thesis was by Sir Richard Burton, in his mid-nineteenth-century essay on the

136  Todd Shepard

Sotadic Zone; it since has taken on a life of its own. See Richard Burton, “Terminal Essay,” in The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, v. 10, trans. Richard F. Burton (Benares, India: The Burton Club, 1885–1886), 63–302. 14 Jerôme Lindon [Béchir Boumaza, Mustapha Francis, Moussa Khebaili, and Benaissa Souami], La gangrène (Paris: éd. de Minuit, 1959); Henri Alleg, La question (Paris éd. de Minuit, 1958); Frantz Fanon, Les damnés de la terre, pref. Jean-Paul Sartre (Paris: éd. François Maspero, 1961); on The Question and heroic masculinity see Judith Surkis, “Ethics and Violence: Simone de Beauvoir, Djamila Boupacha, and the Algerian War,” French Politcs, Culture, & Society 28 (2010), 38–55; on Fanon, see esp. Françoise Vergès,“Creole Skin, Black Mask: Fanon and Disavowal,” Critical Inquiry 23 (1997), 578–595; 593; and Fuss (1994). 15 Michael Seidman describes how demands for sexual liberties emerged among French students in 1962, just as Algerian independence was won, and states that debates about racism and “colonial” immigrants were crucial factors in the shape their protests took; see Seidman (2001), 25–41. 16 In 1962, Algerians constituted 85 percent of France’s North African (presumed or “culturally”) Muslim population of about 410,000; in 1970, their part had declined to about 75 percent. At that time, the number of “Muslim” non-citizens in the country was more than 800,000 and counted approximately 608,000 Algerians (the largest group of immigrants, ahead of the Portuguese) but also 143,000 Moroccans and 89,000 Tunisians. The overwhelming majority were male manual laborers, but the proportion of women and children had actually increased since 1962. See Ethan Katz, The Burdens of Brotherhood: Jews and Muslims from North Africa to France (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2015), 217; on the UK, see Ian R. G. Spencer, British Immigration Policy since 1939: The Making of Multi-racial Britain (London: Routledge, 1997), 19; on shift from talk of “families” before 1962 to “young men,” see Amelia Lyons, The Civilizing Mission in the Metropole: Algerian Families and the French Welfare State during Decolonization (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2013), “Conclusion.” 17 On French republicanism, universalism, and gender, see esp. Joan W. Scott, “Only Paradoxes to Offer”: French Feminists and the Rights of Man (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996. 18 On trauma, see, esp., Dominick LaCapra, Writing History, Writing Trauma (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001). On proto-Nouvelle droite theorization, see, especially, Anne-Marie Duranton-Crabol, “La ‘Nouvelle Droite’ entre printemps et automne, 1968–1986.” Vingtième Siècle. Revue D’histoire, 17 (1988), 39–49; Tamir BarOn, Where Have All the Fascists Gone? (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007). On “nostalgérie,” see Jacques Derrida and Geoffrey Bennington, Jacques Derrida, trans. Geoffrey Bennington (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1991), 330. 19 On this language, see Tahar Ben Jelloun, La plus haute des solitudes. Misère sexuelle d’émigrés nord-africains (Paris: Seuil, 1977), 8; Frantz Fanon, “Le ‘syndrome nord africain’ (1952),” in Pour la révolution africaine. Ecrits politiques (Paris: éd. François Maspero, 1964), 13–25, 21; Dr. A. Kocher, De la criminalité chez les Arabes (Paris: P. Baillière, 1884); and Emmanuel Blanchard, “Le mauvais genre des Algériens. Des hommes sans femme face au virilisme policier dans le Paris d’après-guerre,” Clio. Histoire, femmes et societies 27 (2008), 209–222. On its development during the 1930s, see Neil MacMaster, Colonial Migrants and Racism: Algerians in France, 1900–62 (London: Macmillan, 1997), 132–135; Ralph Schor, L’opinion française et les étrangers en France, 1919–1939 (Paris: Publications de la Sorbonne, 1985), 126; 165–166. 20 See Dominique Venner, Pour une critique positive (Paris: éd. Saint-Juste, 1964); Shepard (2008), Ch. 3. 21 François Brigneau, “Le défi de Boumedienne: il veut les Champs Elysées,” Minute (March 7, 1968), 10; M.P. de Draguignan, “Les frères ont droit au tariff reduit,” Minute (March 14, 1968), 18; “Ca, c’est social mon’zami,” Minute (May 9, 1968), 11; Georges A. Bousquet, “. . .et le fellagha Medeghri a eu les honneurs de l’Elysée”, Rivarol (March 7, 1968), 2. 22 On the far right and masculinity, see, Sandrine Sanos, The Aesthetics of Hate: Far-Right Intellectuals, Antisemitism, and Gender in 1930s France (Stanford, IL: Stanford University Press, 2012). For details of Franco-Algerian Accords concerning immigration, see

Global erotics of the French sexual revolution  137

Jacques Simon, L’immigration algérienne en France de 1962 à nos jours (Paris: L’Harmattan, 2002), 229–232 and Laure d’Hauteville, “Algériens: feu la liberté de circulation,” Plein Droit 29/30 (1995), 87–89. 23 “Il faut en finir avec la chienlit des Cohn-Bendit!”, Minute (May 2, 1968), 5. 24 “Dix ans après le 13 mai tricolore, la marée rouge déferle sur les boulevards,” Le Crapouillot (new series) 3 (summer 1968), 30; Georges Bousquet, “D’un 13 mai l’autre [sic],” Rivarol (May 16, 1968), 6; ibid., 1. On Gaullist politicians use of such comparisons during “May,” see Todd Shepard, “L’extrême droite et ‘mai 68’: une obsession d’Algérie et de virilité,” Clio. Histoire, femmes et société 29 (2009), 35–55, 52–54. 25 “De Berlin à Nanterre, en passant par Nantes: l’Internationale universitaire de la contestation,” Rivarol (May 3, 1968), 5; Georges Bousquet, “D’un 13 mai l’autre [sic],” 6; “La peste est entrée dans Paris! . . ., ” Rivarol, May 23, 1968, 2; “A chacun son boche!,” Rivarol (May 16, 1968), 2–3; “L’action des ‘etudiants en colère’ se situe dans le droit fil des fastes libératoires,” Rivarol (May 16, 1968), 2–3. 26 Minute (June 6, 1968), 20; “Interview: Jean Genet,” Playboy 11 (1964), 45–53, 51. 27 On Algerian “inspiration,” see fn 7. On “la France algérienne,” see, e.g., François Brigneau, “Le défi de Boumedienne . . . ” 28 For details of far-right responses to these laws, see Shepard (2009). On laws of 1974 and 1975, see Simon (2002). On Ministry of Social Affairs, see “Immigrés: le témoignage d’un psychiatre,” La France nouvelle (October 24, 1977), 32–34. 29 On the renewal of far-right and rightist connections, see Seidman (2004), 221–224. On government statements on immigrants, disease, immorality, and crime, see, e.g., “Colloque Rhône-Alpes sur la Migration algérienne: Conclusions générales—Dimanche 15 octobre 1967,” in Centre d’accueil et de recherche des Archives nationales de France, Paris: F/ 1A /5015. On the violence and restrictions on immigration, see Rabah Aissaoui, North African Political Movements in Colonial and Postcolonial France (New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), 160–165. 30 Transcription in “Ceux qui nous aiment bien,” L’Antinorm 2 (1973), 5. 31 On the FHAR, see Michael Sibalis, “L’arrivée de la libération gay en France. Le Front Homosexuel d’Action Révolutionnaire (FHAR),” Genre, sexualité & société 3 (2010), 2–17; Julian Jackson, Living in Arcadia: Homosexuality, Politics, and Morality in France from the Liberation to AIDS (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2009), 184–194; Frédéric Martel, The Pink and the Black: Homosexuals in France since 1968, trans. Jane-Marie Todd (Stanford, IL: Stanford University Press, 1999), 20–48. 32 This reading draws from Jean-Paul Sartre, e.g., Saint Genet, comédien et martyr (Paris: Gallimard, 1952). On the publication of Tout! and subsequent scandal, see, especially, Ron Haas, “Guy Hocquenghem and the Cultural Revolution in France after May 1968,” in Julian Bourg, ed., After the Deluge: New Perspectives on the Intellectual and Cultural History of Postwar France (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2004), 175–200, 190–191. 33 For a particularly useful examination of this in the West German case, see Jennifer Ruth Hosek, “ ‘Subaltern Nationalism’ and the West Berlin Anti-Authoritarians,” German Politics and Society 26 (2008), 57–81. On the importance of “third-worldism [tiersmondism]” in France in about 1968, see Ross (2002), especially 80–100. On the post-war context and anti-racism, see Todd Shepard, “Algeria, France, Mexico, UNESCO: A Transnational History of Anti-Racism and Empire, 1932–1962,” Journal of Global History 6 (2011), 273–297. 34 NB: Sibalis and most other work on the FHAR detail how the FHAR became so male dominated. 35 See Jackson (2009); Francoise d’Eaubonne, “Le FHAR, origines et illustrations,” La Revue h 2 (1996), 18–30. On the importance of anti-colonial models for US “queer” writers who inspired radical sexual liberationists in North America, see Abelove (2005). 36 Recherches, special issue “3 milliards de pervers: La grande encyclopédie des Homosexualités” 12 (1973); Emou, “Deux monographies parallèles . . .” Recherches 35 (1978), 249– 264, 262; Le FHAR, “Appel aux médecins” (n.d.), in La Bibliothèque de documentation internationale contemporaine, Nanterre, France (hereafter, BDIC): fonds Daniel Guérin: F delta 721/15/1, 1–2.

138  Todd Shepard

37 From centerfold of Tout! 12 (1971). The text parodied the famous “Manifesto of 343” that, the previous month, French feminists had published in support of abortion rights. 38 “Vingt ans de drague,” Recherches 12 (1973), 56. 39 Yves Frémion and Daniel Riche “La parole au Fléau social, groupe n. 5,” Actuel 25 (1972), 8–9. Sexual misery was a theme that engaged numerous “French” commentators in these years, e.g., Roger-Pol Droit, Antoine Gallien, La réalité sexuelle: enquête sur la misère sexuelle en France (Paris: Robert Laffont, 1974); Ben Jelloun (1977); Alain Corbin, Les Filles de noce: Misère sexuelle et prostitution (Paris: Aubier Montaigne, 1978); Edouard Glissant, Le discours antillais (Paris: éd. Présence africaine, 1981). 40 “Vingt ans de drague,” Recherches 12 (1973), 55–60. 41 “Intellectuals and Power: A conversation between Michel Foucault and Gilles Deleuze,” in Michel Foucault, Language, Counter-Memory, Practice: selected essays and interviews, ed. Donald F. Bouchard, trans. Donald F. Bouchard and Sherry Simon (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1977), 205–217. For the classic critique of Foucault’s definition, see Spivak (1988). 42 P. Mazodier (Salindres),“Nos lecteurs interviennnent: Comprendre la lutte des minorités ethniques,” Politique-hebdo (nouvelle formule) 2 (1971), 3. 43 See Hosek (2008); also, Bill Marshall, Guy Hocquenghem: Beyond Gay Identity (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1997), 6–8. N.B.: Hocquenghem and the other well-known intellectuals who were involved with FHAR publications (e.g., Gilles Deleuze; Félix Guattari) each analyzed the politics of sex in ways quite distinct from what emerged, I argue here, from the discourse produced by the multiple publications and voices (including theirs, although most were anonymously authored) that invoked “le sexe arabe.” 44 See Joseph Massad, Desiring Arabs (Chicago, 2007). For critiques of FHAR racism, see, e.g., “Intellectuals and Power” (1977); Mekki Bentahar, Les arabes en France (Rabat: Société Marocaine des Editions Réunis, 1979), 155; Gary Genosko, “The Figure of the Arab in Three Billion Perverts,” Deleuze Studies 1 (2007), 60–78; Maxime Cervulle, “French Homonormativity and the Commodification of the Arab Body,” Radical History Review 100 (2008), 171–179. 45 In Le Monde, September 1, 1973, cited and translated in Aissaoui (2009), 188. 46 For a particularly astute sociological analysis of how recent French public debates invoke “Arab” men and boys in France, see Nacira Guénif Souilamas and Eric Macé, Les féministes et le garçon arabe (Paris: La Tour d’Aigues, L’Aube, 2004).

Selected bibliography Ben Jelloun,Tahar. La plus haute des solitudes. Misère sexuelle d’émigrés nord-africains (Paris: Seuil, 1977). Brun, Catherine and Todd Shepard, eds, Guerre d’Algérie. Le sexe outragé (Paris, 2016). Dreyfus-Armand, G., R. Frank, M. F. Lévy, and M. Zancarini-Fournel, eds, Les années 68: le temps de la contestation (Brussels: éd. Complexe, 2000). Genosko, Gary, “The Figure of the Arab in Three Billion Perverts,” Deleuze Studies 1 (2007), 60–78. Giami, Alain and Gert Hekma, eds, Sexual Revolutions (Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014). Gordon, Daniel A. Immigrants and Intellectuals: May ’68 and the Rise of Antiracism in France (Pontypool, UK: Merlin Press, 2012). Hajjat, Abdellali, “Les comités Palestine (1970–1972). Aux origines du soutien de la cause palestinienne en France,” Revue d’études palestiniennes 98 (2006), 74–92. Herzog, Dagmar. Sexuality in Europe: A Twentieth-Century History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011).

Global erotics of the French sexual revolution  139

Hosek, Jennifer Ruth,“ ‘Subaltern Nationalism’ and the West Berlin Anti-Authoritarians,” German Politics and Society 26 (2008), 57–81. Jackson, Julian, Living in Arcadia: Homosexuality, Politics, and Morality in France from the Liberation to AIDS (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2009). Ross, Kristin. May ’68 and its Afterlives (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2002). Seidman, Michael M. The Imaginary Revolution: Parisian Students and Workers in 1968 (New York, NY: Berghahn Books, 2004). Shepard, Todd, “L’extrême droite et ‘mai 68’: une obsession d’Algérie et de virilité,” Clio. Histoire, femmes et société 29 (2009), 35–55. Shepard, Todd, Sex, France, and Arab Men, 1962–1979 (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2017).

7 LEFT OUT: WRITING WOMEN BACK INTO JAPAN’S 1968 Chelsea Szendi Schieder

Introduction In December 1968, student activists at Japan’s premier university held the nation’s educational system hostage.1 Their strikes on and occupation of the University of Tokyo’s two campuses resulted in the cancellation of entrance exams for 1969, disrupting a key educational ritual not only for the school, but also for the entire nation. On the evening of January 17, 1969, the university president announced his decision to use force to break up the student barricades. The next day, thousands of riot police entered the main campus. The 35-hour siege of the university’s Yasuda Clock Tower, the centerpiece of a longer student struggle, pitted students’ molotov cocktails, rocks, desks, and chairs against police water cannons and tear gas, and became the iconic climax of the campus-based New Left in the late 1960s.2 On the eve of the events, newspaper reports speculated that a showdown was imminent, noting that male activists had evacuated female students from the tower on January 17.3 Although eyewitnesses attested to the presence of women at this event, the actions of male activists and the news accounts that separated out female students from the dramatic action contributed to the erasure of female participation from the spectacle of campus protests that captured the popular imagination at the time.4 Subsequent accounts of the New Left also sweep aside the specificity of women’s experiences, effacing key analyses of the movement’s dynamics. Although women played central roles in several protest movements in postwar Japan—particularly in the peace, anti-nuclear, and environmental protests that emerged after the 1950s—they are often left out of the narratives of postwar New Left activism.5 This is a serious oversight, especially considering that (as was also true in other countries around the world), female students involved in campus-based activism in Japan went on to form the core of what became known as the Japanese women’s liberation movement of the 1970s.6 This chapter writes

Left out: Writing women back into Japan’s 1968  141

FIGURE 7.1 Student activists at the University of Tokyo meet in an attempt to block the

riot police’s efforts to dislodge a student occupation of the clock tower on January 15, 1969.The specificity of women’s participation and experiences have been excluded from subsequent narratives of this mass movement. Photo: January 15, 1969, Kyodo News.

women and the meanings that they created by their participation back into “1968” and the New Left in Japan. I argue here that, although the student movement in late 1960s Japan launched a radical critique of systems of power and hierarchy in newly affluent postwar Japan, the persistence of a gendered hierarchy perpetuated

142  Chelsea Szendi Schieder

the gendering of the values of mainstream Japanese society within the New Left. I introduce the specific history in which a “New Left” emerged in postwar Japan, and consider how female student participation contributed to that history in the 1960s. Then I consider how campus-based activism in the late 1960s created barricaded spaces at universities as part of a challenge to mainstream society and I assess the political possibilities extant within those spaces. This opens onto a discussion of how daily practices in the barricades led many female student activists to question the limits of the New Left movement. Finally, I analyze the hostile reception given one all-female student group within the New Left to illustrate the experiences that led many women to seek a women-only movement in the early 1970s. The social and cultural context in Japan shaped the New Left and its gender dynamics there, but the similarities across New Left movements point to similar structural changes in higher education and in the role of women in societies moving toward postindustrial economies across the world.There is an almost uncanny similarity between patterns of gendered exclusion in the global New Left.7 Accounts of the 1960s youth activism in various societies also illustrate a shared masculine culture of protest.8 In the cases of the United States, France, West Germany, and Mexico, activists and scholars have documented the gendered dynamics within the New Left that led to a women-only movement.9 Histories of the women’s liberation movement in Japan also detailed how women’s experiences in the New Left affected subsequent feminist activism.10 Radical student activists in the late 1960s in Japan, including female activists, experienced a movement linked to larger geopolitical events and ideas, although their experience was also specific to their historical circumstances. It is my aim to illuminate that context here. Campus protests disrupted university operations at schools across the Japanese archipelago, but I focus here on sources that come from Tokyo-based universities, which were well documented both at the time and after. Evidence nevertheless suggests that similar gendered dynamics operated elsewhere.11 Female student activists occupied a position in which gendered treatment relegated them to “feminine” labor and diminished their contributions to the movement. Their experiences illuminate the contradictions inherent in an ostensibly liberatory and nonhierarchical political project. Few male student activists wrote of these issues, and their accounts frequently remain silent on the tense gender relations that so deeply colored many female student activists’ experiences.12 For this reason, in what follows I rely mainly on the voices of female student activists, writing both at the time and retrospectively.

The rise of a “New Left” in Japan The New Left in Japan formed in the late 1950s, when mainly male leftist student activists split from the “Old Left” of the Japan Communist Party (JCP) and established a “New Left” that organized in self-conscious opposition to the established Left. There were international and domestic reasons behind the creation of the New Left in Japan: Kruschev’s de-Stalinization speech, the Soviet crushing of the Hungarian Revolution, and the Suez Canal Crisis caused a great deal of controversy

Left out: Writing women back into Japan’s 1968  143

in international Communism in 1956; in the same year in Japan, the JCP withdrew support for armed struggle and disenchanted a generation of earnest would-be guerrillas who had left universities to foment revolution in the countryside. In December 1958, a group that dubbed itself “Bund,” after Karl Marx’s first organization, rejected JCP leadership and advocated for more militant anti-institutional leftist politics.13 The rise of the Bund proved short-lived, but also marked the end of the JCP’s hegemony over left-leaning student organizing. While the New Left generally continued to refer to student-based leftist activism that organized separately from the traditional Left of the JCP and the Japan Socialist Party (JSP), some defining characteristics of the New Left shifted over the course of the 1960s. These changes also responded to domestic and international shifts. The population of higher education institutions increased in Japan, a booming economy generated new critiques of an affluent society, and Japan’s relationship to the wider world was transforming, particularly within the geopolitical context generated by liberation movements in the “Third World” and a generally unpopular war waged by the United States in Southeast Asia. Another distinguishing feature of the postwar student New Left in Japan was the newly coeducational character of the nation’s most influential universities. As part of a package of democratic reforms implemented under the Allied Occupation (1945–1952) (and although long-standing ideas about gendered labor roles in society still defined female participation in the public sphere), women had nonetheless gained new access to the political realm, winning the vote, and entering formerly all-male spaces of higher education at a dramatic rate. In 1955, the percentage of young women pursuing education beyond the compulsory nine years of elementary schooling was a little less than half. Twenty years later, in 1975, it would be 93 percent—slightly more, even, than the percentage of young men.14 This also meant that men and women engaged in student activism together in new ways and on a more expansive scale than ever before. If new levels of participation in leftist activism by female students created some heroines, it did not necessarily mean that those helped incorporate a critique of gender-based social and economic challenges into New Left philosophy. When Kanba Michiko, a female student activist involved in protests against the renewal of the U.S.–Japan Security Treaty, died in clashes between the police and demonstrators on the evening of June 15, 1960, she became emblematic of the potential violence of the ostensibly peaceful postwar state.15 Kanba’s death and her posthumously published writings influenced a future generation of student activists, in particular when the controversial Treaty, which was forced through by the ruling Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) in 1960, came up for renewal in 1970. Many young people, looking back at student activism in the mass demonstrations of 1960, entered university in the late 1960s so that they too could be political actors and participate in protest.16 As reflected in Kanba’s student essays from the late 1950s, despite postwar rhetoric and the passage of policies promoting equality between men and women, neither she nor her generation of female student activists were ignorant of the

144  Chelsea Szendi Schieder

persistent sexism that women faced in Japan.17 Despite early optimism for a new and more equal role for women in society, older ideals continued to circumscribe what women could and could not do. Mainstream values still upheld the feminine virtues of the “Good Wife,Wise Mother,” which had been the state-promoted ideal of modern womanhood from the Meiji Era (1868–1912).18 Indeed, the expansion of the middle class and the nuclear family in postwar Japan was built upon a gendered division of labor and rise of the full-time housewife on a new scale.19 However, those among her generation of female activists who participated in academic and political ventures often rejected “woman” as a primary identification, since that could relegate them to writing or acting on behalf of “women’s issues,” which they saw as a barrier to serious study or political activism.20 And yet, even as New Left activism offered a chance for a certain degree of radical political subjectivity beyond gendered roles, the internal dynamics of key New Left organizations often held female activists to a different, feminine standard. According to the retrospective reflections of one female student activist of Kanba Michiko’s generation, Imai Yasuko, male student activists expected affection and emotional support from their female comrades, and the fight for “human liberation” was shaped by these masculine romantic ideals.21 True, ideas about personal relationships and the gendered expectations within the New Left of 1959–1960 were not widely discussed among activists at the time. However, the heroic image of the masculine student activist battling the state’s monopoly on street violence grew over the decade, and in many ways came to define the popular perception and commemoration of the New Left in late 1960s Japan. As the focus of New Left activism turned toward more amorphous and entrenched concepts such as “everyday life,” young female activists’ perceptions about their own gendered oppression also became more difficult to square with the movement’s stated objectives. The rapid expansion of higher education in the 1960s fed the late 1960s swell of campus-based activism, and New Left protests began to focus on university campuses as places in which to organize and also as targets for a critique of everyday life and postwar affluence.22 By the late 1960s, as in much of the Western world, not only did a greater percentage of Japanese young people attend higher education, there were also simply many more young people overall, products of a postwar baby boom.23 This larger demographic fueled student discontent while guaranteeing the widespread impact of student protests.24 For many of these campus-based movements in the late 1960s, the rise of a nonsectarian New Left movement was key. Typically, male leaders of New Left sects demanded a great deal of obedience and commitment from their members. However, the “All-Student Joint Struggle Councils” (Zenkyōtō) that formed out of unlimited strikes at universities invited participation in actions without demanding commitment to a specific group or ideology. The first Zenkyōtō originated at a meeting attended by occupying student activists and “ordinary students” alike at the University of Tokyo in early July 1968. Its concept and organizational philosophy soon spread to other campuses.25 The Zenkyōtō, unlike the sects, emphasized a radically democratic organizational structure and the occupation of campus space,

Left out: Writing women back into Japan’s 1968  145

and became an attractive alternative to the strict and hierarchical sectarian method of organizing student activism. Various students developed their own Zenkyōtō, which led to a rich heterogeneity of Zenkyōtō experiences. Campus Zenkyōtō made demands on their administrations and faculty based on local student grievances, while they also insisted on more general and sweeping issues, such as an end to the war in Southeast Asia, or the reversion of Okinawa. Among these diverse cases, students organizing Zenkyōtō also shared a politicized ideal of the student, and a myth of spontaneity, i.e., the collective belief that a series of open, nonhierarchical, non-sectarian movements had blossomed on hundreds of campuses nationwide in 1968–1969. In very few cases were the ostensibly non-sectarian Zenkyōtō actually free from sectarian power plays.26 The depoliticized style, however, distinguished the late 1960s student movement from that of the 1960 Bund.27 Being a “nonpolitical” activist, or nonpoli for short, became a fashionable term to indicate one’s freedom from sectarian politics, politics that sometimes turned deadly as sects battled for control of student councils or over the finer points of ideological dogma, even as they engaged in political activism.28 The genealogy of the Zenkyōtō as it formed at the University of Tokyo actually drew on the writings of a female student activist who had been active in the early 1960s New Left. Tokoro Mitsuko, meditating on her ideal organization for future activism, had advocated “endless debate” and horizontal organization, rather than top-down hierarchies and control. Tokoro’s early death of what seemed to be a connective tissue disease in 1968 kept her from participating in the movement that made some of her male comrades famous. However, her posthumously published collected essays, journals, and correspondence became part of the Zenkyōtō canon. Tokoro was concerned with how an organization could respect the individuality of its members, and her writings articulated the guiding principles for the nonsectarian New Left Zenkyōtō that arose in the late 1960s on college campuses. She decried organizations that demanded that their members subsume personal desires to the group’s goals. However, she also rejected an individualist solution, retaining hope for collective action.29 In her judgment, this would require ongoing debate, and noncoercive and nonhierarchical structures. Zenkyōtō groups attempted to employ these strategies through, for example, inviting all members to participate in debates while refraining from requiring that all members participate in group actions. Her analyses drew on her personal experiences in leftist activism. Her articulations of “women’s logic” as a potential source of opposition to the rationalist logic of economic efficiency and war demonstrate that ideas later associated with post-New Left feminists have a longer genealogy. Tokoro attempted to understand how gendered subjectivity created meaning in society, and explored how one might listen to those excluded from hierarchies of power. The subsequent Zenkyōtō movement strove to adopt her ideas of horizontality and “endless debate,” but dropped Tokoro’s insistence that a less coercive organizational style demonstrated a nurturing “women’s logic.”30 Tokoro posited “women’s logic” as pitted against the utilitarian, rationalist scientific thinking of the wartime state and postwar capitalism. While Tokoro’s argument represented women as

146  Chelsea Szendi Schieder

a homogenous category, her emphasis on female experience as that most indivisibly linked to embodied experience also evoked the concerns of other thinkers who rejected the subordination of everyday life to rationalist theoreticism. In an essay published in Shisō no kagaku [Science of Thought], “How Do Women Want to Be?,” Tokoro defined “women’s logic” as that that determines existence itself to be enough, and sees value in everything, from the “head of a salted salmon” to the “tail of a radish.”31 This, Tokoro argued, came from women’s urge to nurture even the “useless” bodies of weak or disabled children, and stands in stark opposition to utilitarian logic or the logic of American military scientists, who were busily computing how to most effectively kill people in the Vietnam War. It is the logic of women, she went on, to exhaust all resources to nurture life without calculating its “value”; in contrast, the “male” logic of science exerts itself to assess the most effective means of eliminating lives (and places) considered valueless, regardless of the villages, villagers, jungles, and rice fields that might also be destroyed.32 For Tokoro, it is this positivist utilitarian logic that is the result not only of the rise of science, but also of capitalism. As productivity became the test of worth, she argued, machines could even come to be considered superior to humans.This logic, for Tokoro, is also where the “nation” as an entity worth more than individual lives appears; the value of people’s lives becomes determined by their contribution to the “national interest.”33 Inasmuch as Tokoro emphasized uncoupling the value of human life from the “national interest,” Tokoro’s thought also resonated with late1960s student activism against rationalized education. Although Tokoro’s ideas were celebrated as influential to the Zenkyōtō movement, the gendered implications of her theories were ultimately erased.34 This points to a dynamic within the New Left, in which critiques of the “everyday” also tended to reject a deeper meditation on how experiences of diverse everyday lives created political subjectivities and potential alternatives. Tokoro attempted to analyze the meaning of politics and political organization from the perspective of weaker participants; although the New Left in Japan celebrated causes associated with the oppressed in the name of countering the everyday institutions that perpetuated oppression, few attempts were made to imagine how the movement might exclude or affect different kinds of participants. Many male New Left activists saw oppression as something that existed outside of the movement, and oppressive actions within the movement and daily life of the barricades, which were set up to counter the ostensibly oppressive everyday life of the nation, capital, and the hegemonic mainstream, remained invisible.

The potential and pitfalls of the campus barricades When activists occupied campuses and built barricades in late 1960s Japan— carving out spaces in which activists organized, ate, and slept—they also saw themselves as challenging the Japanese state and undermining the university’s role in the creation of workers for the new postwar Japanese economy. In his defense of the barricades at the University of Tokyo, Yamamoto Yoshitaka, chairman of

Left out: Writing women back into Japan’s 1968  147

the University of Tokyo Zenkyōtō, attacked the institution for facilitating only the research that undergirded the existing Western order in which the United States buttressed Japanese capitalism while waging war in Vietnam and continuing a military occupation of Okinawa.35 The barricades were meant to disrupt the logic of capital and authority as manifested in the university, to “confront the malicious and everyday-supporting ideology on campus.”36 The highly visible student occupation of Yasuda Tower at Tokyo University was among the most renowned of these acts; it lasted from early July 1968 through January 1969, when students were finally besieged and dislodged by riot police. Although the drama of the final siege of Yasuda Tower overshadowed the occupation as a whole, the practices of everyday life behind the barricades also had the potential to disrupt received social wisdom. Indeed, the barricades inadvertently created spaces in which students experimented with new forms of social organization, and challenged accepted values. Many female student activists described the potential they felt for a complete renegotiation of their social roles behind the campus barricades.37 One young woman, reflecting on the University of Tokyo barricades recalled: “When in the ‘exitless’ space of Building 8 [University of Tokyo Komaba campus barricades], I was released from my social positions (as a female, as someone’s child, as a Tokyo University student, etc.). I lived only in a ‘now’ that floated away from its position in connecting the past and the future.”38 For this female student, the barricades promised a kind of temporal rupture that facilitated new forms of engagement with others.This rupture engendered an excitement that contrasted sharply with the oppression and boredom she felt when she contemplated the social expectations she faced as a young women, destined for children and a household.39 In the barricades, she finally felt involved in something unpredictable.40 This promised a thrilling release from the everyday life of mainstream society and the university, and opened up the potential for alternative modes of being, alternative futures that included a rethinking of gender relations. New kinds of personal conversations were also possible.Yonezu Tomoko, later a well-known women’s lib activist whose early feminist writings will be introduced below, recalled that she was first able to talk about the physical disabilities that had convinced her she could never become a “normal” wife in the “extraordinarily liberated space” of the student barricades.41 And yet, the desire to demolish everyday expectations of mainstream society came up against the requirements of everyday life in the barricades.Young women drawn to the movement’s expansive promises came up against familiar constraints. Their presence exposed major gaps between theory and practice.Thus, for example, while the ideal of non-horizontal participation offered the potential for mutual nurturing, many female activists found that the tasks of providing actual nourishment fell to them. The labor hierarchies within the campus barricades tended to replicate those in Japanese society at large.42 And while young men could participate in the violent spectacles that disrupted everyday life in the city, women came to provide the “everyday” labor that kept the movement running: cooking, cleaning, supporting prisoners, and mimeographing fliers. Young women did not

148  Chelsea Szendi Schieder

discover “women’s issues” within the New Left, but they often left the movement with a new sense that their supplementary status was entrenched not only within larger social structures but also—and more troublingly—within the “revolutionary” practices of their male comrades. Some female activists still attempted to reframe their commitment to traditionally feminine duties as something new and liberated. One young woman, aware that cooking was seen as women’s work, nevertheless asserted that, in the “commune” of the barricades, since she chose to do this work it made the chore different than if she were doing it because she was subordinate to a man.43 She insisted that in the space of the barricades, cut off from the everyday of mainstream society, the students were freed from the social history that gave certain tasks gendered meanings. Interestingly, her assertion that female participants were free to decide the value of their work within the occupied spaces explicitly rationalized the gendered division of labor that relegated women to kitchen duty more frequently than men. It was not, however, a theme upon which male activists reflected. In addition, the increasing emphasis in late-1960s student activism on “Gewalt” as a strategy of disruption emphasized the importance of political violence in the streets. “Gewalt,” the German word for violence or force, became, within the movement, a term to frame the student movement’s violence as counter-violence against the state-monopolized violence of the riot police. Both male and female students adopted the Gewalt style: a helmet painted with one’s sectarian affiliation, a towel to protect one’s nose and mouth from tear gas, and a “Gewalt stave” to wield in battle.44 Many students considered Gewalt a way to confront what they perceived to be a disempowered bourgeoisie who allowed the state to control all violence.45 The idealized agent of Gewalt, however, remained male. One female student noted that, although the idea that “girls shouldn’t take part in Gewalt” was never put into words, she nonetheless felt the sentiment among male activists.46 This put many female activists in a bind, since participation in Gewalt also became a measure of one’s commitment to the movement.47 Over and over, student violence associated with “real” activism was gendered male, while the equally necessary everyday tasks associated with tending the barricaded homefront were seen as supplementary, gendered female and, in the process, rendered invisible.48 One young woman at the University of Tokyo barricades found herself preparing rice balls late into the night with other female students as they helped prepare for meetings.49 In particular, the monotony of making rice balls to feed other activists became a synecdoche for the sexism within the student movement in Japan in later accounts.50 Given this process of gendered erasure, it is not surprising that outside observers, from the police and to the university administration, assumed that female participation in the student movement was merely supplementary to male activism. Rumors flew that the authorities had a “pink list” of female students who were close to the male activists on the “black list,” but as one police officer explained,“For me, the girls are not really an issue. In the end, what the girls do is just help the boys.”51 A female student noted that the faculty often believed that women activists were passive

Left out: Writing women back into Japan’s 1968  149

participants used sexually and politically by men, and “couldn’t understand women as anything other than submissive to men.”52 Another female student recorded how, at a meeting with students and faculty after the barricades were broken up at the University of Tokyo, a faculty member had commented on the number of young women at an event so late in the evening. “Aren’t your families worried? What kind of families are they, anyway?”53 The student found the comment especially patronizing given the freedom and autonomy she had just experienced on the campus barricades—where she had lived with and slept alongside male students for weeks. In the meantime, tabloids speculated on the sexual aspects of female participation in barricade activism.The presence of female bodies led mass media sources to suggest that the “function” of young women participants must be to provide sexual release for young men.54 In publications such as Shūkan shinchō and Shūkan playboy, articles insinuated that coed campuses must be hotbeds of not only political but also sexual activity. Assuming that the inclusion of female bodies introduced rampant sexuality, tabloids relied upon police conjectures as a main source of information for speculative articles on the kinds of sex that occurred as male and female students lived together in campus occupations. Based on police gossip about literally hot beds—one officer reported feeling “the warmth of two bodies” on a recently abandoned futon in the barricades—the headlines of such articles included sensational terms like “free sex.”55 In the prurient imagination of the tabloids, female students sharing space with male students sexualized those spaces. In reality, many student barricades were spaces of controlled rather than rampant sexuality. Students at several different schools reported that their movement’s codes of conduct were rather strict. One student described the custom adopted in the campus barricades at Nihon University, in which female students all slept in one room and locked the door from the inside. Citing the fear of popular opinion as the basis for this policy, he noted, “Some have complained that it’s an exaggerated gesture, or that it’s bourgeois, but it’s our first struggle, so we don’t want some silly mistake to become a weapon for our enemies.”56 A former activist at Hosei University repeated this fear that sexual activity could be used as a weapon against the student movement, and noted that the Hosei University barricades also strictly managed sexual activities. A former activist at Hosei University repeated this fear that sexual activity could be used as a weapon against the student movement, and noted that the Hosei University barricades also strictly managed sexual activities.57 Although many student activist groups attempted to contain sexual behavior in student-occupied spaces, it was true that some argued for a renegotiation of male–female relationships along the lines of “free sex.”58 However, more often than not, the casual heterosexual “free sex” some advocated in the New Left failed to solve the issues that female students in particular felt that they faced. One female student activist, Aoyama Michiko, decried the commodification of eroticism she saw in contemporary Japanese society, while she also criticized free sex as it was experimented with in the student movement. For her, this “free sex” was a kind of personal pleasure, but did not seem to be a richer form of interpersonal communication.59 An influential women’s lib writer, Tanaka Mitsuko, framed her

150  Chelsea Szendi Schieder

ideas about how to liberate women as human beings around a critique of free sex doctrines in the New Left.60 She felt men in contemporary Japan divided women into two distinct categories, either that of “mothers” worthy of affection or that of “toilets” in which they could discharge their sexual desires. Tanaka objected to how this binary degraded not only women but also men: “If women are ‘toilets’ to dispose of physical desire, that makes male sexuality ‘shit’.”61 As a result of these experiences, many young women began to question just who the active subject of the “revolution” was (or should be). While many were drawn to campus-based activism and became caught up in building and maintaining barricades and conducting demonstrations and strikes, they also began to name their dissatisfaction; they felt excluded from the movement’s purportedly universal aims. As one former activist noted, the University of Tokyo Zenkyōtō was supposed to be a total struggle in the name of humanity, but she felt treated differently within the movement because she was female.62 This kind of experience led many young women to the conclusion that, even in New Left attempts to forge a radical universal critique of postwar Japanese bourgeois society, “universal” still implied “male.” One young woman came to the conclusion that the Zenkyōtō at the University of Tokyo was not necessarily a male movement because of the numbers of male participants as much as it was male in its basic assumptions.63 These retrospective evaluations would later inform the separation of the history of the 1970s women’s movements from the history of the “male” New Left.

Thought Group S.E.X. There were many potential moments at which a feminist movement could have grown out of the Japanese New Left. To name just one, standard histories of the rise of the 1970s women’s liberation movement cite the participation of a contingent of female activists who marched as women rather than as part of a mixed sex group under feminist slogans in a New Left demonstration on “Antiwar Day,” 21 October 1970.64 Over time, multiple diverse experiences from within the New Left led to the emergence of a more coherent and self-conscious women-only movement in the 1970s.65 An appeal written by a female student to mobilize other female students and circulated at Nihon University in the late 1960s argued “female students are students,” and that female student activism was a way for young women to realize that “women themselves are also truly people.”66 A women’s group at the University of Tokyo convened during the student strikes and discussed male attitudes about the role of women in the Zenkyōtō.67 Although these kinds of isolated incidents did not immediately lead to a women’s movement, they did indicate women’s growing desire to liberate themselves through activism, as well as their consciousness of the limitations imposed by other activists and gendered roles. The drive to form a women-only movement, however, was not solely a reaction to the everyday sexism experienced by female participants in the late-1960s New Left; it was also a reaction to the resistance of the New Left to critiques of sexism within its ranks. The experiences of a handful of young women who called

Left out: Writing women back into Japan’s 1968  151

themselves Thought Group S.E.X. (Shisō shūdan esu.ii.ekkusu) demonstrates precisely what kind of resistance such female activists encountered. Thought Group S.E.X. emerged out of the student movement at Tama Arts University, and was founded by four women. Two of the women, Yonezu Tomoko and Mori Setsuko, would go on to become key activists in the early 1970s women’s liberation movement. Thought Group S.E.X. became one of the key groups associated with women’s activism at the Shinjuku Lib Center, founded in fall 1972.68 For the five years the Center was in operation, it was a base of feminist operations, publishing pamphlets, organizing demonstrations, and advising women on legal issues, divorce, birth control, abortion, and running away from home.69 It also offered a physical space where all the various women’s groups who grew out of the campus-based New Left and other social movements could meet and share information. Yonezu Tomoko and Mori Setsuko, both of whom produced most of the materials for Thought Group S.E.X., came out of the New Left movement at Tama Arts University. As we have seen above, it was while participating in student barricades that Yonezu Tomoko first found the freedom to articulate her feelings about her physical disabilities. Mori Setsuko recalls that for her part, she was able to act as a kind of “honorary male,” and participate in training with a Gewalt stick. Mori’s observations of how male activists treated other women in the movement convinced her of the necessity for a women-only movement.70 The group used “S.E.X.” as a place to address unequal gender relations and to discuss what it meant to be female in society. The group wanted to theorize gender, sex, and heterosexuality as political categories—with all the complications that this entailed.71 They were dissatisfied with terms used for women, such as the genteel fujin, which by including the Chinese character for wife and bride, presumptively linked women with marriage and childbirth. They also rejected josei, the generic term for women.72 Their interest in forging a new language to discuss women would continue in many women’s liberation discussions.73 The group also responded to earlier women’s movements, like those which had drawn on women’s presumed moral authority as wives and mothers in order to pursue their aims.74 But mainstream women’s movements did not attract the young women who responded to the New Left’s call to radically reformulate society. As one female student put it in 1971, “You hear that women are liberated, they’ve become strong. But in the world today women with ‘women’s liberation movements’ have only gotten bourgeois rights, and the yoke of the new order has gotten tighter.”75 Isolation within the campus-based New Left also drove the women associated with Thought Group S.E.X. and other similar campus-based radical women’s groups toward women-only activism. When the newly formed Thought Group S.E.X. attempted to hijack the stage at a New Left event to debut their group in April 1970, donning black helmets with S.E.X. in white paint, they were drowned out. Someone turned up the volume on the ten TV screens behind the stage, and the attention of the crowd turned to a female teenage drifter who stole the show with a spontaneous striptease and nonsensical game of rock, paper, scissors.76 This cold reception within an activist space motivated the group’s critique of male attitudes in the late 1960s New Left.

152  Chelsea Szendi Schieder

In New Left culture, male activists could act out, hijack spaces, and make aggressive demands. When this small group of young women adopted the same tactics, even in a space they thought would be sympathetic, they were drowned out by rock music and televisions, and sexual display. Reflecting back on their failed debut, Thought Group S.E.X. expressed anger toward the New Left activists who shamed and controlled them, isolating women and their concerns in the movement yet again. They felt demeaned by male activists’ demands that they join the “drifter chick” in her striptease.They reported cringing, as “every bit of [their] feelings” were crushed, and later wrote about how their concerns were negated within the New Left.77 Angry about how the history of their own participation in the New Left was belittled and minimized, these female activists asserted that they, too, had faced the riot police, and provoked state power. The young women involved in Thought Group S.E.X. rejected the distinction between a public sphere of equal struggle and a private sphere in which women were subject to male control. The personal, as was said so forcefully in the US women’s movement, was political: personal intimate relationships could not be “private.”78 Indeed, “There are no private issues.”79 They repeated the complaint of many female student activists who felt the weight of gender expectations within a movement for human liberation: “Humans, humans, humans. In our struggle we said this word over and over. What does this neutered noun ‘humans’ make real? What are we grumbling about with this neutered noun? [The New Left struggle for human liberation] was certainly our struggle, but at the same time it wasn’t.”80 These young women who had become sensitive to analyses of labor, everyday life, and alienation found that many New Left interpretations cut them out of the revolution. “One boy said, ‘haven’t you read Marx? Women’s labor in the home isn’t labor.’ ”81 They countered such limited interpretations of labor and production, arguing that childbirth was also production, and hence was far from a personal, private matter.82 They insisted on an expansive interpretation of alienation as well: “for us, alienation also includes everything in everyday life; from meals to sex, there’s nothing in our sticky real life that doesn’t alienate us. We’re even alienated from being conscious of alienation.”83 They called for raising consciousness as a political goal. Thought Group S.E.X. concluded their observations on the supplementary and exceptional role played by women in the student and modern revolutionary movements with a call to reconnect political struggle with private issues. Self-consciously writing in a style rich with sexual puns, they urged: “Women, take on what has been split off! Take on your own SEX with purpose and consciousness and fight to make love and SEX your own, erect the 70s! Smash the free sex of the modern way! Men, give up masturbation and become the criminals who violate the conservative world!”84

Conclusion As many have noted before, in Japan, as elsewhere, the women’s movement of the 1970s borrowed strategies and ideas from the 1960s New Left.85 However, the

Left out: Writing women back into Japan’s 1968  153

gendered expectations that defined work on the barricades exposed a major rift between theory and practice, a rift that shaped subsequent evaluations of the late 1960s student New Left as a “male” movement.To this day, narratives of 1968 Japan remain divided along gendered lines: male former student activists publish celebratory memoirs of the campus occupations, while female former student activists publish accounts describing how campus activism led them to feminism.86 For many who were young women in 1968, the barricades were exciting, but the sense of betrayal by male activists and the significance of the women-only activism that followed remain the most salient aspects of this turbulent time. When we fail to account for their experiences on the barricades—however fraught and contested— our understanding of the gendered history of the Japanese sixties as a whole is both impoverished and inaccurate.

Notes  1 Author’s note: Following Japanese conventions, Japanese names are given surname first, given name second. The exceptions are Japanese authors who have published under a different name order in English. The piece benefited a great deal from the comments of Kim Icreverzi, Zane Dean River Mackin, and two anonymous readers on an earlier draft.   2 “Kessen sakebu ‘Yasuda-jō’ [‘Yasuda fortress’ clamors for the decisive battle],” Yomiuri shimbun, January 18, 1969, 15; Takazawa Kōji, et al. Shinsayoku nijūnen [Twenty years of the New Left] (Tokyo: Shinsensha, 1981), 123–124.   3 “Kessen sakebu ‘Yasuda-jō’, ” Yomiuri shimbun, January 18, 1969, 15.   4 “Haikyo no Tōdai [University of Tokyo in ruins],” Shūkan Yomiuri, January 31, 1969, 16–17. Sassa Atsuyuki, Tōdai rakujō: Yasuda kōdō kōbō shichijūnijikan [Surrender of University of Tokyo fortress: The seventy-hour battle for Yasuda Clock Tower] (Tokyo: Bungei shunjū, 1993), 10–11.   5 See Margaret McKean, Environmental Protest and Citizen Politics in Japan (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1981); David Apter and Nagayo Sawa, Against the State: Politics and Social Protest in Japan (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1984); Robin LeBlanc, Bicycle Citizens: The Political World of the Japanese Housewife (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1999); Ronald P. Loftus, Changing Lives:The “Postwar” in Japanese Women’s Autobiographies and Memoirs (Ann Arbor, MI: Association for Asian Studies, 2013).  6 Zenkyōtō kara ribu e [From Zenkyōtō to Lib], Jūgoshi nōto sengohen, ed. (Kawazaki: Inpakuto shuppankai, 1996)   7 See, for example, an analysis of the case in France in Keith A. Reader and Khursheed Wadia, “Women and the Events of May 1968,” in The May 1968 Events in France: Reproductions and Interpretations (Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 1992), 148–166.   8 Sara M. Evans, “AHR Forum: Sons, Daughters, and Patriarchy: Gender and the 1968 Generation,” American Historical Review (April 2009), 31–347, 331; Deborah Cohen and Lessie Jo Frazier, “Talking Back to ’68: Gendered Narratives, Participatory Spaces, and Political Cultures,” Gender and Sexuality in 1968: Transformative Politics in the Cultural Imagination, eds Lessie Jo Frazier and Deborah Cohen (Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), 145–172.   9 Marge Piercy, The Grand Coolie Damn (Boston, MA: New England Free Press, 1969); Sara M. Evans, Personal Politics (New York, N.Y.: Vintage, 1980); Mary King, Freedom Song: A Personal Story of the 1960s Civil Rights Movement (New York, N.Y.:William Morrow & Co., 1988); Wini Breines, Community and Organization in the New Left (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1989); Doug McAdam, Freedom Summer (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990); Ruth Rosen, The World Split Open: How the

154  Chelsea Szendi Schieder

10

11 12

13 14 15

16 17 18 19

20

Modern Women’s Movement Changed America, Revised Edition (New York, N.Y.: Penguin Books, 2006); Claire Duchen, ed., French Connections: Voices from the Women’s Movement in France (Amherst, MA: University of Massachusetts Press, 1987); Die 68erinnen: Porträt einer rebellischen Frauengeneration (Berlin: Rowohlt Berlin, 2002); Ulrike Meinhof, Everybody Talks About the Weather . . .We Don’t:The Writings of Ulrike Meinhof, ed., Karin Bauer (New York, N.Y.: Seven Stories Press, 2008); Elaine Carey, Plaza of Sacrifices: Gender, Power, and Terror in 1968 Mexico (Albuquerque, N.M.: University of New Mexico Press, 2005); Deborah Cohen and Lessie Jo Frazier, “Talking Back to ’68: Gendered Narratives, Participatory Spaces, and Political Cultures,” Gender and Sexuality in 1968:Transformative Politics in the Cultural Imagination, ed., Lessie Jo Frazier and Deborah Cohen (Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), 145–172. Vera Mackie, Feminism in Modern Japan (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003); Setsu Shigematsu, Scream from the Shadows: The Women’s Liberation Movement in Japan (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2012). Oguma Eiji also includes a chapter on the rise of a women’s movement out of the New Left in his two-volume history of 1968 in Japan. However, gender and women’s experiences do not figure in his more general historiography of the New Left. Also, Oguma has come under attack from some female activists, most notably Tanaka Mitsu, for his misinterpretations of their activist involvement. See, Oguma Eiji, 1968 (ge): Hanran no shūen to sono isan [1968 (Volume 2): The uprising’s demise and its legacies] (Tokyo: Shinyōsha, 2009); “Tanaka Mitsu 1968 o warau,” [Tanaka Mitsu mocks 1968] Shūkan kinyōbi, December 25, 2009. Kondo Keiko, interview by Chelsea Szendi Schieder, Tokyo, May 10, 2011. A notable exception is Itō Kimio, who cites his experiences as a young male criticized by female activists as the origin of his interest in analyzing masculinity. Itō Kimio, “Boku ga ‘danseigaku’ o hajimeta wake [Why I started men’s studies],” Danseigaku nyūmon [Introduction to Men’s Studies] (Tokyo: Sakuhinsha, 1996). Takazawa Kōji and Karata Keisei, eds, Shinsayoku riron zenshi: 1957–1975 [A complete history of New Left theory: 1957–1975] (Tokyo: Shinsensha, 1984), 12–13. Edward R Beauchamp and Richard Rubinger, Education in Japan: A Source Book (New York, N.Y.: Garland, 1989), 226. The rate for young women in 1955 is 47 percent, 91 percent for young men in 1975. Chelsea Szendi Schieder, Coed Revolution: The Female Student in the Japanese New Left, 1957–1972, unpublished PhD dissertation, Columbia University, 2014; Eiko Maruko Siniawer, “Befitting Bedfellows:Yakuza and the State in Modern Japan,” The Hidden History of Crime, Corruption, and States, ed., Renate Bridenthal (New York, N.Y.: Berghahn Books, 2013) 98–122; 112. Ōhara Kimiko, Tokeidai wa takakatta [The clock tower was tall] (Tokyo: San’ichi Shobo, 1969); Inoshishikai, group interview with Chelsea Szendi Schieder, Tokyo, July 9, 2011. Kanba Michiko, “Watashitachi wa seichō shitai! [We want to grow up!],” Hito shirezu hohoeman [The smile nobody knows] (Tokyo: San’ichi shobo, 1960), 56–57. Sharon Sievers, Flowers in Salt: The Beginnings of Feminist Consciousness in Modern Japan (Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 1983), 22. Uno, “The Death of ‘Good Wife,Wise Mother’?” in Postwar Japan as History, ed., Andrew Gordon (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1993), 293–322; Mari Osawa, “Twelve Million Full-Time Housewives: The Gender Consequences of Japan’s Postwar Social Contract,” in Social Contracts Under Stress: the Middle Classes of America, Europe, and Japan at the Turn of the Century, eds Olivier Zunz, Leonard Schoppa, and Nobuhiro Hiwatari (New York, N.Y.: Russell Sage Foundation, 2002), 255–280. Yamamoto Miwa, “Joshi gakusei no anpo tōsō [A female student’s US–Japan Security Treaty struggle], Onnatachi no 60-nen anpo [Women’s 1960 US–Japan Security Treaty], vol. 5, Jûgoshi nōto sengohen (Kawasaki: Inpakuto shuppankai, 1990), 104; Yamamoto Chie “Anpo tōsō wa shuppatsu no toki [The US-Japan Security Treaty was when it began],” Onnatachi no 60-nen anpo, vol. 5, Jûgoshi nōto sengohen (Kawasaki: Inpakuto shuppankai, 1990), 120.

Left out: Writing women back into Japan’s 1968  155

21 Imai Yasuko, “Bunto to feminizum [Bund and feminism],” 60-nen Anpo to Bunto wo yomu [Reading 1960 Anpo and the Bund] (Tokyo: Jōkyō shuppan, 2002), 75. 22 Nagai Michio. Nihon no daigaku: Sangyō shakai ni hatatsu yakuwari [Japan’s universities: The role in developing industrial society] (Tokyo: Chūkō shinsho, 1965), 4. 23 Jeremy Seymour Eades, Roger Goodman, and Yumiko Hada, The “Big Bang” in Japanese Higher Education:The 2004 Reforms and the Dynamics of Change (Melbourne:Trans Pacific Press, 2005), 86. 24 Sawara Yukiko, “The University Struggles,” Zengakuren: Japan’s Revolutionary Students, Stuart Dowsey, ed. (Berkeley, CA: The Ishi Press, 1970), 126–192, 165. 25 Sawara, 139. 26 Hoshino Chieko, “Kamonegi shōjo no sanjū nen [Thirty years as a naive maiden],” Zenkyōtō kara ribu e [From Zenkyōtō to Lib], Jūgoshi nōto sengohen, ed. (Kawazaki: Inpakuto shuppankai, 1996), 90. 27 Sakai Kazuko, “Onna to iu mainoriti o mitsukete [Discovering the minority called woman],” Zenkyōtō kara ribu e [From Zenkyōtō to Lib], Jūgoshi nōto sengohen, ed. (Kawazaki: Inpakuto shuppankai, 1996), 100. 28 The most infamous of these sectarian conflicts was the “blood feud” between Chūkaku and Kakumaru. 29 Tomano Mimie, “Yokan sareru soshiki ni yosete [Toward the coming organization],” Waga ai waga hangyaku [My love, my rebellion] (Tokyo: Zeneisha, 1969), 141–160. 30 Guy Yasko and Setsu Shigematsu also note the influence of “women’s issues” to the formation of Zenkyōtō, even as those issues became dropped in the course of the movement. Guy Yasko, “The Japanese Student Movement 1968–1970: The Zenkyōtō Uprising,” unpublished dissertation, Cornell University, 1997. 19; Shigematsu, 51–52. 31 Tomano Mimie, “Onna wa dō aritai ka [How do women want to be],” in Waga ai waga hangyaku [My love, my rebellion] (Tokyo: Zeneisha, 1969), 169. 32 Ibid., 170. 33 Ibid., 173. 34 Setsu Shigematsu notes how Tokoro’s contributions were “overshadowed by the spectacular images of male students confronting university administrators and the riot police” even as ribu women (women’s liberation activists in Japan) insist on her place in the genealogy of Zenkyōtō thought. Shigematsu, 42–43. 35 Yamamoto Yoshitaka, “Barikeedo fūsa no shisō” [Thoughts on the barricade blockades], Chisei no hanran [Revolt of the intellect] (Tokyo: Zeneisha, 1969) 79–95. 83. 36 Ibid., 92–94. 37 Yonezu Tomoko, “Barikeedo wo kugutte [Passing through the barricades],” Zenkyōtō kara ribu e, Jūgoshi nōto sengohen, ed. (Kawazaki: Inpakuto shuppankai, 1996) 121. 38 Katō, 54. 39 Ibid., 24–25. 40 Ibid., 35. 41 Yonezu Tomoko, “Barikeedo wo kugutte [Passing through the barricades]” 121. 42 This was also the case in France, as described by Reader and Wadia. 43 Ibid., Katō 52. 44 The “Gewalt staves” were apparently originally employed in sectarian battles, and only later came to be used in clashes with the police. William Marotti, “Japan 198: The Performance of Violence and the Theater of Protest,” American Historical Review (February 2009): 97–135, 103, ft. 19. 45 Katō, 41. 46 Ibid., 43. 47 Ibid., 42. 48 Ōhara, 143–145. 49 Ōhara, 143–145.

156  Chelsea Szendi Schieder

50 Tokuyama Haruko, “Watashi ga ugokeba yo no naka ga hitori bun ugoku to iu jikkan [The feeling that if I move one more person in the world is moving],” Zenkyōtō kara ribu e [From Zenkyōtō to Lib], Jūgoshi nōto sengohen, ed. (Kawazaki: Inpakuto shuppankai, 1996). 88; Ōhara, 143–145. 51 “Akatsuki no teire to hachinin no joshigakusei [Morning raid and eight female students],” Shūkan shinchō, May 11, 1968 52 Kuwahara, 94. 53 Katō, 57. 54 “ ‘Zengakuren’ kago danjo gakusei wa nani o shiteiru? [What are the male and female students doing in the ‘Zengakuren’ cage?],” Shūkan Playboy, August 20, 1968. 55 “Akatsuki no teire to hachinin no joshigakusei [Crack-down at dawn and eight female students],” Shūkan shinchō, May 11, 1968. 56 “ ‘Zengakuren’ kago danjo gakusei wa nani o shiteiru?”; [What are the male and female students doing in the ‘Zengakuren’ cage?]. 57 Umezawa Tadashi, interviewed by Chelsea Szendi Schieder. Tokyo, July 25, 2011. 58 Oshima Nagisa, “Sexual Poverty,” Cinema, Censorship, and the State:The Writings of Nagisa Oshima, ed. Annette Michelson, trans. Dawn Larson (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1992) 240–248; 240. 59 Aoyama, 198–199. 60 Mackie, 144. 61 Tanaka Mitsu, “Benjō kara no kaihō [Freedom from the Toilet],” Ribu to feminizumu [Lib and Feminism], ed. Amano Masako, et al., Shinhen Nihon no feminizumu 1 [New Edition Japanese Feminism 1] (Tokyo: Iwanami shoten), 59. 62 Ōta Motoko,“Onnatachi no zenkyōtō undō [Women’s Zenkyōtō movement],” Zenkyōtō kara ribu e [From Zenkyōtō to Lib] Jūgoshi nōto sengohen, ed. (Kawazaki: Inpakuto shuppankai, 1996) 78. 63 Katō, 45. 64 Ueno Chizuko, “Forty Years of Japanese Feminism: What It Has Achieved . . . and What It Has Not,” Lecture, Tetsuo Najita Distinguished Lecture Series in Japanese Studies, University of Chicago, April 22, 2013. 65 “Joshigakusei ni uttaeru! [Appeal to female students!]” Hangyaku no barikeedo: Nichidai tōsō no kiroku [The revolts barricades: record of the Nihon University struggle] (Tokyo: San’ichi shobo, 2008) 31–32. 66 “Joshigakusei ni uttaeru! [Appeal to female students!]” Hangyaku no barikeedo: Nichidai tōsō no kiroku [The revolts barricades: record of the Nihon University struggle] (Tokyo: San’ichi shobo, 2008) 31–32. 67 Katō, 21–22. 68 Shigematsu, 66. Inoue Teruko, Nagao Yōko, Funabashi Kuniko, “ūman ribu no shisō to undō: kanren shiryō no kisoteki kenkyū [Women’s Lib Theory and Movement: Fundamental Research of Basic Materials],” Tōzainanboku: Wakō daigaku sōgō bunka kenkyūjo nenpō [East West South North: Wako University Annual Report from the Comprehensive Cultural Research Center], 2006, 134–158. 69 Inoue, 137. 70 Shigematsu, 66. 71 Mori Setsuko, “Shisō shūdan esu.ii.ekkusu soshikiron? Josetsu [An organizational theory for Thought Group S.E.X.? Introduction],”Shiryō ūman ribu shi I [A history of Women’s Lib sources I], ed. Mizonoguchi Akiyo (Tokyo: Shōkadō shoten, 1992), 171. 72 Shiryō ūman ribu shi I [A history of Women’s Lib sources I], ed. Mizonoguchi Akiyo (Tokyo: Shōkadō shoten, 1992), 169. 73 For a discussion on how Tanaka Mitsu and women’s lib (ribu) activists employed the term onna, which “signalized the politicization of what was widely considered a pejorative term, with sexual or lower-class connotations” to reclaim a raw and sexual subjectivity for women and reject an older history of “bourgeois” women’s movements, see

Left out: Writing women back into Japan’s 1968  157

Shigematsu, 4. This attention to cultivating a female language was also key to feminist thought elsewhere, for example in the writings of Mary Daly (USA), Hélène Cixous, Luce Irigaray, and Julia Kristeva (France). 74 Shigematsu, 9–10. 75 Aoyama, 196–197. 76 Yonezu Tomoko, “Mizukara no SEX o mokuteki ishikitekini hikiukeru naka kara 70 nendai o bokki suru [Take on your own SEX with purpose and consciousness and erect the 1970s],” Shiryō ūman ribu shi I, ed. Mizonoguchi Akiyo (Tokyo: Shōkadō shoten, 1992), 170. 77 Ibid., 170. 78 Although feminists in the early 1970s in Japan read about women’s movements elsewhere, and works translated from other languages from an earlier generation of feminism had long influenced discussions about women’s rights in Japan, the key inspiration for their early writings come from their specific experiences. 79 Ibid., 172. 80 Ibid., 172. 81 Mori, “Shisō shūdan esu.ii.ekkusu soshikiron? josetsu,” 173. 82 Ibid., 174. 83 Ibid., 175 84 Ibid., 170. 85 Most significantly Vera Mackie and Setsu Shigematsu. 86 Kano Akihiro and Kano Kenta, Omae no 1960-nendai o, shinu mae ni shabettoke [Tell me your 1960s before you die!] (Tokyo: Potto shuppan, 2010); Mihashi Toshiaki, Rojō no Zenkyōtō 1968 [Zenkyoto 1968 on the streets] (Tokyo: Kawade bukkusu, 2010); Takahashi Hiroshi, Tuwamono-domo ga yume no saki [The rank and file has surpassed the dream] (Tokyo: Wayts, 2010); Zenkyōtō kara ribu e [From Zenkyōtō to Lib] Jūgoshi nōto sengohen, ed., (Kawazaki: Inpakuto shuppankai, 1996).

Selected bibliography Avenell, Simon. Making Japanese Citizens: Civil Society and the Mythology of the Shimin in Postwar Japan. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2010. Evans, Sara M., “AHR Forum: Sons, Daughters, and Patriarchy: Gender and the 1968 Generation,” American Historical Review (April 2009), 31–347. Kenji, Hasegawa, “In Search of a New Radical Left: The Rise and Fall of the Anpo Bund, 1955–1960.” Stanford Journal of East Asian Affairs 3, no. 1 (2003): 75–92. Jesty, Justin. “Tokyo 1960: Days of Rage and Grief.” MIT Visualizing Cultures. http://ocw. mit.edu/ans7870/21f/21f.027/tokyo_1960/anp2_essay05.html. Mackie, Vera. Feminism in Modern Japan: Citizenship, Embodiment, and Sexuality. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003. Marotti,William. “Japan 1968:The Performance of Violence and the Theater of Protest.” The American Historical Review 114, no. 1 (2009): 97–135. Oguma Eiji. “Japan’s 1968: A Collective Reaction to Rapid Economic Growth in an Age of Turmoil.” Translated by Nick Kapur with Samuel Malissa and Stephen Poland. The AsiaPacific Journal 13:12, no. 1. (March 2015). Sasaki-Uemura,Wesley. Organizing the Spontaneous: Citizen Protest in Postwar Japan. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2001. Sawara Yukiko. “The University Struggles.” In Zengakuren: Japan’s Revolutionary Students, edited by Stuart Dowsey, 136–192. Berkeley, CA: The Ishi Press, 1970. Shigematsu Setsu. Scream from the Shadows: The Women’s Liberation Movement in Japan. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2012.

158  Chelsea Szendi Schieder

Steinhoff, Patricia. “Three Women Who Loved the Left: Radical Women Leaders in the Japanese Red Army Movement.” In Re-Imaging Japanese Women, edited by Anne Imamura. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996. Takemasa, Ando. Japan’s New Left Movements: Legacies for Civil Society. London and New York, N.Y.: Routledge, 2013. Uno, Kathleen. “The Death of ‘Good Wife,Wise Mother’?” In Postwar Japan as History, edited by Andrew Gordon, 293–322. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1993. Yasko, Guy. “The Japanese Student Movement 1968–70: The Zenkyōtō Uprising.” Dissertation, Cornell University, 1997.

8 REFASHIONING SPAIN Fashion, consumer culture, gender, and international integration under the late Franco dictatorship Alejandro J. Gomez-del-Moral

Writing in a 1971 issue of Cortty, the El Corte Inglés department store’s employee bulletin, journalist Vicente Verdú marveled at how changes in Spain’s consumer culture had transformed Spanish gender relations during the 1960s.The repressive early years of Generalissimo Francisco Franco’s brutal dictatorship (1939–1975), had seen the Franco regime and its ally, the Spanish Catholic Church, impose a rigid gender hierarchy that mandated separation of the sexes in public areas from the age of 6, disenfranchised and stripped women of the right to work, and stressed female obedience to male authority. But by the late 1960s,Verdú wrote, new “youth” sections at Spain’s department stores had undermined this gender order. These departments traded especially in unisex fashions influenced by counter-cultural movements then sweeping through the United States and Western Europe; by offering boys and girls the same clothes in the same place, they became spaces where Spanish adolescents could mingle freely over clothes that emphasized equality, not gender difference. More radically, the messaging that surrounded these foreign-inspired fashions also frequently celebrated an iconoclastic youthful idealism, suggesting – sometimes explicitly – that adolescents now knew better than their benighted Francoist elders, and could legitimately rebel against the sociopolitical stagnation they represented. The change,Verdú underscored, was dramatic – “from zero to one thousand”.1 At the heart of this shift lay the emergence of a new and unprecedented male consumer culture in Spain, fueled by the development of the nation’s first men’s consumer press. Although fellow journalist and social critic Manuel Vázquez Montalbán only noted their presence decades after Verdú wrote, domestically produced men’s magazines circulated in Spain from as early as 1955 and did so throughout the Spanish economic boom of 1959–1973, when Spain’s economy was among the fastest growing in the world.2 Alongside Spanish women’s periodicals, fashion trade journals, and store bulletins, men’s magazines like the trailblazing Señor: La Revista del Hombre (Sir:The Men’s Magazine, launched 1955) shaped a new male consumer.

160  Alejandro J. Gomez-del-Moral

This consumer embraced rather than feared the increasingly radical innovations in menswear, popular culture, and gastronomy arriving from abroad, and thus fit poorly within the Franco regime’s conservative masculine ideal – an ideal characterized by sobriety, piety, and virile struggle for personal success. This male consumer culture begs attention, for it qualifies scholarly thinking on the 1960s in Spain and Western Europe. Scholars including Uta Poiger, Victoria de Grazia, and Richard Kuisel have shown how American mass consumption transformed European societies during the Western European economic booms of 1945–1973.3 Because most Spaniards lacked the buying power to consume en masse before the 1970s, the consensus has been that a Spanish mass consumer society was late in forming. With the exception of historians like Aurora Morcillo and Sasha Pack, scholars have also suggested that whatever mass-oriented consumption Spain had developed earlier possessed little of the sociopolitically transformative character evident elsewhere in Europe, and was instead either apolitical or used by the Franco regime to depoliticize the populace.4 This has excluded Spain – a dictatorship that cultivated consumption under the tutelage of the democratic Cold War West while clinging to repressive vestiges of fascist policies – from narratives of how consumers experienced Europe’s socially and politically turbulent 1960s. Moreover, scholars have yet to assess the decade’s impact on Franco-era masculinity, a cornerstone of the regime’s conservative gender ideology and social order. Yet, examination of mid-century Spain’s consumer magazines, particularly those aimed at men, reveals that despite widespread material hardship, a mass consumer society began to form in the Spanish press from the late 1940s onward. In these years, affordable periodicals like the department store customer bulletin Revista Jorba produced content suggesting that readers aspire to once-unattainable luxuries like fashion and home appliances, and portrayed mass access to such goods (as well as the advent of a mass consumer society in which this was possible), as virtual faits accomplis.5 In response, Spanish fashion, retailing professionals, and consumers increasingly integrated into a larger international community defined by the transnational exchange of commercial knowledge and ideas about consumption. Journalists, for instance, celebrated Spain’s growing presence at foreign fashion shows, while Spanish department stores championed the latest imported trends. As Vicente Verdú noted, Spanish consumers – especially young adults – embraced both these imported goods and a series of concomitant ideals, including new masculinities, that were similarly foreign in inspiration, possessed significant political content, and had a complex impact on Spanish society conditioned by the unique context of Francoism. Notwithstanding other Europeans’ ostensibly greater personal liberties, the messages on gender that magazines disseminated in 1950s and early 1960s Spain echoed Francoism’s conservative masculine values. Alongside a virile pursuit of personal distinction, these included sober elegance in dress, and defense of patriarchy. Spanish periodicals also echoed the regime’s foundational doctrine of national exceptionalism, which deemed Western civilization decadent, and held Spain to be its last proper moral and cultural reference. The initial result, then, was a popular reproduction of Francoist sociopolitical hegemony.

Refashioning Spain  161

As the 1960s progressed, however, Spain’s consumer media and retailers flirted with messages subversive to Francoist orthodoxy, particularly on issues of gender. These included calls for gender equality, the virtues of youthful experimentation and rebellion, as well as a fixation with the consumer products and lifestyles of not just the United States, but also democratic Western Europe, especially England. This underscores Per Lundin and Thomas Kaiserfeld’s recent warning that the established Americanization narrative, in which postwar American consumerism displaced preexisting European mores, obscures how these societies appropriated American culture differently while also culturally influencing one another.6 For Franco’s Spain was “Europeanizing” as well as Americanizing, socially, culturally, and politically: as the Spanish press, its readers, and myriad fashion and retail professionals turned toward Europe, they also began to voice both concern over Spain’s place therein and a growing desire to join a perceived club of prosperous consumer nations. By the mid-1970s, such concerns encouraged them to abandon Franco’s exceptionalist discourse, and instead embrace political convergence with democratic Europe and the liberalization that it entailed.

Gender hierarchy and repression under early Francoism The development of a Spanish male consumer culture and subsequent evolution in models of masculinity came at a transitional moment for Franco’s Spain. In the early 1950s as during the peak of repression in the 1940s, the Franco regime met alternatives to its social and political doctrines with marked hostility. Following its victory over the liberal Second Spanish Republic in the Spanish Civil War (1936–1939), the dictatorship had banned all political parties save its own National Movement, with the fascist Falange Española (“Spanish Phalanx”) at its core, and had jailed and executed tens of thousands of Republican civil servants and political activists.7 Throughout the 1940s and 1950s, censors from the regime’s Ministry for Information and Tourism (henceforth MIT) policed all printed matter before it circulated in Spain and imposed stiff sanctions on any works they judged offensive to “public morality.”8 And in collaboration with the Spanish Catholic hierarchy, the regime made a new nationalistic brand of conservative Catholicism – National-Catholicism – Spain’s sole religion, which quickly became a centerpiece of early Franco-era Spanish national identity.9 At the heart of this new official morality lay a patriarchal social system that severely regulated gender roles and sexual behavior, stressing respect for paternal authority.10 The dictatorship stripped women of the right to vote, to divorce, and, after marrying, to secure paid work without spousal permission (also required when opening a bank account or taking a trip).11 Meanwhile, regime, National-Catholic authorities, and Spanish society all encouraged women to embrace what historian Aurora Morcillo has termed “True Catholic Womanhood”: a selfless, patriotic, obedient, and domestic feminine ideal drawn largely from sixteenth-century Catholic women’s manuals. Those who retained professional ambitions or a disinterest in marriage were ridiculed.12 Meanwhile, though privileged by comparison, men also had to adhere to conservative gender norms that required them to behave

162  Alejandro J. Gomez-del-Moral

like competitive “man-warriors”; they fought to excel professionally and socially for the greater glory of Spain, and were obliged to police female relatives’ as well as their own moral and (ideally purely procreative) sexual conduct.13 To ensure public observance of National-Catholic puritanism, the state restricted interaction between the sexes through measures like abolishing coeducation after the age of 6 and police patrols that targeted immodestly dressed Spanish beachgoers.14 On the other hand, by the early 1950s Franco also began to pursue renewed diplomatic and economic ties with Western Europe and the United States, culminating in a 1953 treaty with the latter that brought Spain – a diplomatic pariah in the late 1940s – both international rehabilitation and more than $62 million in aid, which helped revive an economy that had languished in the post-Civil War years. This limited rapprochement helped make the flourishing of a Spanish male as well as female consumer culture possible: foreign tourists brought their consumer ways to Spain; a fledgling middle class developed as the economy slowly improved; new, foreign-influenced commercial arenas like Spain’s first mass-oriented department stores opened spaces for personal expression through consumption; and, in this vein, the number of consumer magazines, which had grown fourfold in the 1940s, did so again.15 These venues offered Spaniards images of a Spanish society already engaged in mass consumption, which they so internalized that they overwhelmed automaker SEAT with orders when it released its new 600 model in 1957, even though the car cost 3.5 times the average Spanish annual income.16 Nevertheless, change remained limited – in particular, regime officials and allies sought to limit the social side-effects of Spain’s renewed foreign relations. By the late 1950s, it was more common for married women to work, but they were to limit themselves to jobs consonant with their traditional nurturing roles.17 Hollywood movies came to Spanish theaters, but were dubbed and censored. The cautiously improving economy went into an inflationary crisis in 1956, from which it only emerged after the Spanish market fully opened to foreign investment in 1959, which sparked the Spanish boom. And amid these changes, Spaniards who adopted forbidden foreign trappings like the bikini risked fines and arrest, regardless of what tourists did. Importantly, foreign ways were not necessarily more progressive: where postwar American housewives could typically only make minor budgetary decisions without their husbands, the Spanish ama de casa had full run of the family finances. And though a 1953 Revista Jorba column misogynistically dismissed fashion as “a quintessentially feminine thing”, so did a 1959 editorial in Britain’s Daily Express that ridiculed a female columnist’s call for more daring menswear, sarcastically telling her to focus on “the ‘progress’ of women’s fashion and leave…men in [their] happy way of evolving without such hurry”.18

Fashion, conformity, and alternatives to Francoist masculinity By the mid-1950s, however, this prejudice had given ground in Spain: menswear was starting to garner attention, a shift that soon introduced alternatives to Francoist

Refashioning Spain  163

masculine orthodoxy. Thus far, Revista Jorba’s skepticism had been the norm in the Spanish press. Tellingly, while 1950s Spain already boasted several successful women’s fashion and consumer journals, notably the long-running Mujer (in print 1937–1977) as well as several magazines produced by the state-sanctioned women’s section of the Falange, or Sección Femenina, there was no male equivalent.19 This changed in 1955, when brothers Santiago and Segismundo de Anta, founders of the women’s fashion journal Alta Costura, launched Spain’s first men’s magazine, Señor: Revista del Hombre (Sir: The Men’s Magazine). Despite its novelty, Señor did not seem revolutionary. The magazine targeted a conventional, restricted, haute bourgeois audience: at 25–30 pesetas per quarterly issue, it was expensive, while content on aristocratic topics like the latest boating fashions and profiles of elegant Spanish noblemen and high-ranking officials spoke most directly to an elite readership.20 Politically, Señor was similarly conservative, opening its first issue with a full-page image of a bust of Franco – an unsurprising display of loyalty, given Santiago de Anta’s near-execution during the Civil War for being a Francoist fifth-columnist.21 Indeed, in his introductory editorial, editorin-chief Segismundo described the magazine’s ambitions in limited terms: not “to create anything new…[but only] profound and practical constructive work in the field of menswear”.22 The magazine quickly delivered on this conventional promise. Echoing arguments made by Spanish etiquette manuals throughout the previous half-century,23 Señor and periodicals that followed, like the avant-garde men’s journal DON: Revista Masculina Española (Don: Spanish Men’s Magazine, founded 1963), began to spend ever more ink on menswear during the late 1950s and early 1960s, stressing especially that clothes indeed “made the man” i.e., that because they reflected one’s inner self, outward attire was key to achieving personal success, and so to being properly masculine. In a 1958 column, for instance, Señor contributor María Pilar de Molina explained that she had only agreed to marry her husband Miguel (whose formerly shabby appearance had once given her doubts about his character), after he embraced fashion, proving his inner worth.24 Conversely, these magazines stressed that clothes and other consumer products could in turn also shape sensibilities, producing a kind of dialogue between attire and self. Thus, in a 1963 fashion spread, DON cautioned that what most determined one’s worth was not possessing the clothes depicted, but the refined taste to appreciate them. And in 1964 DON promised it would make readers, “more complex and … always as informed as others”; confident in their desires and correct in their fashion choices; and most of all able to “easily establish contacts [by] . . . knowing what others are feeling but cannot express”.25 The sartorially defined model of masculinity that these magazines offered was equally well defined. It hinged on two related virtues, “distinction” and “elegance”. The first was a form of social prominence based upon public recognition of one’s professional, moral, and aesthetic respectability. Distinction was literally “that which distinguishes man from the rest of society”, as Barcelona’s provincial MIT representative Jaime Delgado phrased it in his keynote address at DON’s 1963 launch.

164  Alejandro J. Gomez-del-Moral

And distinction depended in turn on achieving the second quality: elegance. Attaining these virtues, meanwhile, required both dressing well (as defined by mainstream Spanish society) and, as DON suggested in 1963 and 1964, possessing the refined sensibilities and confidence to match.26 Together, these concepts so pervaded mid-century Spanish literature on menswear that despite historian Leonore Davidoff ’s warning that periodicals do not necessarily reflect mainstream opinion, their omnipresence alone suggests broad social acceptance.27 Delgado’s keynote, which stressed the importance of both distinction and elegance in modern society, is but one example. In 1963, DON offered to grant the reader “the spirit of excellence that … will always tend to separate him from the masses”28 – distinction, in other words29 – while in 1961, ads in the Barcelona daily La Vanguardia Española similarly promised “distinction … [and] the ability to win friends and triumph in life” to buyers of the etiquette manual El Hombre en Sociedad (Man in Society), and marketed cologne for “the elegant and distinguished man”.30 In 1966, the famed cultural magazine Triunfo celebrated the reappearance of “elegant” and “distinguished” dandies in Spain.31 And in Señor, María de Molina’s 1958 column specifically lamented her husband’s former lack of elegance due to shabby and passé attire, while others stressed that elegance required wearing only flattering clothes and meticulously caring for them, or profiled Spain’s most elegant men. These values and the ties that magazines like Señor drew between clothes and the self publicly reproduced Francoist social doctrine and gender orthodoxy, too. The quest for sartorial distinction displayed in DON and La Vanguardia Española – in essence, a struggle to outdo one’s peers – may be read as another manifestation of the Falangist man-warrior’s call to struggle, particularly given the Falange’s history of sartorial self-representation through use of blue shirts as an ideological badge.32 Certainly, Francoist officials and supporters frequently voiced support for this pursuit, as during the keynote at DON’s 1963 launch, or when the Anta brothers’ Señor listed former ABC editor-in-chief Juan Ignacio Luca de Tena, a wartime Franco supporter, among the most elegant Spaniards of 1960.33 Late 1950s and early 1960s Spanish men’s fashion also supported Francoist gender norms through its marked conservatism, which restricted masculine selfexpression to a circumscribed set of subtle choices including the number of jacket buttons one fastened and what sort of tie or gloves one wore. Thus, in 1961 Señor advised that elegance required avoiding “extravagance” and instead “dressing well and without calling attention to oneself ”, a claim echoed by the regime via Jaime Delgado’s 1963 speech, which also called for judicious acceptance of new trends, always within limits with “discrete tact”.34 Similarly, articles in DON applauded the conservative look of English style, or, in a 1963 advert by Spanish designer Loewe, suggested that menswear’s restrictive emphasis on small details charged them with an “expressive significance” that elevated men’s fashion to an art form.35 Triunfo columnist Ignacio Agustí even boasted Spain’s adherence to classic lines amid an international shift toward experimentation was a mark of national superiority, paralleling early Francoist discourses of exceptionalism.36

Refashioning Spain  165

Sartorial conservatism also reinforced Francoist emphasis on gender difference and hierarchization of power. Scholars have suggested that men’s business suits discipline the male body and so reproduce patriarchy, under which gendered divisions of dress are especially rigidly defined and gender bending taboo.37 Just so, through the early 1960s, columns in Señor ridiculed the idea of sartorially (and so, emotionally) unstable women designing menswear, cautioning that women could not even be trusted to buy their husbands clothes – even choosing accessories like gloves was best left to salesclerks.38 Similarly, Triunfo’s coverage of the 1963 Menhir (Megalith) menswear line proclaimed a break with Spaniards’ traditional aversion to fashion as “feminoid weakness”, but the magazine’s praise for Menhir’s sobriety and classic lines as well as the image of masculine strength evoked by the collection’s name, in fact reaffirmed traditional masculinity and gender difference.39 As the 1960s progressed, however, the models of masculinity presented by Spanish consumer magazines increasingly began to include messages and promote traits that did not conform with, and even ran counter to, Francoist gender orthodoxy. Under the label of youth culture and a concomitant celebration of youthful exuberance, Spanish menswear began to exhibit the more radical shifts that had formerly been only (barely) acceptable for the young. Early 1960s articles in Señor acknowledged that younger Spaniards preferred fashions more flamboyant than the magazine’s sober ideal, but added that this penchant was not universal and was usually abandoned upon reaching middle age.40 By the mid-1960s, innovation was by contrast not just for the young, and “la moda joven”, or youth fashion, was inescapable, as magazines celebrated the newly minted sartorial virtue of “youthfulness” in menswear, by which they meant rapid change and sharp departures from the classic suit. As early as 1962, Triunfo contributor Suzanne lauded Pierre Cardin’s radical and seasonally changing designs for rendering menswear “no longer sad nor static”.41 Five years later, the Spanish tailoring journal Men’s Modes warned that youth fashion was the will of Spain’s youth, for whom designers would have to “break old molds”.42 Spanish clothing manufacturer PK did just that, building 1967’s new Terlenka YOUNG collection around such a celebration of youthful dynamism: the line featured novelties like Mao jackets and Victorian tailcoats, and the company marketed it as “youthful”, “daring”, “sensational”, and designed for modern men of all ages.43 Youth fashion’s ascendancy in Spain represented a serious threat to Francoism. It threatened the regime’s gendered social hierarchies, as these rested upon a dismissal of women as flighty, unreliable, and therefore inferior to more socially stable men, a judgment that was in turn premised partly on the supposed capriciousness of women’s wear. Once this proteanism was shared, changeability of fashion as an indicator of bodily discipline and social stability became an increasingly inoperative category of difference. Thus, in 1967, DON explained that designers’ efforts to create dynamic new men’s fashions and to reassure men that shopping was an acceptably masculine pastime had stemmed from the question: “If woman is not man’s inferior, it is not reasonable that man be woman’s inferior … if they [women] plan their wardrobes each season, why are we [men] not to do the same for ours?”44 Youth

166  Alejandro J. Gomez-del-Moral

fashion could also directly attack the regime politically, as in a 1968 advert run by PK in the popular women’s magazine Telva with the suggestive title “The rebellion of today’s man for an ‘ImPKble’ future”. The advert described PK’s intended customer as a young, “anxious”, socially conscious student of the sort then protesting at the universities of Barcelona and Madrid, who rejected their elders’ – the Franco regime’s – sociopolitical stagnation and the “stupid grand spectacles” that took place each Spring, all of which were politically radical jabs at the regime, the last a reference to its military parades.45 Meanwhile, a second trend fueled by the ascendancy of youth culture began to make inroads in 1960s Spain: unisex fashion, which rejected traditional gendering of clothing such as skirts and pants in favor of neutral outfits that freed the wearer from gender’s constraints and focused instead on the virtues of youthfulness.46 Unisex first developed internationally in the 1950s and flourished in the mid1960s, when the boutiques of Carnaby Street in “Swinging London”, designers like Halston, and the New York department store Alexander’s all embraced it.47 In Spain, the fashion press took notice of the trend by the early 1960s. In 1962, for instance, Triunfo ran an article about women appropriating menswear, a new fashion being championed by the Danish model Maud.48 Reports only multiplied after Carnaby Street took up the cause: through the early 1970s, content on or alluding to unisex fashion became common in the Spanish consumer press.49 Thus, in 1967 DON ran an interview with Carnaby Street boutique owner and chief figure John Stephen, who pointed to the pantsuit as evidence for the inexorability of male and female fashion’s convergence, and, in 1970 alone, Cortty ran three articles commenting on unisex’s popularity among Spanish consumers.50 PK’s coverage of unisex, meanwhile, was similarly dense; notably, this included a 1967 feature on menswear’s recent embrace of traditionally feminine floral patterns, which the article declared were motivated by a desire for gender equality in fashion, and that reportedly led male consumers to realize that women were the fairer sex based on their merits, not fashion.51 Even more directly than youth fashion, then, unisex challenged Francoist constructions of masculinity. Spanish moral authorities stressed gender difference and male primacy in the public sphere, and so feared the sinful consequences of excessive contact between the sexes that they banned coeducation for children after age 6. Unisex clothes sent a contrary message of gender equality, female agency, and casual social interaction between men and women.52 By 1971, Vicente Verdú reported in Cortty, unisex had increased Spanish acceptance of gender equality by encouraging teenagers to form platonic friendships, by making their personalities more similar, and by undermining a misogynistic male culture of sexual conquest – an impact whose extent he judged “undeniable”.53 Other references to unisex contained more radical attacks on the existing gendered order, as in a 1967 DON photo-editorial that featured a woman seducing a man, only to then steal and saunter away smugly wearing his suit, leaving him in shirttails and helpless – a tableau in which the pantsuit became not just an act of appropriation, but patriarchy-defying emasculation.54 Unisex, moreover, subverted Francoism’s separation of the sexes through new

Refashioning Spain  167

consolidated “youth” sections then being launched at Spain’s largest department store chains, in which teenage boys and girls could shop side by side for, and freely mingle over, unisex as well as more traditionally gendered items.55 So clear was the challenge that unisex posed to Francoist gender orthodoxy that even as Verdú celebrated in 1971, PK’s own company bulletin fretted that the trend was ultimately doomed in a patriarchal Southern Europe ill-suited to unisex’s radical social and sartorial egalitarianism.56 And, indeed, the social transformations that youth fashion and unisex embodied had their limits, though ultimately their impact was both marked and lasting. On the one hand, Terlenka YOUNG’s advertising still stressed the pursuit of elegance, and in company literature, PK assured readers that Spain remained free from hippie radicalism.57 An early 1970s rise in the popularity of explicitly gendered fashions in Spain and abroad, spearheaded by the new trend of the maxi-skirt, arose as a viable counter to unisex’s rejection of gender markers, whose true revolutionary potential has morever come into question.58 Lingering belief that female shoppers were flighty and biddable similarly persisted.59 But if the maxi-skirt challenged unisex, it did not wholly conquer: it was just then that Cortty reported on a popular new gender-bending trend – male handbags – and in any case, the maxi-skirt could serve as a feminist garment, providing women agency to deny the male gaze by covering their legs. If perhaps cynically, it is in these terms that El Corte Inglés promoted the item, and, meanwhile, Cortty elsewhere suggested men were no less gullible as shoppers than women.60 As for youth fashion’s impact, Vicente Verdú, whose own observations postdated the maxi-skirt’s arrival, noted that while a decade earlier youths had dressed much like their parents, now the reverse was true.

Clothes and the foreign origins of Spanish liberalization Yet what proved to be most dangerous to the Francoist sociopolitical project – to both the regime’s patriarchal order and its political legitimacy as a whole – were youth fashion and unisex’s foreign origins. As Spaniards interested in the world of menswear grew more aware of the revolutionary changes in fashion culture taking place abroad, especially in England, this stoked desires and efforts to participate in this international fashion culture, as well as anxieties over what some perceived to be Spain’s continued absence therefrom – in other words, a concern that in fashion as in politics, Franco’s Spain had stagnated. Over time, this naturalized the notion that Spain was properly part of Western Europe rather than separate from and superior to it, undercutting the regime’s doctrine of national exceptionalism. Spanish interest in British men’s fashion rose sharply from the late 1950s onward. Magazines like Señor heaped praise on English menswear, hailing England as the epitome of good taste. In 1958, Señor applauded the London-based Men’s Fashion Council’s new “Trapeze” collection for putting paid to the notion that men’s fashion never changed, and declared that it would “exert notable influence, both in national and international fashion”.61 The magazine later lauded English menswear as “the peak and standard for the international mode of dress”.62 AMA, a

168  Alejandro J. Gomez-del-Moral

homemaker’s magazine launched in 1959 by an agency within the Spanish Commerce Ministry, concurred: in 1960, contributor Adriana opined that “[men’s] fashion tends toward the sober English style”.63 Once youth culture and unisex appeared in Spain, this fascination with English style expanded to include both the conservatism of Bond Street and the experimentation of Carnaby Street, which DON declared “the World Mecca of men’s fashion” in 1967.64 Tellingly, PK named that year’s youth line in English – Terlenka YOUNG – and promoted it using English buzzwords, declaring the line its latest “HIT”, through which wearers could live life “a ritmo YOUNG” (at a YOUNG rhythm) – a seeming attempt to capitalize on British Invasion’s popularity.65 And, in 1970, recognizing such interest in English menswear in the Spanish city of Bilbao, the local El Corte Inglés branch took the extraordinary step of gathering its English-made men’s products into a special “English Men’s Shop” – again named in English. This boutique-like space intentionally exuded exclusivity, high quality, and England: dark wood columns carved into Big Ben’s likeness and special “English-style” staff uniforms distinguished it from surrounding departments. Indeed, because the department was built on a raised platform, it literally stood above its neighbors.66 Nor was England Spain’s sole foreign model. While Triunfo celebrated Pierre Cardin, late 1950s and early 1960s issues of Señor reviewed a Belgian menswear line, reported the results of a French survey gauging the year’s fashion preferences, and interviewed Hollywood star Cornel Wilde concerning his personal style.67 Indeed, in 1966 PK warned that the constant sartorial propaganda offered on both the small and silver screens, which included T-shirts and jeans in American war movies as well as James Bond’s personal accessories, was coming to Spain, was difficult to resist, and was often exploited by shopkeepers peddling these items.68 But, regardless of these items’ origins, their entry into Spain was unforced. Rather, Spanish observers following the latest developments abroad invited and imported these ideas into Spain, wanting their country to join a perceived international “club” of trend-setting nations. Thus, Señor’s coverage of the 1960 European Assembly of Male Fashion Industries (henceforth EAMFI) closed by hoping that Spain would have greater representation at next year’s meeting, and do so armed with “the information … necessary to rise to the level of the other countries”.69 At the root of this openness to foreign fashion was an anxiety over Spain’s place in wealthy, consumerist Western Europe. Throughout the 1960s, Spanish coverage of developments in menswear fretted over the state of the industry in Spain by comparison with counterparts abroad, or conversely boisterously boasted of Spain’s rising profile as a trendsetting nation. Of the former, Señor’s comments concerning future EAMFI meetings are just one example; in 1966, Men’s Modes warned Spanish tailors that their fondness for the cape was passé and risked stymying Spain’s achievement of European levels of elegance, while, in 1970, Triunfo described Spain’s fashion industry as “Europe, but less” – that is, in step with the latest European tastes, but lacking the infrastructure to provide a quality product.70 DON, by contrast, felt that Spanish fashion was already “fully integrated” into

Refashioning Spain  169

European fashion in 1963, and in 1962, Señor contributor Manuel Vigil y Vázquez bragged that “in the industrial, economic and social spheres, Spain’s fashion industrial firms ha[d] set their watches to the European hour”.71 Members of Spain’s fashion industry and consumer press responded by increasingly inserting themselves into fashion shows and trade conferences held by the larger international fashion community. In 1960, Valencia hosted its “First Men’s Fashion Show”, which showcased designs crafted by Spanish tailors, “sick of plagiarizing imported styles”.72 1961’s Salón Nacional de la Confección, the inaugural Spanish National Fashion Show, was another such event, and though ostensibly meant to celebrate Spanish designers’ successes, some observers similarly saw in it evidence of Spain’s past backwardness. One Señor correspondent, for instance, declared it the first event about which Spanish fashion could feel truly proud – damning praise at best.73 Nevertheless, the show was successful enough that it ran annually for at least a decade, raising the hopes of supporters who sought a place for Spain within international couture. Thus, in 1963 Señor’s Jaime Huguet boasted that with the Salón now one of Europe’s premier shows, Spanish fashion was no longer “isolated to this side of the Pyrenees, romantic limit of Chateaubriand’s Europe”.74 His hopes were not unfounded: Spanish barbers had competed in international hairstyling championships in 1961 and 1962; DON reported a warm reception for the Menhir line at 1963’s XII Festival of Men’s Fashion in Italy, and, in February 1962, Barcelona hosted the International Measurement Congress.75 Innocuous though these foreign products and influences may have seemed, Spanish journalists’ attention to foreign menswear also allowed in less orthodox ideas, which subsequently undermined the Franco regime’s control over social mores. The bikini, brought to 1960s Spain by tourists who the police soon stopped arresting for fear of harming the nation’s tourism, is a well-known example of such subversion, but there are others. In menswear, unisex and youth fashion – both imports – challenged the Franco regime’s gender hierarchy. Inspired by the experimentalism of 1960s youth culture abroad, some Spanish magazines pushed the limits of official Francoist morality more broadly. One year before DON’s 1967 emasculating photo spread, for instance, MIT censors nearly suspended the usually conservative women’s magazine Mujer for showing two bikini-clad models being body-painted as an example of foreign “hippie art”.76

Conclusions Fashion was not, of course, solely responsible for undermining Francoism’s hold on Spanish society. Menswear nevertheless represented one of several fissures that began to appear from the 1950s onward in the increasingly porous cultural borders that the early Franco regime had erected around a Spain that it had portrayed as an isolated moral beacon for the rest of Europe and the United States. A larger mid-century Spanish economic integration into Europe, which the regime itself pursued, further opened the country’s cultural borders. So too did what historian Sasha Pack has termed a “mass tourism as international relations” – the influx of

170  Alejandro J. Gomez-del-Moral

foreign tourists whose presence cultivated Spanish desires for sociopolitical convergence with democratic Europe. Both factors also hinged upon a larger continental economic upturn that fueled Spanish growth and the male consumption that Señor and DON promoted.77 Ultimately, however, Spanish men’s fashion and the attention that Spanish commercial professionals, journalists, and consumers paid to international fashion developments undermined Francoism’s sociopolitical project. In the 1940s and early 1950s, fashion had proven a valuable tool for the preservation of Francoist cultural hegemony, reproducing the regime’s patriarchal gender doctrine in the Spanish men’s consumer press. But as the 1960s dawned, these magazines began to fix their gaze abroad, particularly on London. As Spaniards encountered foreign fashions and the popular cultures that informed them, they fostered a desire to mimic and then to develop styles of their own, joining the club of prosperous trendsetting nations. Fed by contemporaneous changes such as a tourist boom that multiplied Spaniards’ opportunities for exposure to more permissive foreign ways, Spain’s new male fashion culture rendered its participants – particularly the young – more like their neighbors and increasingly different from their own past selves. In the early 1960s, the Ministry for Information and Tourism had popularized the tourist slogan, “Spain is Different”; by the late 1960s, however, Spain was not so very different after all. Presented with this growing cultural similarity to their neighbors – who they even dressed like – it was only a matter of time before Spaniards began to wonder why their political situations were poles apart.78 And fashion was among the first to herald this change. For, as Señor had observed as early as 1961: “fashion being a font of progress, nothing st[ood] in the way of [thei]r believing in the imminence of a great Federal Europe of which, now many centuries ago, first dreamed Charlemagne.”79

Notes   1 Vicente Verdú, “La Moda ya no es Frivolidad”, Cortty, year III, no. 22 (August, 1971). For gender repression, see Luis Alonso Tejada, La represión sexual en la España de Franco (Barcelona: Luis de Caralt, 1978); and Rafael Abella, La vida cotidiana bajo el régimen de Franco (Madrid: Ediciones Temas de Hoy, S.A., 1984).   2 Manuel Vázquez Montalban, “Emergentes” El País (Madrid, Spain) June 9, 1986. accessed December 22, 2008. http://www.elpais.com/articulo/ultima/Emergentes/ elpepiult/19860609elpepiult_3/Tes. For the Spanish boom, see Manuel-Jesús González, La Economía Política de Franquismo (1940–1970): Dirigismo, mercado y planificación (Madrid: Tecnos, 1979), 306, 309; Sasha D. Pack, Tourism and Dictatorship: Europe’s Peaceful Invasion of Franco’s Spain (London, New York: Palgrave-Macmillan, 2006), 86, 108; Stanley G. Payne, The Franco Regime, 1936–1975 (Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 1987), 478.   3 Victoria de Grazia, Irresistible Empire:America’s Advance through 20th-Century Europe (Cambridge, MA: Belknap, 2006), Ch. 9; Richard Kuisel, Seducing the French: The Dilemma of Americanization (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1993).  4 Pack, Tourism and Dictatorship; Aurora Morcillo, True Catholic Womanhood: Gender Ideology in Franco’s Spain (Dekalb, IL: Northern Illinois University Press, 2000); José Castillo Castillo, Sociedad de Consumo a la Española (Madrid: EUDEMA, 1987); Luis Enrique Alonso

Refashioning Spain  171

and Fernando Conde, Historia del consumo en España: una aproximación a sus orígenes y primer desarrollo (Madrid: Debate, 1994), 80, 86–87, 147–151; Justin Crumbaugh, Destination Dictatorship: The Spectacle of Spain’s Tourist Boom and the Reinvention of Difference (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 2009).  5 Alejandro J. Gomez-del-Moral, “Buying into Change: Consumer Culture and the Department Store in the Transformation(s) of Spain, 1939–1982” (Ph.D. diss., Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey, 2014), Ch. 2   6 See contributions in Per Lundin and Thomas Kaiserfeld, eds, The Making of European Consumption: Facing the American Challenge (London, New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015).   7 For the Falange, see, Stanley G. Payne, Fascism in Spain, 1923–1977 (Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 2000).  8 The 1938 law also required all journalists and publications active in Spain to register with the government, which became the press’s gatekeeper. See Manuel Fernández Areal, La Libertad de Prensa en España, 1938–71 (Madrid: Cuadernos para el Diálogo S.A., 1968), 35–41.  9 For National-Catholicism, see Morcillo, True Catholic Womanhood, 4, 28; and William Callahan, The Catholic Church in Spain, 1875–1998 (Washington, D.C.: The Catholic University of America Press, 2012), Chs. 3–5. 10 Abella, 213–214. 11 In fact, the regime stripped married women of their right to freely secure work in 1938. See Alonso Tejada, 31. 12 Carmen Martín Gaite, Courtship Customs in Postwar Spain (Usos amorosos de la postguerra española), trans. Margaret E.W. Jones (Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University Press, 2004), 37–41, 44, 46; Morcillo, Ch. 1, especially 36–39, 40–41; Abella, 160–161; Alonso Tejada, 32–34. 13 Education policy reinforced this hierarchy, preparing boys and girls for their respective public and domestic duties, while National-Catholic authorities declared gender inequality integral to family stability. See Morcillo, 33, 69, 40, 44, 42; Abella, 216; Pilar Folguera Crespo, “El Franquismo. El Retorno a la Esfera Privada (1939–1975)”, in Historia de las Mujeres en España, ed. Elisa Garrido González (Madrid: Editorial Síntesis, S.A., 1997), 529, 531. 14 Yet, underscoring the Francoist patriarchal double standard, the regime also tolerated prostitution into the mid-1950s, deeming it a necessary release for male virility. Abella, 106, 111; Alonso Tejada. 15 Morcillo, 48–49, 55–56, 65. 16 Serafí del Arco, “El coche que puso a España sobre ruedas,” El País, 3 June, 2007. El País Digital, accessed December 22, 2008, www.elpais.com/articulo/economia/coche/puso/ Espana/ruedas/elpepueco/20070603elpepieco_2/Tes. 17 Morcillo, 65. 18 “Para Usted, Caballero,” Revista Jorba, no. 2 (Sept. 1953); “¿Que las mujeres diseñen los trajes masculinos? ¡No! ¡No!”, Señor, no. 16 (Fall 1959). 19 For Mujer, see Mujer, no. 1 year I (June 1937); for Señor, see Segismundo de Anta, “[Untitled Introductory Editorial Article],” Señor: La Revista del Hombre, no. 1 year I (Nov. 1955). For an overview of the Spanish consumer press in the 1940s and 1950s, see Francisco García Ruescas, Historia de la Publicidad (Madrid: Editora Nacional, 1971); and, María del Carmen Muñoz Ruiz, “Mujer Mítica, Mujeres Reales: Las Revistas Femeninas en España, 1955–1970” (Ph.D. diss., Universidad Complutentse de Madrid, 2002). 20 For profiles of elegant elites, see, for instance, Marquesa de Quintanar, “La Elegancia y la Sencillez de la Casa de Alba,” Señor, no. 1 year I (Nov. 1955). 21 Juan Gyenes, “S.E. El Jefe de Estado Generalísimo Franco,” Señor: La Revista del Hombre, no. 1, year I (Nov. 1955), 3. For Santiago de Anta, see “Don Ramón Serrano Súñer, caballero del ideal que redime a España, estudia los problemas de trabajo y de economía de las provincias catalanas,” La Vanguardia Española, Jun. 16, 1939; for Segismundo de Anta

172  Alejandro J. Gomez-del-Moral

22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33

34 35 36 37 38 39 40

41 42 43 44 45

and the Salón de la Moda, see Manuel del Arco, “Mano a Mano – Segismundo de Anta,” La Vanguardia Española, Feb. 23, 1939, and “Inauguración del Primer Salón de la Moda Española,” La Vanguardia Española, Mar. 6, 1941. Segismundo de Anta, “[Untitled Introductory Editorial Article],” Señor: La Revista del Hombre, no. 1 year I (Nov. 1955). See, for instance, José Sanchez Moreno Distinción y Etiqueta Moderna, 2nd Ed. (Barcelona: Sociedad General Española de Librería, 1944), 6; and, Celia López Sainz, La Cortesía en la Vida Moderna, 3rd Ed. (Madrid: Editex, 1965), 33–34. María Pilar de Molina, “Confidencia,” Señor, no. 10 (Spring 1958). El Hombre y Su Circunstancia”, Don, no. 1 (Spring–Summer 1963); “Club Don”, Don, no. 4 (Spring–Summer 1964). F., “Una Gran Revista Española, ‘Don’ ”, Hoja del Lunes, reprinted in “Cocktail en la Terraza Martini”, Don, no. 2 (Fall–Winter 1963). Christopher Breward, The Hidden Consumer: Masculinities, Fashion and City Life, 1860– 1914 (Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press, 1999), 42. “El Hombre y Su Circunstancia”, Don, no. 1 (Spring–Summer 1963). “Distinction” was also the title of a Barcelona-based society and fashion magazine that circulated during the 1950s and 1960s. See, for example, Distinción: Revista Gráfica Española, no. 54, year XIV (June 1967). Advertisement for El Hombre en Sociedad”, La Vanguardia Española, 1 January 1961, 17; Marcel Rochas – Paris, “Femme”, La Vanguardia Española, 1 January 1961, 17. “Vuelve el Dandy”, Triunfo, no. 213, year XIV (July 1966), 30. Mary Vincent, “Camisas Nuevas: Style and Uniformity in the Falange Española 1933– 1943,” in Dress, Gender, Citizenship: Fashioning the Body Politic, ed.Wendy Parkins (Oxford, New York, N.Y.: Berg, 2002), 167–188. F., “Cocktail en la Terraza Martini”; “Los Doce Elegantes Españoles”. Another instance of such support may be had in etiquette manualist José Sánchez Moreno’s Distinción y Etiqueta Moderna, a self-described “guidebook for the acquisition of social distinction” lauded by several major right-leaning Spanish newspapers. See José Sanchez Moreno Distinción y Etiqueta Moderna, 2nd Ed. (Barcelona: Sociedad General Española de Librería, 1944), 6. El ideal de los caballeros: vestir bien y sin llamar la atención” Señor, no. 22 (Spring 1961); F., “Cocktail en la Terraza Martini”. María Luz Morales, “Lo que ellas piensan de nosotros”, Don, no. 2 (Fall-Winter 1963); Loewe, “Loewe”, Don, no. 3, (Spring–Summer 1964). Ignacio Agustí, “Los trajes que llevamos”, Triunfo, year XVIII, no. 42 (Mar. 1963), 25. Jennifer Paff Ogle and Mary Lynn Damhorst, “Dress for Success in the Popular Press”, in Appearance and Power, eds, Kim K.P. Johnson and Sharron J. Lennon (Oxford: Berg, 1999), 80–81; Lurie, The Language of Clothes, 220–221, 226–228. “¿Que las mujeres diseñen los trajes masculinos? ¡No! ¡No!”, Señor, no. 16 (Fall, 1959); “Señora, deje que su marido vista a su gusto”, Señor, no. 19 (Summer, 1960). Adelaida, “Linea ‘Menhir’ para el Hombre de 1963”, Triunfo, no. 39, year XVIII (Mar., 1963), 53. “La Moda Juvenil Representa un Paso hacia Adelante”, Señor: La Revista del Hombre, no. 15 (Summer 1959); I.W.S., “Nuevas ideas de elegancia masculina”; Señor Correspondent to Düsseldorf IWS, “La Nueva Moda Masculina es Juvenil sin Exageración”, Señor: La Revista del Hombre, no. 13 (Winter 1958). Suzanne, “1963: El Dandy y El Mujik”, Triunfo, no. 18, year XVII (Oct. 1962), 70. Los(?)nte, “Moda Joven” Men’s Modes, no. 110, year XXVII, (1967), 7. “Terlenka YOUNG: Una Nueva Moda a Ritmo Joven”, PK Press, no. 6 (Feb. 1967). “Estatuto y Apogeo del Azul Bruma y los complementarios DON”, Don, no. 7 (1967). “La rebeldía del hombre de hoy por un futuro imPKble”, Telva, no. 123, (Nov. 1968). For student protests, see for instance Alberto Carrillo-Linares, Subversivos y maldtiso en la Universidad de Sevilla (1965–1977) (Seville: Fundación Centro de Estudios Anaduces, 2008).

Refashioning Spain  173

46 Jennifer Park, “Unisex Clothing,” in Encyclopedia of Clothing and Fashion, Valerie Steele, ed.,Vol. 3 (Detroit: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 2005), 382–384. 47 Ibid., Bernadine Morris “Halston Tips His Hat To Unisex Fashions,” The NewYork Times, Dec. 4, 1968, in ProQuest Database, accessed December 23, 2008, www.proquest.com; Marylin Bender, “He Calls It ‘The Couple Look’,” The New York Times, Nov. 9, 1968, in ProQuest Database, accessed December 23, 2008, www.proquest.com; Angela ­Taylor, “Some Fashions Are for Boys and Girls, While Others Are Strictly for the Ladies,” The New York Times, Aug. 15, 1968, in ProQuest Database, accessed December 23, 2008, www.proquest.com. 48 “Cuando la mujer se viste de hombre” Triunfo, no. 21, year XVII (Oct. 1962), 70. 49 “Moda Masculina,” PK Press, no. 6 (Feb. 1967); See also “Camisas y Blusas, PrimaveraVerano 1967,” PK Press, no. 2 (Sept. 1966);“Moda: Seguiran los cuadros y rayas “Madras,” PK Press, no. 2 (Sept. 1966). For Cortty, see for instance, “Coyuntura Comercial del Cuarto Trimestre del 69,” Cortty, no. 4, year II (Feb. 1970), 2, and “La Moda ya no es Frivolidad”. For Don, see John Stephen, “Carnaby Street,” Don, no. 7 (1967). See also César Santos Fontenla, “Carnaby Street,” Triunfo, no. 231, year XXI (Nov. 1966), 37, 40. 50 See, for example,“Coyuntura Comercial del Cuarto Trimestre del 69”, Cortty, year II, no. 4 (Feb. 1970), 2. 51 “Moda Masculina”, PK Press, no. 6 (Feb. 1967). See also “Camisas y Blusas, PrimaveraVerano 1967”, PK Press, no. 2 (Sept. 1966), and “Moda: Seguiran los cuadros y rayas “Madras”, PK Press, no. 2 (Sept. 1966). 52 Verdú, “La Moda ya no es Frivolidad” 53 Ibid. 54 See “Don: ¿Es para usted? ¿Para él? Para ellos? Para mi? Es para quien? El azul bruma y complementarios Don?” Don, no. 7 (1967). 55 Verdú, “La Moda ya no es Frivolidad”; “Tienda Juvenil: Nueva dependencia,” Boletín de Galerías Preciados, no. 191, year XX (Apr. 1969), 11; “Nueva Boutique para Jóvenes”,” Noti-Sears, no. 7, year I (Mar. 1972). 56 “¿Quién es destinatario de la moda unisex?” PK Press, no. 11 (Mar. 1971), 3. 57 José Hua[?]te, “¿Tiene Usted Un Hippy En Su Casa?” PK Press, no. 8 (Sept. 1969). 58 “La Maxi-Midi o el ‘Ocultismo’,” Cortty, no. 11, year II (Sept. 1970), 9. Fred Davis, Fashion, Culture, and Identity (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1992), 35–37, 41–50. 59 “La Maxi-Midi o el ‘Ocultismo’,” Cortty, year II, no. 11 (Sept. 1970): 9; “La dificil Psicologia Femenina”, Cortty, year III, no. 15 (Jan. 1971). 60 “La “Maxi-Midi” o el “Ocultismo”,” Cortty, no. 11, year II (Sept. 1970), 9; “La Propietaria de una Boutique”, Cortty, year II, no. 9 (July 1970), 3. 61 “Nueva linea masculina: La moda ‘Trapecio’ ”, Señor, no. 12 (Fall 1958). 62 “ “Londres Impone La Moda Masculina”, Señor, no. 21 (Winter 1960). 63 Morales, “Lo que piensan ellas de nosotros”, and Adriana, “El Punto Flaco de los Caballeros”, Ama: La Revista de las Amas de Casa Españolas (henceforth Ama), no. 1 (Jan., 1960), 41. 64 “Ciudades Europeas y su Moda”, PK Press, no. 11 (Mar., 1971), 2; “Carnaby Street”, Don, no. 7 (1967). 65 “Terlenka YOUNG: Una Nueva Moda a Ritmo Joven”; “Ciudades Europeas y su Moda”. 66 “Tienda inglesa en la 3a Planta: “English Men’s Shop”, en Bilbao”, Cortty, no. 3, year II (Jan. 1970), 4. 67 Suzanne, “1963: El Dandy y El Mujik”; Anglo-Spanish Press Bureau, “La Linea ‘Y’ Belga”, Señor, no. 10 (Spring 1958); “¿Como Vestiran los Franceses en 1962?”, Señor, no 27 (Summer, 1962); Preferencias de un gran actor internacional en materia de indumentaria: Cornel Wilde”, Señor, no. 10 (Spring 1958); 68 H.C. “Las modas que ha popularizado el cine”, PK Press, no. 2 (Sept. 1966). 69 “Asamblea General de la Asociacion Euroepa de las Industrias del Vestir”, Señor, no. 20 (Oct. 1960).

174  Alejandro J. Gomez-del-Moral

70 Los(?)nte, “La Moda”, Men’s Modes, no. 109, year XXVI (1966), 7; José Eduardo Mira, “El sistema de la moda en España”, Triunfo, no. 440, year XXV (Nov. 1970), 26. 71 “La Facilidad del Bien Vestir”, Don, no. 2 (Fall–Winter 1963); “Creaciones de CONFECCIONES FARGAS, S.A. empresa que participó en el II SALON NACIONAL DE LA CONFECCION”, Señor, no. 27 (Summer 1962). The article later links the stylishness of Spanish clothing manufacturer Confecciones Fargas to Spain’s rising prosperity, which, he claims, further enhanced the prestige of Spain’s tailors – casting them, perhaps, as Falangist ‘man-warriors’. 72 “1er Gran Desfile de la Moda Masculina.VALENCIA”, Señor, no. 19 (Summer 1960). 73 “I Salón Nacional de la Confección ‘Avance de la Moda Masculina’ ”, Señor, no. 26 (Spring 1962). Others were instead reminded of the ongoing fight to gain international legitimacy as a fashion nation, or welcomed the use of a historic venue as “European” and a departure from a hidebound Spanish fetishization of such sites. See “Creaciones de Confecciones Albert, S.A., Empresa que ha participado en el I Salon Nacional de la Confeccion con su marca Bailet’s”, Señor, no. 23 (Summer 1961). 74 “Salon Nacional de la Confeccion, Consagracion de la Maxifalda”, Cortty, no. 5, year II (Mar. 1970), 10; Jaime Huguet, “El III Salon Nacional de la Confeccion. Reflejo de Industria Naciente”, Señor, no. 31 (Summer 1963). 75 “La Moda 1961 en el Peinado Masculino”, Señor, no. 22 (Spring 1961); “Untitled Hairstyling Photographic Spread”, Señor, no. 25 (Spring 1962); “XII festival de la moda masculina en San Remo”, Don, no. 1 (Spring–Summer 1963); “III Congreso de la Medida Industrial”, Señor, no. 26 (Spring 1962). 76 For the bikini, see Alonso Tejada, 141–142. For Mujer, see “Expediente de Sanción, Mujer, no. 368”, AGA-MIT 71/12270/39. 77 Julio Crespo MacLennan, Spain and the Process of European Integration, 1957–1985 (Hampshire, UK and New York, N.Y.: Palgrave, 2000); Pack, Tourism and Dictatorship, 5; Pablo Martín Aceña and Elena Martínez Ruiz, “The Golden Age of Spanish Capitalism: Economic Growth without Political Freedom,” in Townson, Spain Transformed, 30–46. 78 Walter Bernecker, “The Change in Mentalities during the Late Franco Regime,” in Townson, Spain Transformed, 75–76. 79 “La Camisa, Prenda Esencial del Hombre Civilizado”, Señor, no. 22 (Spring 1961).

Selected bibliography Abella, Rafael. La vida cotidiana bajo el régimen de Franco. Madrid: Ediciones Temas de Hoy, S.A., 1984. Alonso, Luis Enrique and Conde, Fernando. Historia del consumo en España: una aproximación a sus orígenes y primer desarrollo. Madrid: Debate, 1994. Alonso Tejada, Luis. La represión sexual en la España de Franco. Barcelona: Luis de Caralt, 1978. Callahan,William. The Catholic Church in Spain, 1875–1998.Washington, D.C.:The Catholic University of America Press, 2012. Crumbaugh, Justin. Destination Dictatorship: The Spectacle of Spain’s Tourist Boom and the Reinvention of Difference. Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 2009. De Grazia, Victoria. Irresistible Empire: America’s Advance through 20th-Century Europe. Cambridge, MA: Belknap, 2006. Folguera Crespo, Pilar. “El Franquismo. El Retorno a la Esfera Privada (1939–1975),” in Historia de las Mujeres en España, edited by Elisa Garrido González, 527–548. Madrid: Editorial Síntesis, S.A., 1997. Gomez-del-Moral, Alejandro J. “Buying into Change: Consumer Culture and the Department Store in the Transformation(s) of Spain, 1939–1982.” Ph.D. diss., Rutgers,The State University of New Jersey, 2014.

Refashioning Spain  175

Lundin, Per and Kaiserfeld, Thomas, eds, The Making of European Consumption: Facing the American Challenge. London, New York, N.Y.: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015. Martín Gaite, Carmen. Courtship Customs in Postwar Spain (Usos amorosos de la postguerra española), translated by Margaret E. W. Jones. Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University Press, 2004. Morcillo, Aurora. True Catholic Womanhood: Gender Ideology in Franco’s Spain. Dekalb, IL: Northern Illinois University Press, 2000. Pack, Sasha D. Tourism and Dictatorship: Europe’s Peaceful Invasion of Franco’s Spain. London, New York, N.Y.: Palgrave-Macmillan, 2006. Payne, Stanley G. Fascism in Spain, 1923–1977. Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 2000. ———. The Franco Regime, 1936–1975. Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 1987. Townson, Nigel, ed., Spain Transformed: The Late Franco Dictatorship, 1959–75. London, New York, NY: Palgrave-Macmillan, 2007.

9 HONG KONG AT THE MOVIES Cold war masculinity, action melodrama and sixties martial arts films Jing Jing Chang

Introduction Today, along with Japanese anime and Bollywood musicals, the Hong Kong martialarts film (including swordplay or wuxia and Kung Fu films) is one of the most beloved cinematic genres among audiences worldwide.1 More recently, martial-arts fighting styles, iconography, and narrative conventions have infiltrated such international multimedia platforms as videogames and music videos, attracting consumers and fans beyond movie theatres. This chapter examines the historical moment that gave rise to the global brand of the 1960s Hong Kong martial-arts film. While the genre has a history tracing all the way back to the silent era of Chinese cinema, Bruce Lee remains its most famous star. Indeed, one of the iconic images in Hong Kong film history is the final freeze frame of Lee in Fist of Fury (Lo Wei, 1972). Suspended in mid-air and poised to take on his aggressors, this image is full of contradictions, showing Lee as invincible in what is (as audiences remember well) the final moment before his demise. Some five years earlier, a scene in One-Armed Swordsman (1967) had already captured a similar tension between raw masculine prowess and emasculation. Directed by Chang Cheh, produced by the Shaw Brothers film company, and shot with a handheld camera, it shows the moment when Kang, the film’s hero, has his right arm severed by the daughter of his teacher, Master Qi. Chosen for its unique status as one of the best examples of the genre, this chapter uses OneArmed Swordsman as a case study to explore how Hong Kong martial-arts cinema (and in particular the Shaw Brothers’ new-style wuxia film), can provide crucial insights into the emergence of Hong Kong’s global identity during the 1960s. In Hong Kong society, the era known as the “long sixties” overlapped with the Cold War period in Asia (early 1950s to early 1970s). This extended decade saw sweeping and dramatic changes in political and cultural life, changes that were both represented in and promoted through cinema. Martial-arts films contributed to the

Hong Kong at the movies  177

construction of Hong Kong’s global image during a complex historical moment: it was nourished both by international film genres, and by a localized and violent cinephile identity that reflected the complicated nexus between Cold War politics, British governance and competing discourses on Chinese nationalism. Due to its status as a British colony (Hong Kong was officially under British rule from 1842 to 1997), postwar Hong Kong became a site par excellence for ideological struggles between competing pro-democratic and pro-communist camps, represented respectively by Nationalist (Kuomintang or KMT) and Chinese Communist Party (CCP) supporters. Facing these diametrically opposed political forces in the aftermath of World War II, Great Britain sought to retain its legitimacy as the colonial ruler of Hong Kong by controlling overt propaganda from both right and left. Toward the late 1960s, labor-related and anti-colonial riots erupted that challenged colonial governance and transformed the relationship between Hong Kong’s citizen-subjects and their state.2 As Hong Kong entered the global manufacturing economy during the long sixties, it also sought to define and clarify its local and particular identity. This quest was mirrored in the cinematic field: indeed, during these same years (and despite the increasing internationalization of film culture and exchange), Hong Kong cinema sought a new specificity in its filmmaking. Throughout the Hong Kong film industry’s “golden age” (early 1950s to late 1960s) commercialization and politicization kept pace. During the Cold War period, film rose in importance as an ideological weapon poised to influence the hearts and minds of audiences at home and abroad. On one hand, the colonial government manipulated local film culture through censorship and the production of propaganda. On the other, both right- and left-leaning film companies vied for the loyalty of Hong Kong and Chinese diasporic fans. Competition within the multilingual, multi-genre film industry, whose livelihood depended as much on local as on global audiences, was cutthroat.The Shaw Brothers’ innovative martial-arts films came to epitomize these Cold War struggles. One-Armed Swordsman is the culmination of a trend established by the Shaw Brothers team at Movietown when they launched their new-style martial-arts film genre in the mid-1960s. On July 26 1967, One-Armed Swordsman was released on Hong Kong screens.3 A box office success, it tells the story of a young swordplay student, named Kang, who rises to become one of the best swordplay practitioners in jianghu, the imaginary world of swordsmen, vanquishing all opponents with only his left arm. The film’s significance was derived from myriad factors, both political and cultural: its timely release amid the mid-1960s disturbances in Hong Kong; its participation in the global dialogue of international action genre films; its reinvention of the local genre of wuxia; and its adoption of characteristics from melodrama (wenyipian) or family melodrama (jiating lunlipian).4 As we shall see, by recuperating more traditional forms of melodrama, One-Armed Swordsman was able to construct a global hyper-masculine martial-arts genre that remained deeply rooted in Confucian values, especially those of righteousness, filial piety, and chastity as they relate to heroism, family, and home. One-Armed Swordsman and films like it thus provided continuity for Chinese audiences at home and abroad by codifying the familial

178  Jing Jing Chang

values so characteristic of postwar Hong Kong melodrama films, while simultaneously offering a new and seductive fantasy of masculine power. In so doing, Hong Kong martial-arts cinema of the 1960s projected a uniquely gendered national image, one that fused patriarchal Confucian moral principles with modern male conceptions of speed, violence, and action. Arranged in four sections, this chapter presents the postwar emergence of Hong Kong film’s masculine identity amid the Cold War politics of decolonization and the dissolution of state-defined Chinese nationalism. The first section situates the sixties Hong Kong experience within the context of the Cold War, a phenomenon that led the former colony to claim an identity separate from that defined by party politics and beyond the confines of a finite geographic locale. The second section focuses on the global business strategies of the Shaw Brothers and explains how the company maneuvered both commercial and political terrains in order to carve out its own brand of powerful “Chineseness” in film. The third section draws on the theory of American film genre studies, arguing that the new-style Mandarin wuxia film expressed a distinctly Hong Kong form of masculinity through interaction with international genres such as Britain’s James Bond films. The final section demonstrates how One-Armed Swordsman portrays heroism as a twin narrative of revenge and reconciliation, pitting action and desire against aspirations for family and home. I argue that this hybridization of action and melodrama in 1960s martial-arts film illustrates the emergence of a unique type of Hong Kong masculinity that was at once global and local, conservative and radical. Indeed, in and through such films as One-Armed Swordsman, Hong Kong’s dramatically gendered identity emerged in the 1960s via a process of negotiation between global Cold War and colonial politics, diasporic Chinese nationalistic sentiments and localized cultural forces.

The Cold War and Hong Kong’s film culture in the “long sixties” My placement of 1960s British Hong Kong within the period of the Cold War in Asia is not new. The Hong Kong “long sixties” were characterized by an increasingly globalized movement of politics, ideas, talent, capital, and imagery that began with the end of the Korean War in 1953 and lasted through the end of the Cold War period in Asia in 1972 (when U.S. President Richard Nixon made his historic visit to the People’s Republic of China).5 The Hong Kong long sixties were marked by processes of political and cultural change predicated on British Hong Kong’s changing place in the postwar world. Thus, although the Cold War was to a certain extent a bipolar war between East and West, it also altered the colonial state-society relation in Hong Kong. Following World War II, the British Empire gradually lost its global prestige. While Great Britain aligned itself with the U.S. in fighting the spread of communism, it maintained its colonial rule in Hong Kong at a time when anti-colonial struggles were fomenting around the world. In order to legitimize its rule in Hong

Hong Kong at the movies  179

Kong, the British colonial government had to play a balancing act between the propaganda campaigns of American Cold War proponents, pro-Taiwan rightist, proMainland China leftist, pro-democratic and pro-communist camps, all of whom found colonial Hong Kong an ideal site on which to wage their psychological warfare. Consequently, the colonial government in Hong Kong exercised a regulatory regime of censorship over the production and dissemination of information. All films, either imported or locally produced, had to pass the Hong Kong censorship board before they could be publicly screened. Any film that presented the colonial regime in a bad light, or overtly demonized the KMT, was banned. At the same time, British Hong Kong also funded propaganda films that vaunted its prestige and paternalistic benevolence to audiences in and beyond the colony. Yet despite the government’s attempts to maintain a tight grip on media and information, Hong Kong existed in a “precarious balance,” where colonial rule was in constant danger of collapsing.6 Within the realm of film, images of British Hong Kong’s laissezfaire and paternalistic benevolence vied for citizen-subjects’ loyalty with competing discourses about Chinese nationalism produced by both nanlai cultural elites from Mainland China and by Hong Kong filmmakers. After the Communist takeover of China in 1949, émigrés from the mainland took refuge in colonial Hong Kong, among them entrepreneurs, businesspeople and cultural workers from Shanghai, as well as laborers from Guangdong province. During the Chinese civil war from 1947 to 1949, more than two hundred Shanghai enterprises—including film production companies—moved their headquarters (and several billion Hong Kong dollars’ worth of economic value) to the colony.7 Due to émigré capital, business know-how, filmmaking experience, creative ideas, and available labor, Hong Kong’s film industry experienced a renaissance. By the 1950s and 1960s it became the new production center for Chinese-language cinema. Both right- and left-leaning filmmakers who had previously viewed the British colony as a “cultural desert” came to Hong Kong at that time determined to transform its film culture.8 These nanlai cultural elites from the mainland brought competing discourses of primarily party-dominated rhetoric reflecting Chinese nationalism and aesthetics. While Occupied China was obsessed with the nation’s survival during a time of crisis, left- and right-wing Chinese filmmakers who fled to Hong Kong during the Cold War sought to perpetuate their own visions of national identity beyond the geopolitical boundaries of what was now Communist China.9 During the 1950s and early 1960s, leftist film companies such as Xinlian and Zhonglian produced family melodramas that centered on Confucian ethics and morality designed primarily for Hong Kong working-class audiences. Rightleaning companies such as MP&GI and the Shaw Brothers catered to more affluent Westernized audiences with Mandarin language romances and musicals, promoting a lifestyle of urban-industrial modernity. Provided they did not criticize the colonial regime or overtly propagandize, all Hong Kong film companies were permitted to produce cinematic entertainment across multiple genres and languages at a time when melodramas, fantastical wuxia (swordplay) films and

180  Jing Jing Chang

Chinese-dialect films were banned on the mainland. Nonetheless, the Hong Kong film industry still had to contend with a distribution market that was dictated by the bifurcated Cold War milieu, forcing its workers to become “reluctant Cold War players.”10 With the Mainland Chinese market closed off to foreign films, companies had to seek new outlets in Taiwan, Southeast Asia and North America in order for their products and messages to reach the global Chinese diaspora. For Hong Kong film companies, that meant aligning themselves with either the leftist South China Film Industry Workers Union (founded in 1949), or the proright Hong Kong-Kowloon Free Cinema Association (founded in 1952 by the Taiwanese Nationalists). The Shaw Brothers belonged to the Hong Kong Kowloon Association and their contracted actors were called “free celebrities” (ziyou yingren). Their films could be distributed to “Free World” markets such as Taiwan, the U.S., Vietnam, Cambodia, and the Philippines, while those produced by procommunist companies could not.11 Following the Korean War, the Cold War struggle intensified in Asia. As a result, the border between China and Hong Kong was closed, thus cutting the colony off from its biggest trading partner. During the 1960s, Hong Kong rapidly adapted by transforming its economy from entrepôt trade-based to one focused on manufacturing and industry. The same period also saw a profound change in demography. According to the 1961 census, close to half of Hong Kong’s approximately 3 million people were under the age of 15; for the first time, the majority of these young people had been born and raised in the colony.12 Many, however, were disenfranchised and those with jobs worked up to 10 hours a day in the colony’s booming factories. The rising discontent of Hong Kong’s working classes resulted in the 1967 labor disturbances and protests, which gradually took on an anti-colonial tone. The 1967 riots resulted in a decreasing influence of the underground communist party along with a shift in relations between British Hong Kong and its citizen-subjects.13 The colonial government saw these riots as a confrontation and communication problem and tried to regain the trust of Hong Kong society through labor reform and government-sponsored community events. Some scholars have argued that it was during this juncture that Hong Kong society began to form an identity apart from that of either Mainland China or the British colonial government. Hong Kong youth became politically active, calling for greater political representation; at the same time, some segments of Hong Kong society perceived Mainland China as being the “cultural other.”14 Scholars have described the identity politics of Hong Kong residents as shifting from a refugee mentality (1950s) to a market mentality (1960s). Those with a refugee mentality yearned for the Chinese homeland, treating Hong Kong as a place of sojourn. However, as Hong Kong became more industrialized, a segment of its population developed a local sense of belonging, seeing the colony’s burgeoning market as a means of bettering their own family economies.15 This “market identity” emerged from Hong Kong’s new global status as a manufacturing power, a worldwide source of “Made in Hong Kong” textiles, plastics, and electronics.16 Hong Kong’s cinephile identity also emerged at this time, as Hong Kong audiences became avid consumers of Western and international

Hong Kong at the movies  181

cultural products. It is within this complex Cold War context that we must analyze the contribution of One-Armed Swordsman to Hong Kong’s long 1960s.

The Shaw Brothers’ entertainment emporium in local, national, and global contexts The formation of a postwar Hong Kong identity and the globalization of a Hong Kong brand of cinema were closely linked in multiple ways. Hong Kong film companies, including that formed by the Shaw Brothers, had to navigate these challenging contexts in order to maintain their market advantage during the long 1960s. Sai-Shing Yung reminds us that since the 1930s the Shaw Brothers’ entertainment empire was known for “going global” and “selling local.”17 In order to vanquish their competitors within the Hong Kong film industry, the Shaw Brothers—as a business enterprise and a purveyor of a pro-KMT Chinese nationalism that symbolized “China Forever” to the diaspora—deployed marketing strategies on a global scale that were equally efficacious at penetrating the varied local demographics extant in cosmopolitan Hong Kong.18 They aimed to be “cross-regional (Shanghai, Hong Kong, Singapore, Malaya), cross-genre (opera, cinema, popular song), cross-language (Cantonese, Hokkien,Teochew, Mandarin), and multiethnic (Chinese, Malay, Indian).”19 Hailing from Ningbo, China, the Shaw family dominated the entertainment business in Shanghai, Hong Kong and Southeast Asia for 80 years.20 From the 1930s, the Shaw Brothers had already found pan-Asian success by producing the first Cantonese film, The Platinum Dragon (1933), under the company Tianyi in Shanghai. In 1938, the Tianyi company was renamed Nanyang and relocated to Hong Kong. By the mid-1950s, in addition to operating film production companies, the Shaw enterprise also ran more than one hundred movie theaters and ten amusement parks in Singapore, Malaysia, Vietnam, Thailand, and Java. In March 1958, the sixth brother, Run Run Shaw, established Shaw Brothers (HK) Ltd. in Hong Kong. He confirmed his economic domination in Hong Kong by purchasing 46 acres of Crown land at Clearwater Bay. By the end of 1960, the Shaw Brothers boasted ten soundproof film studios, each covering 400 square meters or more. These gigantic facilities, the best of their kind in the Far East, allowed the Shaw Brothers to shoot two or three films at the same time.21 It is no wonder that the colony became the preeminent production base where Hong Kong cinema took form. By the time One-Armed Swordsman was produced in 1967, the Shaw Brothers’ vertically integrated empire was producing films following the U.S. Fordist-Taylorist industrial model, controlling their own distribution and exhibition circuits to ensure the financial success of their products.22 The Shaw Brothers relied on multiple concurrent strategies to attract both local and diasporic audience members: first, they collaborated with other production companies; second, they adopted leading-edge technology; and third, they developed a new cinematic language for constructing Chinese nationalism. Throughout the late 1950s and 1960s, the Shaw Brothers collaborated with other film enterprises

182  Jing Jing Chang

like the Korean Shin Company, as well as with producers from Britain and West Germany.23 They also sent their employees to Japan to study advanced cinema techniques. In her study of cross-cultural and inter-industrial relations between Hong Kong and Japan, Kinnia Yau traced the extensive connections between the Shaw Brothers and Japanese film studios.24 According to Yau, the mid-1950s through early 1970s was the golden age of Hong Kong–Japan cinematic interactions.25 The Shaw Brothers recruited many directors and cinematographers from established Japanese studios, including Shochiku and Toho, as well as sending technicians to Japanese television and film companies to learn about décor and lighting.26 Talented filmmakers were also recruited from Taiwan and Korea, while technology was brought in from Britain and the United States.27 The Shaw Brothers had already developed Shawscope and were shooting in Eastmancolor in the early 1960s at a time when most color film was still being produced during postproduction in the West. By 1964, they had a six-channel mixer and optical recorder from Westrex USA,28 and by summer 1965 had added a four-story building to house color film processing equipment.29 From their beginnings in Hong Kong, the Shaw Brothers released both Cantonese and Mandarin films. By the mid-1960s, however, the company decided to focus on producing Mandarin language films.30 According to Poshek Fu, the Shaw Brothers chose Mandarin as an official and business language to promote the company’s “China Forever” sentiment.31 However, the Shaw Brothers’ approach was only one version of cultural Chinese nationalism constructed amid local and Cold War politics to meet the economic imperatives of an entertainment business vying for exhibition markets. The Nationalist government of the Republic of China had decreed Mandarin as its official language following the 1911 revolution. After being ousted by Chairman Mao in 1949, the Nationalists took refuge in Taiwan, where Chiang Kai-shek also imposed Mandarin as the official language.The promotion of Mandarin to China’s official language inevitably meant that other spoken Chinese languages were relegated to the status of “dialects.” In Hong Kong, the impact of this linguistic politics was dire, for the majority of the territory’s population had migrated from South China where Cantonese was the mother tongue. As numerous fan letters submitted to the left-leaning Zhonglian’s magazine Union Pictorial attest, during the 1950s and 1960s, audiences in the Chinese diaspora felt a sense of nostalgic return to their Chinese homeland through watching a wide range of films, including those in other Chinese languages like Chaozhou and Cantonese. Therefore, the Shaw Brothers’ use of Mandarin imposed a form of “cultural nationalism” that was subtly both pro-Nationalist and pro-Taiwan.32 This linguistic choice was a conscious strategy that promoted a homogeneous diasporic public on one hand, while on the other, undermining the popularity of Cantonese cinema by leftist film companies such as Zhonglian and Xinlian among diasporic audiences in Southeast Asia. Global networks were also established by the Shaw Brothers’ film fan magazine Southern Screen, which created a spectator mindset in and beyond Hong Kong that was not only modern and global, but also patriotic. Besides promoting the

Hong Kong at the movies  183

company’s international collaborations, Southern Screen (which ran from 1957 to 1984) also subtly sowed its pages with the rhetoric of Free China patriotism. As a fan magazine, Southern Screen provides a valuable source for exploring the company’s support for KMT cultural nationalism and pro-Nationalist pan-Chinese identity. At first, only 18 bookstores around the globe sold Southern Screen, but by the late 1960s, circulation had nevertheless grown to around 150,000 copies worldwide.33 Shaw Brothers’ contract stars often participated in charity drives, such as that following Typhoon Wanda in September 1962, and in celebrating patriotic events such as the Double Ten national day of the Taiwanese Republic of China.34 And by far the most conspicuous endorsement of the Free China agenda was when the Shaw Brothers sent a delegation to Taiwan in January 1966 to celebrate the 78th birthday of Nationalist party leader Chiang Kai-shek.35 Shaw Brothers’ ventures demonstrate that film culture during 1960s Hong Kong was enmeshed in the global politics of Cold War struggles in Asia, the competing nationalistic vision of cultural China, and the economic imperatives of ruthless competition within the colony’s local film industry.

International genres, Cold War masculinity, and Hong Kong’s 1960s identity The popularity of One-Armed Swordsman is anchored at the intersection of Hong Kong’s burgeoning 1960s identity and its globalized brand of martial-arts cinema. The film typified a global dialogue among international styles vaunting the creation and market saturation of masculine action films. It consequently follows that the language that catapulted Hong Kong’s martial-arts films to global prominence was not only Mandarin, but also the “language” of action and masculinity. One-Armed Swordsman’s director, the late Chang Cheh noted: “Action is a world language, thus Hong Kong’s action films were accepted by Cantonese speakers and Mandarin speakers, by Southeast Asian countries which didn’t understand Chinese and gradually by Europe and America.”36 The filmic language of genre conventions, and in the case of 1960s Hong Kong cinema, of wuxia and Kung Fu, became a global language that crossed geopolitical and cultural borders. Renowned film genre scholar Christine Gledhill in her influential article “Reinventing Genre” conceives of it “in its triple existence as industrial mechanisms, aesthetic practice, and [an] arena of cultural-critical discursivity.”37 Therefore, I situate One-Armed Swordsman’s production and reception not only within Hong Kong’s industrial reinvention of itself, but also within the discursive site of Cold War masculinity, inseparable from the making of Hong Kong’s sixties identity. Shaw Brothers’ turn to the hyper-masculine genre of wuxia was in part a response to the cross-industrial “genrification” process, an international process that, during the global sixties, promoted masculinist actionpacked genre films worldwide.Yet, the Hong Kong wuxia film was also a response to a specifically imperialist Western-style masculinity exemplified, for example, by the popular James Bond movies. If action genre films (including wuxia) had the ability to bridge different linguistic identities, the construction of a uniquely Asian

184  Jing Jing Chang

and indigenous cinematic form of Cold War masculinity further enabled Hong Kong to assert its identity on the world stage and in so doing to challenge the Cold War balance of power. The rise of the new-style wuxia film in Hong Kong during the 1960s was the result of both international product convergence and local industrial differentiation. In Hong Kong, the Shaw Brothers spawned a “second boom of martial arts films in Chinese film history” through a new type of wuxia film that was different from its Cantonese wuxia counterpart.38 Through the late 1950s and early 1960s, the Shaw Brothers competed with melodramas produced by Cantonese leftist film companies like Zhonglian and Xinlian, as well as modern musicals produced by MP&GI, by making palace epics such as Yang Kwei Fei (1962) and Empress Wu (1963), along with huangmei diao musicals such as The Kingdom and the Beauty (1959), based on Chinese folk legends. However, a change of artistic leadership combined with falling audience ratings following the departure of key figures like director Li HanHsiang in 1963 marked the end of the Shaw Brothers’ huangmei musicals. Rising directors like Chang Cheh believed that the Hong Kong film industry needed to be revamped away from the dominance of “soft” and “effeminate” genres such as melodrama and huangmei operetta and musical films. To create new figures who could rejuvenate the “too feminine” local film industry, which was inhabited, in his opinion, by weak leading men, Chang Cheh introduced a new aesthetics of yanggang meixue (aesthetics of masculinity).39 On a global level, One-Armed Swordsman and the genre of wuxia must be read within the context of international and generic influences and borrowings. Shot in Eastman color, and screened in the new technology of Shawscope, One-Armed Swordsman was dubbed into many languages for global distribution. The film made more than $1 million HKD locally, as well as meeting with tremendous popular success in Taiwan. During the 1960s, Japanese samurai films like Akira Kurosawa’s Yojimbo (1961), Sergio Leone’s iconic spaghetti Westerns starring Clint Eastwood like A Fistful of Dollars (1964), and British franchise films like the James Bond series all enjoyed popularity and financial success in Hong Kong. According to Variety, film grosses in Hong Kong for the year ending March 1, 1968 ranked the James Bond film You Only Live Twice (UA) first, followed by Leone’s For a Few Dollars More (UA). Coming in at a respectable fifth and sixth place were Shaw Brothers’ newstyle wuxia films The Assassin and One-Armed Swordsman.40 These latter films not only found box-office success, they were in fact creative adaptations of one another: Italian spaghetti Westerns, American Westerns, and Japanese samurai films were all closely related. Akira Kurosawa’s samurai films, for example, were indebted to the John Ford Westerns starring John Wayne, while spaghetti Westerns were a variation on the classic American Western formula.41 Importantly (and together with the James Bond series) these action genre films, all participate in the global penchant for masculine action films, while also addressing specific national issues relating to nationhood, class, gender, and empire. International cinematic industrial borrowings and cross-fertilization rose radically during the 1960s. In Asia, this process was fueled by growing middle-class

Hong Kong at the movies  185

affluence and increasingly Westernized tastes among younger audience members. However, the sixties were also a time of national identity renewal amid the global reconfiguration of political spheres of influence; the British Empire was in decline and the United States on the rise as the new world superpower.Thus, while martial arts films, like One-Armed Swordsman, borrowed some of their codes and conventions from global action genres, Hong Kong films were nevertheless simultaneously rooted in local responses to both colonial and Cold War politics. On screen, the 1960s James Bond film adaptations of 1950s spy novels by Ian Fleming best exemplified the Cold War psychological and ideological contest between good and evil, East and West, democracy and communism, empire and colony. Yet just as film genres are not fixed, during the 1960s the meaning of masculinity also shifted, depending on the political context in which a given film was produced.42 Britain’s ultra-masculine James Bond was in fact a response to that country’s postwar crisis of masculinity, traditionally characterized by emotional restraint, stoicism, and selfless sacrifice. Unlike the postwar Englishman who faced the postwar crises of unemployment, inflation, economic and national decline with dignity, silence, and a “stiff upper lip,” James Bond represented a “modern”, “classless” hero; a free-spirited, womanizing, globe-trotting, technologically savvy, yet patriotic and “professional secret agent.”43 This was indeed a fitting new image as Britain shifted from “prurient Victorianism” to a more “permissive society,” and from “a culture of austerity to the beginnings of affluence.”44 Importantly, this new image of British national identity was one embedded in the decline of British prestige. The popularity of James Bond films during the 1960s suggests that the modern brand of British masculinity successfully enabled British national cinema to triumph in this arena over American Hollywood and European art cinema. But the James Bond series also downplayed the Cold War struggle between democracy and communism in order to appeal to an international market.45 This effacement of Cold War politics in favor of what Bond series producer Albert Broccoli called “old fashioned entertainment” was not so different from what British Hong Kong did in order to curb bipolarized tensions in the colony.46 Not surprisingly, Broccoli transformed Bond’s adversary from the Soviet organization SMERSH to SPECTRE, an international crime syndicate. While scholarly debates continue over whether James Bond is really “an old-fashioned British imperial hero,” or “an agent of American cultural imperialism,” the Bond phenomenon exposes the unequal Cold War alliance between the United States and Britain.47 In this light, Cold War masculinity was a critical site for reconfiguring the relationship between British-American and Hong Kong film culture, as well as for challenging the balance of power between colonial governance and local Hong Kong society. New-style wuxia films appropriated the critical site of Cold War masculinity by reinventing the meaning of “violence” for Hong Kong youth in the sixties. Hyper-violent wuxia films like One-Armed Swordsman gave a generation increasingly dissatisfied with colonial government an outlet to express their collective identity as modern global spectators. According to Chang Cheh, “The new style

186  Jing Jing Chang

martial arts films of the 1960s and 1970s are a unique product of Hong Kong at the crossroads of east and west.”48 He justified violent swordplay films by arguing that they conveyed stronger moral messages than similar action genres from other countries.The violence in swordplay films, he maintained, is not sensational or purposeless like that in spaghetti Westerns for example, but instead expresses courage and righteousness.49 Chang Cheh was against the reading of violence as senseless; for him, violence was a political expression engulfed in Cold War politics and partybased nationalism. He lamented: “At the time, people called my movies ‘violent’ and ‘bloody’. I always thought this was a very shallow way of looking at my movies.”50 In order to defend the portrayal of raw violence in his films, Chang Cheh wrote a passionate essay on the role of art in society.51 In response to the critique that swordplay movies have caused more violence in society, he identified two lines of argument: colonial politics and nationalism. Chang noted how he translated onto the big screen the violence he had witnessed first-hand during the anti-colonial riots of 1967. His personal experience amid student movements and social protests and his sympathy toward Hong Kong’s idealistic but alienated young people, seem to have fueled his argument that in a free society, one should be able to express frustration through violence on screen.52 Thus, through viewing action movies, young people could vent their exasperation over the lack of job opportunities and representative government. While advocating the significance of masculinity and violence for Hong Kong’s local identity, Chang also promoted pro-Taiwan nationalism to the film spectator. For instance Chang placed his swordplay films within the context of Chinese nationalism, contrasting them against earlier film genres such as wenyipian (melodrama) and huangmei diao (yellow plum musical).These genres, Chang argued, were out-of-date and of little interest to young overseas Chinese. Rather, Chang Cheh believed that “free celebrities” like himself should avail themselves of the opportunity to represent the true identity and culture of a Free China.53 Here, what Chang implied is that jianghu is an ideal site for nation building and the formation of a pro-Taiwan Chinese identity, enacting what Stephen Teo calls “cultural nationalism.”54 Screened internationally, Chang’s films, and the martial arts genre of that they were a part, thus contributed to the Cold War construction of a form of national masculinity that helped to establish Hong Kong’s global identity during the 1960s. The global sixties saw rich cross-fertilization and movement of international cinematic genres and artistic conventions across geopolitical borders. During this period, the Shaw Brothers’ hyper-masculine martial arts films—One-Armed Swordsman being among the most popular—dominated the Hong Kong scene. Hong Kong filmmakers drew innovation from both Hollywood and Japanese genres to diversify their film offerings and Hong Kong audience members benefited from the multitude of entertainment choices that resulted. Films such as One-Armed Swordsman particularly appealed to the Westernized tastes of younger moviegoers. But the wuxia films went beyond diversifying Hong Kong film industry products; they also contributed to discourses on local activism, nationalism, and masculinity,

Hong Kong at the movies  187

helping to reconfigure Hong Kong’s role in the colonial encounter and the Cold War balance of power.

Between Jianghu and home: action and melodrama in One-Armed Swordsman This final section offers a close reading of One-Armed Swordsman, arguing that its narrative of masculinity is constructed at the very intersection between two modes of storytelling: that of action and melodrama. As demonstrated in the previous section, One-Armed Swordsman enters into dialogue with the global sixties by paying homage to internationally circulated genres exemplified by British spy films, namely the James Bond series. One-Armed Swordsman also transformed these international genres by infusing local traditions into its narrative, especially elements of Hong Kong melodrama, which center on the reconstitution of the Confucian Chinese family in times of national crisis. Thus, while One-Armed Swordsman shaped global conceptions of masculinity to fit local political concerns, it also revised the very notion of masculine action by reconceiving wuxia as a hybrid genre of “action” and “melodrama.” Although the message of Confucian morality has long been the purview of family melodrama in Hong Kong cinema, One-Armed Swordsman defines masculinity as a reconciliation of home and jianghu (literally, “rivers and lakes”), the imaginary realm of knights and warriors in swordplay films. The film follows the protagonist Kang’s journey to regain his masculinity, a path torn between the lure of fame in the masculine world of jianghu and unconditional love in the feminine world of family, domesticity, and home. One-Armed Swordsman’s narrative is structured around two competing forces: Kang’s aspiration to become the best swordsman in jianghu, and his yearning to be a classless but righteous man. Kang, a servant’s son, seeks fame as a swordsman to honor the memory of his deceased father. The story begins when vengeanceseeking bandits ambush Master Qi’s household in the middle of the night. Kang’s father defends Master Qi, but is killed, in a cinematic moment of traumatic vertiginous confusion, before his son’s eyes.55 Following the death of his father, Kang becomes Master Qi’s swordsmanship pupil and proves to be one of his best students. The elderly Qi wishes to betroth his only daughter and pass on his school of sword arts to Kang, his favorite pupil. Although Kang aspires to be the best swordsman in jianghu, he decides to leave Qi’s school after many years of torment by jealous senior students. Before Kang leaves, however, the other students challenge him to a duel during which Pei Er, Master Qi’s daughter (angered by Kang’s lack of interest in her), cuts off his right arm. Crippled and depressed, Kang is rescued by Xiao Man, a kindly young peasant woman who shows him warmth and compassion in her home. Xiao Man gives Kang a book of left-handed sword techniques once owned by her deceased father. Reaffirmed in his goal, Kang devotes himself to perfecting his fighting skills in the hope that he will one day repay the debts he owes to Master Qi. But even as he regains his skills, he promises Xiao Man, with whom he

188  Jing Jing Chang

in shock immediately after Pei Er severs his right arm. One-Armed Swordsman (Dir. Chang Cheh, 1967).

FIGURE 9.1 Kang

has fallen in love, that he will not leave her in search of fame and fortune as a swordsman as he once aspired to. Like many wuxia literary works and films, One-Armed Swordsman has a revenge subplot. The storyline presents Kang with two career options (the adventure of a swordsman or the life of a farmer), as well as two motivations for revenge. Revenge is embodied by Kang’s wish to express filial piety and righteousness by avenging his father’s and friends’ deaths and by Master Qi’s arch enemy Long-Armed Devil’s desire to gain glory by vanquishing Qi.Therefore, masculinity is further nuanced as the duality between the Confucian value of ren (humanity) and the untamed desire of individualistic power and greed. The contest between these two aspects of masculinity is portrayed as the ultimate duel between Kang and Long-Armed Devil in jianghu. Although jianghu is based on historical accounts of knights-errant in ancient Chinese history, it is mainly an imagined “alternative society” (in wuxia film and literature) where the forces of good and evil contest one another.56 As an imaginary world, jianghu has its own ethical codes and laws to be followed by knights-errant (xia). The values of xia are based on virtues such as righteousness (yi), trust (xin), and tolerance (rang).57 Jianghu is not only where the battle between good and evil ensues; it is the place where masculinity is constructed and contested. Long-Armed Devil is the ultimate evil that terrorizes the professional world of jianghu and the hearth of family life. Throughout the film, we never see LongArmed Devil’s face, only his back, an obvious nod to the British spy series where James Bond’s SPECTRE Number 1 remains faceless. Long-Armed Devil has hated Master Qi ever since Qi defeated him in a duel 15 years earlier, leaving him with a huge scar and a wounded ego; he is obsessed with regaining his empty honor. With his eldest student, Smiling Face, Long-Armed Devil plots to attack Master Qi on his 55th birthday. Long-Armed Devil has spent the past 15 years designing a secret weapon called Golden Sword Lock and a perfecting 64 strokes to counter and defeat the swordplay techniques of Master Qi’s school. As some of Master Qi’s students journey to their teacher’s birthday celebrations, they are ambushed and

Hong Kong at the movies  189

FIGURE 9.2

  The final duel between Kan and Long-Armed Devil. One-Armed Swordsman (Dir. Chang Cheh, 1967).

killed by Long-Armed Devil’s students. Even the best of Qi’s pupils are defenseless against the Golden Sword Lock. When Kang learns of the treachery that has cost the lives of his mentor’s students, he is more determined than ever to repay his debt to his teacher’s kindness in raising him. He heads to Master Qi’s home to warn him, but Long-Armed Devil has arrived first. Kang shows up just when Master Qi, his family, and students are about to surrender and successfully vanquishes the evil adversary. At first, it may seem that Qi’s students die at the hand of Long-Armed Devil because they lack sufficient sword-fighting skill. Usually the sword in jianghu represents many things: the soul, the discipline, the honor and masculinity of the swordsman. But the fact that Long-Armed Devil is never shown actually fighting with a sword is very telling; it marks him as corrupt and illegitimate. Instead of perfecting his sword fighting skills, he uses a combination of malicious weapons specifically designed to harm Master Qi, his family and pupils: arrows, whip, dagger, and the deadly sword lock. Ironically, in One-Armed Swordsman the sword declines into a symbol of corruption and senseless violence for the world of jianghu. It comes to represent only empty honor and egotistical pride. In fact, the other students die because they refuse to let go of their swords. Kang is able to vanquish Long-Armed Devil not so much through his sword-fighting skills but because of Long-Armed Devil’s own arrogance. Instead of seeking revenge through senseless violence, Kang uses purposeful violence to repay Master Qi’s kindness in having raised him. Throughout the film, Kang is driven by discipline, righteousness, humility, and kindness; these are the qualities that allow him to overcome the deceitful ways of Long-Armed Devil. In other words, weapons are meaningless without morality. In this vein, One-Armed Swordsman revolutionizes the wuxia genre not so much by its hyper-violent choreography or “action,” but by exposing the dangers of greed, fame and glory. The film thus presents a reassessment of the xia code of ethics and the parameters of jianghu.

190  Jing Jing Chang

The final mayhem that takes place in the courtyard of Master Qi’s wuxia school exposes both how Qi’s students have yet to embody the ethics of xia as well as showing Master Qi’s failure as a teacher, a master swordsman, and ultimately as a father. While Qi is well respected by his pupils and peers in jianghu, he fails in his most important role as defined by Confucian social ethics—that of parent. Indeed, it was because of her father’s failure to discipline her, that Qi’s daughter Pei Er was able to sever Kang’s arm. After Kang refuses Qi’s request to be his successor, the Master breaks his own sword in half, not out of anger or frustration, but because he realizes that he, like his students and Long-Armed Devil, has not truly lived the swordsman’s life of honor and integrity. Kang also realizes that the world of jianghu is not the place where he can fill the void left by his own dead father. At the core of OneArmed Swordsman is Kang’s search for a father figure. This is the path that initially leads him to jianghu but in the end, the home that he will build with Xiao Man is where he will find the affection and unconditional love he has yearned for all his life. Narratives about father and son and social ethics are usually the purview of the family melodrama. The impact of an absent father (either physically or emotionally) is a preoccupation of many Hong Kong family melodramas (jiating lunlipian generally known as wenyipian), including The Guiding Light (1953), Father and Son (1954), and The Orphan (1960) and many others. At stake in One-Armed Swordsman is Kang’s journey to regain his masculinity through reconciling courage and love, action and stasis, wuxiapian (swordplay film) and wenyipian (melodrama). In his memoir, director Chang Cheh expressed surprise that One-Armed Swordsman was such a box-office success: “It was pure luck that the film wasn’t a commercial disaster!” he wrote.58 Chang believed that One-Armed Swordsman “includes adult scenes rarely seen at the time. The film sacrificed its entertaining values for menyi (boring art).”59 Chang Cheh also noted: “The only sequence displaying my dynamic action design was in the ending scene.”60 But I would argue that One-Armed Swordsman was such a success precisely because Chang Cheh “crossed the definitive line between literary and action dramas.”61 Indeed, the film illustrates Kang’s successful journey in search of masculinity through both stasis and action. Critics and scholars have historically paid less attention to the Hong Kong melodrama film, dismissing the genre as excessively emotional and technically shoddy. Similarly, American melodrama films were deemed by film critics as a “deviation of the classical realist narrative” and hence unworthy of serious study or analysis.62 Just as feminist film critics have redeemed the family melodrama during the 1970s and 1980s as “women’s films” and later in the 1990s as part of male action genres, I also seek to rehabilitate the melodrama as a genre pertinent in shaping film narratives from the 1960s to the present day.63 Indeed, it was because it melded melodrama and action that One-Armed Swordsman succeeded in appealing not only to young cinephiles, craving action and “violence” as an expression of their engagement with Hong Kong’s global sixties, but also to older audiences familiar with family narratives. In addition to the father and son motif, home—representing the realm of domesticity and femininity—also provides the setting for family melodrama. Kang’s final decision to retreat from jianghu and return to the love of Xiao Man reveals

Hong Kong at the movies  191

that One-Armed Swordsman as not just a new-style wuxia film, but a hybrid genre film, the action melodrama. While Long-Armed Devil represents empty honor, the two female characters, Pei Er and Xiao Man, represent contrasting and opposite kinds of home and by extension the complex nature of Chinese nationalism. As the only daughter of Master Qi and his wife, Pei Er is spoiled by her parents and is used to getting her way. She claims to love Kang, but orders him around like a house-servant and ignores her father’s teachings. She humiliates Kang by ordering him to chop wood, calls him derogatory names, and finally severs Kang’s right arm. The fact that it is Pei Er who maims Kang begs the question of how his emasculation by a female transforms the concepts of Chinese nationalism on the one hand, and the very meaning of masculinity on the other. At first, it seems that Kang resembles more the wounded male figure in Hong Kong melodramas than the hyper-masculine hero from the world of wuxia. However, his emasculation at the outset is a necessary plot device that propels him on a path to refining masculinity itself. Pei Er may have wounded Kang. But Kang also regains his masculinity when he first recuses Pei Er from the evil plot of Long-Armed Devil and later saves her entire family. By severing Kang’s arm, Pei Er also represents the threat to the construction of Confucian family life and by extension a harmonious Chinese nationhood. Not only is Pei-Er marked as a spoiled daughter, she is a reminder that Kang’s journey to normative masculinity is always fraught with contradictions and choices. When Pei Er injures Kang in a fit of whim, anger and frustration, Xiao Man nurtures him back to health. Like Kang, Xiao Man is also an orphan who dreams of building her own family. If the sword represents honor for Kang and so many others, for Xiao Man it is an obstacle to happiness. As she says: “Violence breeds violence.” Xiao Man does not understand what violence can achieve; it is because of the desire for empty honor that her own father is now dead, and Kang has been made a cripple. Xiao Man’s mother warns her never to marry a man who seeks fame and worships empty honor; a swordsman’s reputation means everything while his wife means nothing. But Xiao Man feels inspired to support Kang, playing the role of “good wife” and showing him that she cares. In other words, just as Confucian ethics of righteousness and tolerance govern the behavior of the xia in jianghu, affection and respect are the foundational values that hold a Chinese Confucian family together. And just as the harmony of family life is threatened by the selfish individualism of Pei Er, audiences are also reminded by the film’s final shot that Chinese nationalism is an unfinished project. The last shot of One-Armed Swordsman shows Kang and Xiao Man walking toward the hilltop, symbolizing their departure from a life of violence to start their own family. Social order per se is not restored by violence; but violence as a means of changing direction can help one to conform to a new social role in the Confucian familial moral universe. Kang does not lose his masculinity by leaving jianghu. Rather, he defines a new masculine role in the family that he and Xiao Man are about to build. While scenes from the rest of the film are shot on the Shaw Brothers’ soundstage, this dénouement on location nonetheless disturbs the ­hetero-normative closure so typical of genre film’s narrative economy. The

192  Jing Jing Chang

extreme long shot of Kang and Xiao Man against an expansive outdoor countryside shows that the couple still occupy a space in limbo, in the borderland between jianghu and home. Indeed, Kang’s journey in search of masculinity is an ongoing project, a work-in-progress.This lack of narrative closure, however, fulfills an industry purpose by allowing for future sequels. In fact, two sequels (also directed by Chang Cheh) Return of the One-Armed Swordsman (1969) and The New One-Armed Swordsman (1971) followed the tremendous success of One-Armed Swordsman. The hero Kang even joined forces with a popular samurai hero, Zatoichi, in a 1971 Hong Kong-Japan coproduction, Zatoichi and the One-Armed Swordsman (directed by Hsu Tseng-Hung and Yasuda Kimiyoshi). Following the success of One-Armed Swordsman, wuxia films became the main genre identified with the Shaw Brothers company. Out of the 29 productions that Shaw Brothers released in 1968, 12 were wuxia films. Today, Celestial Pictures, which now owns the hundreds of feature films Shaw Brothers made, continues to serve old and new fans of Hong Kong cinema. The entertainment company has a popular YouTube channel and rents or sells Shaw Brothers films to audiences worldwide. By far the company’s most requested product are martial-arts films—a testament to the continuing popularity of Hong Kong’s martial-arts genre films among local and global audiences.

Conclusion This chapter has sought to demonstrate how global Cold War struggles, national politics, and local culture converged in 1960s Hong Kong cinema. This was not only a time of bipolar tensions between pro-democracy and pro-communism, but also a time of the declining prestige of the British Empire. Hong Kong reconfigured colonizer–colonized relations, in part, by reconfiguring its definition of masculinity as a complex entity fusing violence, power, honor, and family. Martialarts films like One-Armed Swordsman illustrate the ways in which cinema played a crucial role in shaping Hong Kong’s identity on both local and international levels at this time. As one of Shaw Brothers’ many global ventures, One-Armed Swordsman was a huge box office hit, not only in Hong Kong, but also in exhibition markets worldwide. One-Armed Swordsman redefined the new wuxia genre and catapulted Hong Kong cinema to leading global status. In fact, the global brand of Hong Kong cinema continues to be defined, even today, by the speed, action, and rawness of Hong Kong’s 1960s action genres. And yet, as we have seen, although it was clearly replete with the hyper-violent ultra-masculinity characteristic of wuxia film, One-Armed Swordsman also provided audiences old and new with cinematic continuity as well. As much as the film embodies global references appealing to the Westernized tastes of a new generation of spectators, it is also local and familiar in its references to traditional Confucian precepts. As such, One-Armed Swordsman, and films like it, played a key role in shaping Hong Kong’s new image during the long sixties on both the local and the global stage: a masculine image that nevertheless reconciled action and melodrama, wuxia and wenyi, masculinity and femininity, empire and nation.

Hong Kong at the movies  193

Notes   1 On the historical development of the Hong Kong martial-arts genre, see Stephen Teo, Chinese Martial Arts Cinema:The Wuxia Tradition (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2009).   2 Although Hong Kong’s population was ruled by the British as colonial subjects, scholars have argued that during the late 1960s, concepts of citizenship began to shape the development of Hong Kong identity. For an in-depth study of citizenship as governance, rhetoric, and its manifold manifestations in Hong Kong, see Agnes S. Ku and Ngai Pun, eds, Remaking Citizenship in Hong Kong: Community, Nation and the Global City (London and New York: Routledge Curzon, 2004).   3 Kwok Ching-ling, Xianggang dianying daquan (1965–1969) diliujuan [Hong Kong Filmography, 1965–1969,Vol. 6] (Hong Kong: Hong Kong Film Archive), 144.   4 For a critical survey of the melodrama genre in Chinese film history, see Stephen Teo, “Chinese Melodrama:The Wenyi Genre,” in Traditions in World Cinema, eds, Linda Badley, R. Barton Palmer, and Steven Jay Schneider, 203–213 (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2006).   5 Some studies note that key defining moments of the 1960s began in the 1950s, arguing that the two decades should not be seen as discrete historical, political, or cultural periods. See Alexander Bloom and Wini Breines, “Past as Prologue: The 1950s as an introduction to the 1960s,” in “Takin’ it to the Streets”: A Sixties Reader, eds, Alexander Bloom and Wini Breines, 1–11 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995; 2003). Other scholars contend that the duration of the 1960s should be extended to include the late 1950s and early 1970s. See Arthur Marwick, The Sixties (London: Bloomsbury Reader, 1998; 2011 (electronic)).   6 Ming K. Chan, ed., Precarious Balance: Hong Kong between China and Britain, 1842–1992 (Armonk, New York: M.E. Sharpe, 1994).   7 John D. Young, “The Building Years: Maintaining a China-Hong Kong-Britain Equilibrium, 1950–1971,” in Precarious Balance: Hong Kong between China and Britain, 1842– 1992, ed. Ming K. Chan (Armonk, New York: M.E. Sharpe), 132.   8 Poshek Fu, Between Shanghai and Hong Kong: The Politics of Chinese Cinemas (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2003).   9 Jubin Hu, Projecting a Nation: Chinese National Cinema before 1949 (Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press), 2003. 10 Chi-Kwan Mark, Hong Kong and the Cold War: Anglo–American Relations, 1949–1957 (Oxford: Clarendon Press), 6. 11 Yu Mo-Wan, “Xianggang dianying de yimian guangrong qizhi–zhonglian shihua [A Study of Zhonglian Film Company],” in Cantonese Cinema Retrospective 1960–69, ed. Lin Nien-Tung (Hong Kong: Urban Council, 1982), 39. 12 United Nations, The Demographic Situation in Hong Kong (Economic and Social Commission for Asia and the Pacific: Bangkok, Thailand, 1974), 9 13 On the origin and impact of the Hong Kong riot of 1967, see Christine Loh, Underground Front:The Chinese Communist Party in Hong Kong (Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2010). 14 Gordon Mathews, Eric Kit-wai Ma, and Tai-lok Lui, Hong Kong, China: Learning to Belong to a Nation (London and New York: Routledge, 2008), 33. 15 Mathews, Ma and Lui, Hong Kong, China, 27–29. 16 Matthew Turner and Irene Ngan, eds, Hong Kong Sixties: Designing Identity (Hong Kong: Hong Kong Arts Center, 1995). 17 Yung Sai-shing, “Territorialization and the Entertainment Industry of the Shaw Brothers in Southeast Asia,” in Forever China: Shaw Brothers and Diasporic Cinema, ed. Poshek Fu (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2008), 133. 18 See Poshek Fu, ed., China Forever:The Shaw Brothers and Diasporic Cinema (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2008). 19 Ibid.

194  Jing Jing Chang

20 The summary of the history of the Shaw Brothers’ entertainment business in this paragraph is adapted from Stephanie Po-Yin Chung, “The Industrial Evolution of a Fraternal Enterprise: The Shaw Brothers and the Shaw Organization,” in The Shaw Screen: A Preliminary Study, 27th Hong Kong International Film Festival, ed. Wong Ain-ling, 1–17 (Hong Kong: Hong Kong Film Archive, 2003). 21 Southern Screen, no. 22, October 1960, 42–43 (henceforth SS issue no, date, page number). 22 Fu, China Forever, 5. 23 SS 131, January 1969, 56. 24 These included the adoption of Japanese fashion trends in the case of films by MP&GI and Japanese technologies in the case of the Shaw Brothers. Kinnia Shuk-ting Yau, Japanese and Hong Kong Film Industries: Understanding the Origins of East Asian Film Networks (London and New York: Routledge, 2010). 25 Ibid., 73. 26 SS 98, April 1966, 74. 27 Ibid., 88. 28 SS 71, January 1964, 39–41. 29 SS 95, January 1966, 11. 30 Fu, China Forever, 6. 31 Ibid. 32 Stephen Teo, Hong Kong Cinema: The Extra Dimensions (London: British Film Institute, 1997), 111. 33 SS 117, November 1967. 34 SS 57, November 1962, 14–15; SS 34, December 1960, insertions between 32–33; and SS 70, December 1963, 45–49. 35 SS 95, January 1966, 70–73. 36 Zhang Che (henceforth Chang Cheh), “Creating the Martial Arts Film and the Hong Kong Cinema Style,” trans. Stephen Teo, in The Making of Martial Arts Films – As Told by Filmmakers and Stars, ed. Hong Kong Film Archive (Hong Kong: Provisional Urban Council, 1999), 20. 37 Christine Gledhill, “Rethinking Genre,” in Reinventing Film Studies, eds, Christine Gledhill and Linda Williams (London: Hodder Arnold, 2000), 223. 38 Ibid., 95. 39 Yau, Japanese and Hong Kong Film Industries, 96. 40 “Gross Estimates: Hong Kong,” Variety, May 8, 1968, 184. 41 Peter Bondanella, Italian Cinema: From Neorealism to the Present, New Expanded Edition (New York: Continuum, 1996), 255. 42 Rick Altman, “Reusable Packaging: Generic Products and the Recycling Process,” in Refiguring American Film Genres: History and Theory, ed. Nick Browne, 1–41 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998). 43 James Chapman, Past and Present: National Identity and the British Historical Film (London and New York: I.B. Tauris, 2005), 321; and Chapman, “Bond and Britishness,” in Ian Fleming & James Bond: The Cultural Politics of 007, eds, Edward P. Comentale, Stephen Watt, and Willman Skip (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2005), 133. 44 Ibid., 134, 135. 45 Janet Woollacott, “James Bond Films: Conditions of Production,” in The James Bond Phenomenon: A Critical Reader. 2nd edn., ed. Christoph Lindner (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2009), 118. 46 Cited in Woollacott, “James Bond Films,” 127. 47 Chapman, “Bond and Britishness,” 130. 48 Chang Cheh, “Creating the Martial Arts Film,” 18. 49 Chang Cheh, “On Martial Arts Films,” SS 126, August 1968, 34–35. 50 Chang Cheh, “Creating the Martial Arts Film,” 22. 51 Chang Cheh, “On Martial Arts Films.” 52 Ibid.

Hong Kong at the movies  195

53 Ibid. 54 Stephen Teo, Hong Kong Cinema: The Extra Dimensions (London: British Film Institute, 1997). 55 This is caused by the motion of the handheld camera—Chang Cheh claimed this was the first time in Hong Kong film history that a handheld camera was used. Wong Ainling, Kwok Ching-ling, and May Ng, eds, Chang Cheh: A Memoir (Hong Kong: Hong Kong Film Archive, 2004), 85. 56 Cited in Teo, Chinese Martial Arts Cinema, 18. 57 Teo, Martial Arts Cinema, 18. 58 Wong Ain-ling, Kwok Ching-ling, and May Ng, eds, Chang Cheh: A Memoir (Hong Kong: Hong Kong Film Archive, 2004), 86. 59 Ibid. 60 Ibid. 61 Ibid. 62 Linda Williams, “Melodrama Revised,” in Refiguring American Film Genres: History and Theory, ed. Nick Browne (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998), 42. 63 Gledhill, “Rethinking Genre,” 222.

Selected bibliography Chiu, Stephen and Tai-Lok Lui. Hong Kong: Becoming a Chinese Global City. London and New York: Routledge, 2009. Fu, Poshek. “The 1960s: Modernity,Youth Culture, and Hong Kong Cantonese Cinema.” In The Cinema of Hong Kong: History, Arts, Identity, edited by Poshek Fu and David Desser, 71–89. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000. Law Kar and Frank Bren. Hong Kong Cinema: A Cross-Cultural View. Lanham, Maryland: The Scarecrow Press, Inc., 2004. Marcantonio, Carla. Global Melodrama: Nation, Body and History in Contemporary Film. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015. Ngo, Tak-Wing, ed. Hong Kong’s History: State and Society under Colonial Rule. London and New York: Routledge, 1999. Pickowicz, Paul G. “Melodrama Representation and the ‘May Fourth’ Tradition of Chinese Cinema.” In From May Fourth to June Fourth: Fiction and Film in Twentieth-Century China, edited by Ellen Widmer and David Der-wei Wang. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1993. Williams,Tony. “Transitional Stardom:The Case of Jimmy Wang Yu,” in A Companion to Hong Kong Cinema, eds, Esther M. K. Cheung, Gina Marchetti and Esther C. M.Yau, 322–340 (Oxford: Wiley Blackwell, 2015). Yip, Man-Fung. “In the Realm of the Senses: Sensory Realism, Speed, and Hong Kong Martial Arts Cinema.” Cinema Journal Vol. 53, no. 4 (Summer 2014): 76–97.

10 ARTISTS’ NETWORKS IN THE 1960s The case of El Corno Emplumado/The Plumed Horn (Mexico City, 1962–1969) Gabriela Aceves Sepúlveda

Introduction The 1960s was a decade of unprecedented transformation in the field of media arts.1 Artists, scientists, and technology enthusiasts experimented with new and old technologies, including mail, print, computers, video, radio, and television broadcasting, leading to the development of interdisciplinary media practices, or what Dick Higgins calls “intermedia.”2 By reviving modernist avant-garde strategies and experimenting with the communication capacities afforded by mass media, artists built transnational networks of exchange and alternative exhibition spaces that challenged mainstream traditions of artistic production and distribution. In particular, magazines became important sites of artistic creation and exhibition. As Gwen Allen puts it, “artists created works using the ephemerality and the materiality of the magazine to challenge the conventions of both artistic medium and gallery.”3 One such magazine was the bilingual (English and Spanish) magazine El Corno Emplumado/The Plumed Horn published in Mexico City from 1962 to 1969 by U.S. poet Margaret Randall and her husband, Mexican writer Sergio Mondragón. El Corno, as its collaborators called it, emerged as a response to the political conservatism of the fifties, the heightened ideological pressures of the Cold War, and the antiauthoritarian aspirations of emergent generations of artists and activists. With a printing of 3000 magazines per quarterly issue and a distribution that extended across the Americas and to several cities in Europe and Australia, El Corno emphasized art’s potential to bridge barriers between nations and political ideologies. Its name, coined by Harvey Wolin, referenced both the feathers of the Aztec god Quetzalcóatl (Emplumado or Feathered Serpent) and a jazz horn (El Corno), a symbol of U.S. counterculture.4 From 1962 to 1968, under the direction of Randall and Mondragón,5 El Corno introduced the work of the Beat poets and Black Mountain College artists to Latin American audiences while showcasing emerging Latin American

Artists’ networks in the 1960s: Mexico City  197

experimental art and poetry to readers outside the region, along with anthropological studies on indigenous cultures and mysticism. The magazine brought together Randall’s growing commitment to the Latin American Left with Mondragón’s interests in drug culture and existential and mystical questionings of self (Buddhism, psychoanalysis, pre-Hispanic mysticism). Their aspirations were recorded in El Corno’s various sections, which included poetry, short essays, visual arts, advertisements, and a rich section of letters from readers and collaborators that made the magazine a tool for communication among people across the globe. Indeed, for Randall, El Corno “was never just a magazine; it was never just a collection of words and images put together by two people … El Corno was a network”.6 El Corno was a meeting place for emerging and established artists, scholars, writers, and activists from all over the world.7 This meeting place materialized physically at Randall and Mondragón’s house in Mexico City, which was turned into a refuge for Latin American, Canadian, and U.S. artists who visited Mexico City during the period. El Corno stood out from other magazines of its era because of its bilingual character and its inclusive editorial commitment that welcomed emerging and established artists and scholars of various disciplines and with opposing ideologies.8 According to Alan Davison and Irene Rostagno, this open editorial approach is one of the reasons for the lack of scholarly attention it has received to date in the field of literary studies.9 Across the Americas, El Corno encountered a series of obstacles to recognition. For some U.S. writers, it was hard to embrace a magazine published in Mexico City because they did not view Mexico as site of legitimate cultural production, while in Mexico City and other parts of Latin America, it was difficult to pay attention to an international endeavor at a time when the focus was on the establishment of national and regional literary schools.10 Others complained that the lack of attention was due to the magazine’s uneven quality of translation and careless proofing. Randall herself has acknowledged that lack of resources and technical expertise affected the reception of El Corno amongst established writers on both sides of the border.11 And yet, despite these shortcomings within the literary field, El Corno was much more than a literary magazine. It also functioned as an alternative exhibition space for many visual artists and a means of communication between artists and intellectuals the world over. While recent scholarly efforts in Mexico have drawn attention to El Corno as an important site of 1960s Mexican countercultural production, its value as a unique record of the global sixties, one that brought together different artistic disciplines and gave voice to intellectuals and artists with opposing ideologies across national borders, remains unexamined.12 This chapter argues that El Corno was emblematic of new networks of cultural and artistic production. Randall, Wolin, and Mondragón aimed to publish a magazine that would unify the southern and northern hemispheres of the American continent through the arts; this study analyzes their achievement. In so doing, it increases our understanding of how transnational efforts shaped the cultural and artistic history of the global sixties. Scholarship on the global sixties has increasingly turned its attention away from the pivotal events of 1968 to the cultural production of the decade in order to

198  Gabriela Aceves Sepúlveda

explain long-term processes of change involving “mores, aesthetics, consumption and a politicization of the myriad faces of the everyday.”13 Certainly, for scholars interested in mapping out a more nuanced history of the global sixties, ignoring the influence of both popular and avant-garde art production is no longer acceptable.14 Such studies trace an important terrain that considers the long-term effects of the democratization of the means of cultural production and the focus on experimentation and collaboration across media and politics.15 Cultural historians of Latin America have carved out an important interdisciplinary and transnational approach to the sixties that emphasizes cultural production not as a backdrop but as a site where formal politics and everyday life are co-produced.16 As Eric Zolov argues, a new generation of Latin American scholars is interested in expanding “the narrower notion of the ‘political’ to include the terrain of culture and the everyday life, carefully seeking to map out and make sense of the complex ideological threads that bind culture and politics together in this period.”17 Similarly, scholars of the cold war in Latin America have also turned to culture and are now asking: “What does the global sixties look and sound like from a non-U.S. and non-European perspective?”18 This chapter provides one answer to that question. Within the field of art history, scholars have also turned their attention to the global sixties. Latin American art historians, for example, have recuperated the practices of 1960s avant-garde artists in order to include the region’s production more meaningfully in the histories of conceptual art.19 However, these studies rarely adopt a transnational lense that follows creative networks of exchange. On the other hand, art historians interested in developing methodologies to narrate the global histories of art from a postcolonial perspective are moving towards an approach that follows transnational networks of exchange between artists across geographies.20 Inspired by the sociologist Boaventura de Sousa Santos’ call for developing “ecologies of knowledge,”21 these scholars are looking at moments of simultaneous creation and friendship networks to decenter traditional art history narratives that place Europe and the United States at the center of modern art production.22 In order to dismantle such narratives, others still are making the networks of exchange between artists (literally) observable by turning to data visualization.23 In line with such efforts this study proposes that El Corno can be read as a unique historical record of the sixties; it makes visible instances of simultaneous artistic creation and tracks the development of relationships and networks of exchange between artists across the globe. This study thus argues in part that El Corno’s interest in building creative networks paralleled that of other art magazines of the era—not only other poetry magazines published in Latin America24—but also art magazines such as Aspen: The Magazine in a Box published in New York City from 1965 to 1971. As Gwen Allen argues, these magazines articulated their countercultural character in both form and content by adopting a do-it-yourself quality and experimenting with different formats.25 Like Aspen, many of these magazines were multimedia projects or “magazines in a box” integrating Super 8 film and collectible items distributed via mail. Such projects were part of the anti-establishment

Artists’ networks in the 1960s: Mexico City  199

and conceptual art practices of a wide array of artists including those affiliated with the so-called “Fluxus” movement.These artists sought to circumvent the art market and the mainstream gallery through the exploration of different systems of distribution and the development of independent creative networks. While El Corno did not embrace multimedia to this degree, it nevertheless anticipated some of these approaches. El Corno adopted the spirit of mail art, using postal mail as a means of distribution and exchange. Throughout the pages of El Corno artists experimented with different formats including paid insertions. In publishing visual art along with the poetry, prose, and critical essays of both established and emergent artists, El Corno showcased artworks that would otherwise not have been seen together at the time. Ultimately, El Corno made art public in new ways in the 1960s, and in doing so, as Gwen Allen puts it, “was a political act that challenged the art world and the world at large.”26

We (were) all brothers: A brief history of El Corno In the fall of 1961, Margaret Randall, then a young poet from New York, found herself in Mexico City. Like many other artists of her generation, she had traveled south of the border in search of a new way of life that would echo her spiritual ethos: “a mix of middle-class provincial America awakened by the Beat Generation, her experiences with Black Mountain artists, Deep Imagery, Abstract Expressionism and Politics.”27 She soon found herself at the apartment of Beat poet Philip Lamantia, who had lived in Mexico City since 1954.28 Lamantia’s apartment was the meeting place for a community of expatriates who, like Randall, thought they could find answers to their spiritual questions in Mexico. Mexican writers and artists who were interested in learning about what was happening abroad also frequented Lamantia’s apartment. Together they spent long nights at Lamantia’s flat reading literary classics to each other in Spanish and English.29 Wolin, Mondragón, and Randall rapidly recognized the need to establish a vehicle through which their work could be shared in both English and Spanish. In January 1962, they edited and published the first edition of El Corno. Their goal was the creation of: a magazine of poetry, prose, letters, art from two hemispheres … whose pages conform to the world … now, when relations between the Americas have never been worse, we hope El Corno Emplumado will be a showcase (outside politics) for the fact that we ARE ALL BROTHERS.30 With this statement Randall, Wolin, and Mondragón affirmed that the main objective of the magazine was to develop a forum for artists from the northern and southern hemispheres of the American continent to share their work outside of the ideological political divide that loomed over the region. Throughout the decade, this fraternal aim—to join people across the Americas through the arts—would not change. However, the same cannot be said of their apolitical approach. As the decade progressed, ideological differences began to emerge between Mondragón

200  Gabriela Aceves Sepúlveda

and Randall, echoing those between the magazine’s readers and collaborators. Randall and Mondragón (who became a couple and main editors by the second issue) grew apart as the Vietnam War, the U.S. civil rights movement, Kennedy’s embargo against Cuba, the emergence of the New Left, the militarization of several Latin American countries, and the Mexican student movement in 1968 polarized their artistic and political aspirations. And while both Randall and Mondragón tried to keep an open editorial stance, Randall writes: “I saw Cuba as the society of the future, and gave more space to those writing from a revolutionary perspective” while Mondragón “became involved in Buddhism and favored mystic or ecstatic texts.”31 Slowly the magazine began to look like two magazines in one. These changes became most apparent in the editorial notes, which had originally been almost identical in English and Spanish, though penned individually by Randall and Mondragón, respectively. By 1965, however, they began to drift apart. In the summer edition of 1965, Mondragón’s Spanish editorial states: This edition of El Corno was published thanks to the generosity of numerous poets and writers that joined efforts and raised the sufficient funds to extend the life of the magazine for yet another number. This unforeseen event that took place in two different cities in the Americas happened in the midst of war, disorder and rampant assault against human rights across the globe: Mexico City and San Francisco. More than seventy artists located in more than ten countries came together to save a literary magazine.32 In contrast to Mondragón’s embrace of artists’ solidarity, Randall’s English version reads as a direct pronunciation against Lyndon Johnson’s escalation of the Vietnam War and the U.S. military occupation of Santo Domingo: This is a magazine of poetry. But, as befits every human being, we make our protest. In this issue we planned a page to read: “Hitler: 1939; Johnson: 1965”. Deep thought and discussion as to the right of judgement caused us to change that protest to: “Truman, Hiroshima and Nagasaki: 1945. Johnson, Viet Nam and Santo Domingo: 1965.” Only History will tell us if our particular voice was too hard or too soft. Meanwhile, we remain at our post. In our case it’s the typewriter, for another it’s the hills of Venezuela or Colombia, a school desk in Birmingham or the presidential chair in the United States of America.33 The different tones in the editorials extended to other issues. For example, in Issue 24 of 1967 as Mondragón complained about the lack of recognition that El Corno has received from the Mexican literary milieu: The bureaucrats of literature in this country, those critics who publish in newspaper editorials, keep ignoring the existence of El Corno Emplumado, or when they pay attention to it they make no effort in diminishing us.34

Artists’ networks in the 1960s: Mexico City  201

Randall, in contrast, penned a love poem entitled “The History”, completely overlooking Mondragon’s laments. The design of the magazine also changed over time, becoming more explicitly political as the decade progressed. The cover of the summer edition of 1965 changed from being duo-chromatic with formalist typographical composition to showcase a reproduction of a photograph by Mexican Nacho López depicting what could be read as a demonstration of peasants. After this issue the covers reproduced photographs and graphic work, including photos by Rodrigo Moya documenting the U.S. invasion of Santo Domingo (Issue 17, 1966), photo portraits of U.S.Vietnam draft dodgers by THE MILITANT (Issue 20, 1966), and a photo documenting black segregation in the U.S. by Larry Siegel (Issue 25, 1968) among many others. This shift towards images visually narrates the ideological transformations of its editors and many of the magazine’s collaborators. For example, after a visit to Cuba in 1967, the year in which Che Guevara was assassinated in Bolivia, the cover of Issue 26 of April 1968 reproduced a poster by Alfredo Rostgaard, the emblematic designer of Cuban political posters. In the editorial note, Randall became a voice for the Cuban struggle.35 She declared that artists are no longer content to bear witness and that Cuba would be the mirror that reflects the aspirations of the new generations. The change is upon us, in our hands and in our mountains and in our cities—brute and sure. Vietnam, Korea, Guatemala, Guiana, Tierra Amarilla, Detroit. Artists and writers are no longer content to bear witness; looking to Debray, to “El Che,” to Carmichael and Cesar Monies they are making their action a new kind of “witness.” In Cuba, the real mirror in which we care to see ourselves reflected, 600 intellectuals from 70 countries met in January and talked about THIS—in all its details and faces.36 Meanwhile Mondragón, then based in Illinois, began to express a sense of isolation and distance perhaps also anticipating the breakdown of his sentimental relation with Randall, and the end of El Corno. Mondragón writes that while he was “impressed by … the incandescence of names such as El Che and Debray” such references only made him more aware of how his “isolation was nothing else but a mere reflection of my distance from the rest of the world.”37 Mexico City was not immune to the pressures of the Cold War. Mexican students, like many around the world, were out on the street challenging the heavy hand of the political regime. As the Mexican government prepared to host the 1968 Summer Olympic Games, tensions between the government of president Gustavo Díaz Ordaz (1964–1970) and the student’s National Strike Council came to an impasse after a series of confrontations with government special forces resulted in bloodshed. On the eve of the inauguration of 1968 Summer Olympic Games hundreds of students were massacred in La Plaza de Talateloco as they gathered to protest the government’s violent actions and listen peacefully to speeches. On 28 October 1968, 26 days after the student massacre in downtown Mexico City on

202  Gabriela Aceves Sepúlveda

2 October, Randall and Mondragón published their last edition of the magazine together. Mondragón’s editorial note denounced the responsibility of the Mexican government in the tragic events that took place in La Plaza de Tlatelolco: “We know that those who bear responsibility for this problem are our government leaders who have demonstrated their lack of skill, their cruelty and their spiritual blindness.”38 For her part, Randall condemned the lack of press freedom around the world. “It is not the small-scale hysteric rightist press which is most to be feared, but the ‘liberal,’ enormous, ‘objective,’ ‘democratic’ news media which do service to no one but their masters,” she wrote.39 After the publication of this issue, Mondragón decided to go into hiding, fearing repression. While some Mexican collaborators of El Corno were not directly involved with the student movement, they had aided it by printing, distributing, and translating flyers or writing notes in support.40 In retrospect, Randall recalls that her involvement with the student movement was not important: She “was not a leader.” She did “what most honest people in Mexico City did at the time—helped students, provided them with food, collected money, distributed propaganda, etc.”41 The magazine, on the other hand, while not directly related to the movement, was a forum for collaborators to voice their opinions as they did on other political issues of the time.42 Throughout the years El Corno had received nominal financial support from Mexican governmental agencies and officials. After the publication of the October issue, Randall, then divorced from Mondragón, was left to her own devices and published issue 29 in January 1969 with financial support from collaborators outside Mexico, including George Bowering, Allan Ginsberg, and Lawrence Ferlinghetti. Joined by Robert Cohen (her new partner), Randall continued to publish the magazine without government support until July 1969, when they both began to receive threats. As many prepared for commemorations of the one-year anniversary of the massacre of students in La Plaza de Taltelolco, paramilitary operatives appeared at the home of Randall and Cohen making off with Randall’s passport.43 Fearing repression, Randall sent her four children to Cuba and later joined them along with Cohen. Randall remained in Cuba until the mid-1980s when she returned to the United States. In Cuba she first worked for the Cuban Book Institute and later as a freelance journalist, photographer, and historian, specializing in the struggles of women in Cuba, Nicaragua, Peru, and Vietnam. Mondragón remained in Mexico where he worked as a journalist, edited the Buddhist magazine Revista Latinoamericana de Estudios Budistas, and continued to publish his poetry. El Corno, as Rostagno argues, stood out from other magazines of the era due to its open editorial approach, its bilingual focus, and its longevity.44 In the span of 7 years, El Corno was able to publish issues dedicated to poetry from Argentina, Algeria, Brazil, Canada, Colombia, Chile, Cuba, Finland, Guatemala, Nicaragua, Spain, Mexico, El Salvador, Uruguay, and Venezuela. Randall and Mondragón also dedicated entire issues to the Canadian poet George Bowering, the Spanish poet Augsti Bartra, the Peruvian poet Rachel Jodorowsky, and Robert Kelly from the United States. The works of Thomas Merton, Allen Ginsberg, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, and George Bowering were translated to Spanish for the first time in the

Artists’ networks in the 1960s: Mexico City  203

pages of El Corno, while the works of Latin American writers like Cesar Vallejo and Rosario Castellanos were translated to English. Mostly, though, the magazine provided a forum for the lesser-known works of Ernesto Cardenal, Cecilia Vicuña, Raquel Jodorowsky, the Colombian Nadaista poets, and the Brazilian concrete poets, among other emergent artists from the Netherlands, Finland, Guatemala, El Salvador, and Algeria.

The letters section: building creative networks by mail For both Randall and Mondragón, the letters section of the magazine was an important vehicle through which to foster relationships between readers and collaborators and an open forum in which distinct points of view could be discussed. It was a place to share stories of family and friends and voice opinions on issues of the day. Many of the letters were personal. One could read about the creative process of a Finnish poet or the aspirations of a group of Nicaraguan poets in editing a magazine such as El Corno.45 Others like Carlos Coffeen Serpas from Mexico used the letter section to tell readers about ongoing health issues and a change of residence.46 The intimate tone of some of the letters provides insight into the interpersonal relationships forged through the pages of the magazine and that manifested in physical encounters in Randall and Mondragón’s home.These meetings provided a space where relationships forged through mail correspondence were strengthened and projects cemented.The Canadian poet George Bowering fondly recalls his visits to the Randall–Mondragón residence in Mexico City with his wife; Bowering’s work became known and published in several Latin American magazines as a result of these meetings.47 The letters section also provides insights into El Corno’s readership and distribution mechanisms. In the early years of El Corno, both Randall and Mondragón had close relationships with Arnaldo Orfila Reyna, who was at the time the director of Fondo de Cultura Económica, one of the largest publishing houses in Latin America, based in Mexico City. According to Randall, Orfila Reyna provided them with a list of libraries around the world to which they could send issues of the magazine. This is how Cecilia Vicuña, a young artist, came to find an edition of El Corno in a library in Santiago, Chile. Inspired, she soon became one of El Corno’s collaborators.48 Similarly, Kathleen Fraser expressed her enthusiasm when she found El Corno at her favorite bookstore in Paris. Fraser writes: Today, walking along the Seine to soak up last remnants of bookstalls faces fish towers I happened into the Mistral bookshop … in the reading room, your new first issue. I read it from cover to cover and was delighted with the offering. Not just one kind of sound. Room to stretch.49 Like Vicuña and Fraser, many others found the magazine on the shelves of their favorite libraries and sent their work to be published. In return, Randall and Mondragón turned these new contributors into representatives. In this way, El Corno

204  Gabriela Aceves Sepúlveda

propagated like a virus, with representatives in Latin America, the United States, Canada, England, Europe, India, and Australia (as listed in the magazine).50 As mentioned earlier, Randall and Mondragón also received financial assistance from governmental agencies, especially under the presidency of López Mateos. According to Randall, this support did not determine the ideological course of the magazine, except when they specifically attacked president Gustavo Díaz Ordaz’s government for its involvement in the massacre of students in 1968—a move that led to Randall’s departure from Mexico and the end of the magazine. Government financing was never enough, however, and donations from friends and collaborators were crucial to El Corno’s survival. Artists and poets published paid insertions and also organized fundraising events. Others, like George Bowering, purchased print originals of the editions dedicated to their work.51 As Davison notes, the letters section also a served as a source of alternative information, giving the magazine’s readers diverse perspectives on important events throughout the decade, such as the Civil Rights movement in the United States.52 In January 1964, El Corno published a letter in which Alan Rodes provides a firsthand account of the rally in Washington on March 28, 1965, focusing on some of the movement’s victories.53 A year earlier, in the July 1963 edition, Tom Stribling provides a different perspective by reporting on some of the difficulties that white communities in Mississippi were having adapting to changes brought about by the Civil Rights movement.54 These differing perspectives provided Latin American readers of El Corno an alternative and perhaps more complex view of the social issues that afflicted the U.S. population at a time when the prevalent view of American was that it was an imperialist force without internal problems. Similarly, El Corno became a source of information on Cuba after Kennedy’s embargo against the Island in 1962. For instance, in 1967, the rabbi Everett Gendler commended El Corno for dedicating Issue 23 (July 1967) to Cuban poetry, stating, “We depend on you to diminish our tragically self-binding, self-defeating and self-imposed cultural blockade.”55 Through its letters section, El Corno also provided a voice for two of the main institutional actors that dictated the progress of the cultural Cold War in the Americas: La Casa de Las Americas in Havana and, collectively, the various U.S.-sponsored cultural initiatives that followed Kennedy’s Alliance for Progress.56 While Randall ended up openly supporting the Cuban cause, in 1963, El Corno published a letter by the Argentinian Rafael Squirru, director of Cultural Affairs for the Pan-American Union, in which he criticized the views Fidel Castro voiced in the famous Carta a los Intelectuales (Letter to Intellectuals), published in El Corno a couple of months prior.57 Ultimately, El Corno’s support for Cuba would cost the magazine 500 subscriptions from the Pan American Union in Washington, in what Randall called a specific attempt to buy them off.58 In spite of this, El Corno published 24 more issues with a growing list of representatives, including: Hans Magnus Enzensberger in Germany; Ektor Nho and Victor García Robles in Argentina; Adrian Rawlins in Australia; Haroldo de Campos in Brazil; Malay Roy Choudhury in India; and Lasse Sodeberg in Sweden, among many others.

Artists’ networks in the 1960s: Mexico City  205

Other points of view discussed in the letters section clarify El Corno’s role as a vehicle of communication across the Americas. In 1963, the Nicaraguan Ernesto Cardenal enthusiastically announced that if the objective of El Corno was to connect the northern and southern hemispheres of the American continent, then a real Pan-American union could emerge through its pages.59 For Cardenal, the PanAmerican union would be developed through the creation of avenues, allowing English- and Spanish-speaking artists and intellectuals to understand each other. In Cardenal’s view, El Corno anticipated the literary exchanges that would subsequently be facilitated through the Center for Inter-American Relations and similar organizations by the end of the decade.60 A couple of months later, in 1964, the Argentinian poet Miguel Grinberg, founder of the Inter-American League of Poets, organized El Primer Encuentro de Poetas Americanos in Mexico City. Inspired by Cardenal’s call for building Pan-American solidarity through poetry, the meeting at Randall and Mondragón’s home gave rise to one of the main themes discussed in El Corno’s pages: the relation between art and politics.61 In response to Grinberg’s and Cardenal’s excitement about building solidarity through poetry, and worried about the perils of ascribing a particular function to art, the U.S. Trappist monk and poet Thomas Merton wrote a letter to the editors warning them about the risks of supporting art that had a political ideology. He observed, “We do not come in solidarity for reasons we have thought out in advance. … The solidarity of poets is not planned and welded together with political convictions, since these are matters of prejudice, cunning and design.”62 The following year, the publication of a series of poems against the Vietnam War unleashed a heated debate between Roger Taus, Ted Enslin, Robert Bly, and Denise Levertov that continued through four editions of the magazine.63 Certainly, El Corno gave voice to debates over the ways in which art and politics were entangled during the turbulent sixties and its letter section is a key site where these debates took place.The letter section provides evidence of the exchanges and the participatory kind of communication that the magazine cultivated between its collaborators and its readers. As various scholars have acknowledged, printed serial publications such as a magazine or periodical fostered public discourse “due to its unique distribution form—its circulation and seriality—which extended the thread of a conversation through space and time to be picked up by different groups of readers.”64 Other important events documented through the letters section provide a glimpse of the development of 1960s counterculture, including, for example, a report on the visit of the Zen Buddhist monk D.T. Suzuki and the psychoanalyst Erich Fromm’s short residence in the city of Cuernavaca.65 An important element in the mix of mysticism, psychoanalysis, and Buddhism that characterized some aspects of 1960s counterculture was a reappraisal of Indigenous cultures. El Corno provided an outlet for this revalorization. In its pages, for example, Ernesto Cardenal published reports on his research travels throughout the Amazons with the Yagua, Bora, and Huitot communities.66 Several issues were illustrated with graphics of pre-Hispanic Codices, including the Borgia, Nuttal, and Dresden as well as photo reproductions of clay and pottery from Teotihuacán, Oaxaca, and Veracruz.67

206  Gabriela Aceves Sepúlveda

The Mexican-based anthropologist Laurette Sejourne published numerous articles on Mexico’s pre-Hispanic past. As Randall recalls, “Sejourne deciphers the mysteries of Monte Alban, she who is without a doubt one of the most penetrating, visionary, and dialectical of our anthropologists.”68 As a product of its era, El Corno’s treatment of Indigenous cultures was yet not completely free from a colonial framework. To a certain extent, El Corno reflected the neo-colonial perspective that had been reworked by Mexican reformers as the bedrock of mexicanidad. Just as indigenous cultures were resuscitated as sources of national identity, similarly they provided an ideal and mystical past that fed 1960s counterculture mysticism and artistic production. Mexican anthropologists only adopted a more critical framework after 1968 as new generations of scholars began to question the role of the discipline in the erasure of the living Indigenous communities.69 While El Corno’s perspective on Indigenous cultures reflected the 1960s countercultural utopic search for an ideal Indigenous past that could inform the present, its open editorial stance also gave voice to indigenous cultures. As mentioned earlier pre-Hispanic art illustrated several issues, and in April 1964, Issue 10 was dedicated to “primitive poetry,” as the editors called it, and included poems by Comanches, Ojibwas, Sioux, Nahuas, Mayas, Otomies, and Pigmies, among others.70 While such inclusion was burdened with an ethnocentric approach evidenced by the use of the word “primitive” it also followed the editor’s interests in building bridges across cultures, nations, and artistic disciplines, and traditions. Yet, due to the ways in which these images were sequenced throughout the pages of the magazine and placed beside other types of images, El Corno’s iconoclasm anticipated curatorial practices that later countered Eurocentric practices within the art world such as Jean Hubert-Martin’s 1989 exhibition Magiciens de la Terre at the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris.71

A way of being in the world: a magazine as an alternative gallery space One of the most crucial, understudied, aspects of El Corno is its function as an alternative forum for showcasing and distributing art. By reproducing artworks by established and emerging artists from the United States, Canada, Europe, and the Latin American region, El Corno provided an unmatched opportunity to showcase artists who otherwise would not have been presented side by side. As art critic Lucy Lippard has acknowledged, magazines and periodicals in the 1960s were an “ideal vehicle for art.”72 By providing a forum in which distinct approaches to art making could be shown side by side, El Corno proposed a reconfiguration of traditional disciplinary discourses and hierarchies within the art world. This reconfiguration was reflective of artists’ experimentation across media and practices. It also challenged Eurocentric art historical narratives that ignore cultural production from the global south, place it in a subordinate position, or frame it as a mere source of inspiration vis-á-vis U.S./European cultural production. Indeed, El Corno’s iconoclastic editorial approach anticipated a renewed interest in mapping out transnational

Artists’ networks in the 1960s: Mexico City  207

exchanges that have the potential for decentering U.S./Eurocentric approaches to the histories of art, writ large.73 In the early years of El Corno, Randall’s personal relations with artists based in New York and Mexico’s cultural milieu, facilitated El Corno’s iconoclastic curatorial approach. In particular, Randall’s friendship with New York-based painter Ellen de Kooning was helpful in promoting El Corno in visual art circles in the United States and in securing work for publication. Later, as El Corno began to circulate more widely, artists recognized the potential to gain recognition through El Corno and would send collaborations and donations for fundraising events.74 The magazine included reproductions of artworks by U.S.-based artists, including the abstract expressionist painters Ellen De Kooning, Milton Resnik, Franz Kline, and Mark Di Suvero; interdisciplinary media artist Bruce Conner; and pop artist Marisol, as well as the Canada-based multi-media artist Roy Kiooka, alongside reproductions by Mexico-based artists including the surrealist painter Lenora Carrington; neofigurative artists José Luis Cuevas, Arnold Belkin, and Carlos Cofeen Serpas; social realist graphic artist Rini Templeton; conceptual artists Mathias Goeritz and Felipe Ehrenberg; Brazilian concrete poet Haroldo de Campos; documentary photography by Mexicans Nacho López, Rodrigo Moya, and U.S. Larry Siegel; graphic work by French Topor and Colombian Halvario Barrios; and reproductions of preHispanic codices, among many others. This iconoclastic approach excited many of its readers. For instance, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, an interdisciplinary artist and founder of City Lights Bookstore in San Francisco, wrote a letter to the editors praising the publication of Indigenous poetry, Brazilian concrete poetry and illustration by Topor. No. 10 of CORNO is great . . . Especially the drawings by Topor, the Indian primitive poetry, and the Brazilian concretions. … As for Topor, could you give me his address? I am working on a book of Happenings and Routines, which is supposed to go to press at New Directions in 3 weeks, and I would like to use that drawing of Topor’s showing the two men with bandaged heads … (In fact, that drawing caused me to write a new Routine for the book.)75 This and other similar correspondence makes visible how artistic experimentation was taking place simultaneously across the Americas and how El Corno fostered artistic exchanges. By facilitating these encounters and conversations through their open editorial approach, Mondragón and Randall were in a parallel dialogue with intermedia art approaches, such as those of Fluxus artists, whose aim was to create networks of artists outside the art establishment by making creative use of technologies of communication like mail and publishing networks. As Jon Bird and Michael Newman defined it, “Fluxus was an international art movement, which stressed the ephemeral and everyday in performances, promoted the experimentation across media and disciplines, and anarchically derided the aspirations of bourgeois taste.”76 Fluxus artists sought to break with the traditional relation between

208  Gabriela Aceves Sepúlveda

the object of art and its viewers by making the viewer an integral part of the work and bringing everyday life into art.77 As George Macinuas, one of the founders of Fluxus, would put it in the 1963 Manifesto: Purge the work of bourgeois sickness, “intellectual”, professional and commercialized culture. … Purge the world of “EUROPANISM”! … Promote living art, anti-art, promote NON ART REALITY to be fully grasped by all peoples, not only critics and dilatants and professionals … FUSE the cadres of cultural social and political revolutionaries into united front and action.78 Indeed, Maciunas’ call to unite with cultural and political revolutionaries was not far removed from El Corno’s objectives. In what follows I will trace simultaneous points of reciprocity amongst artists published in El Corno and those aligned with Fluxus and conceptual art practices in order to suggest how the networks forged through the pages of El Corno trace a more nuanced history of the development of avant-garde artistic discourses and practices during the sixties. In Mexico, visual artists were more amenable than the literary establishment to embracing the opportunities for internationalization that El Corno provided. As elsewhere, the 1960s in Mexico were a time of experimentation in which many artists sought to break disciplinary boundaries and bring the everyday to the level of art. Mexico City-based artists adopted distinct approaches to address these objectives and most of them found a forum in El Corno. The magazine quickly became an alternative exhibition space for some of the most active and experimental currents in visual arts in Mexico City. One of those currents was represented by the art collective Los Hartos, established by Mathias Goeritz, Pedro Freiberg, and José Luis Cuevas in 1961. Los Hartos published their manifesto in the second edition of El Corno. Declaring themselves, “fed-up with everything but in particular with the artificial and hysterical realm called the art-world including all its kitsch painting salons,”79 they suggested simple daily acts such as harvesting, working, or parenting a child could also be considered works of art. Los Hartos’ attempts to position everyday life in the realm of art found an echo in the anti-establishment ethos that characterized El Corno. Los Hartos launched an attack on the Mexican cultural establishment, which they saw as advocates of the Mexican School (social realism) as well as the abstractionist currents that circulated in galleries at the time.80 On 30 November 1961, Los Hartos hosted their first and only art exhibition in Mexico City. In the exhibit, artworks by Goeritz, Cuevas and Freiberg were shown along with works by a homemaker, a babysitter, a boy, a chicken, a factory worker, and a farmer. The gallery canceled the show after the opening night due to scathing comments by art critics.81 Los Hartos also showcased their artworks in El Corno. They published paid insertions such as an ad by Mathias Goeritz in which he proclaimed to be “fed-up with Coca-Cola but nonetheless a fan of it.”82 Coca-Cola was a symbol of U.S. Imperialism in the region but also represented U.S. culture (understood as English language, rock music and countercultural movements such as the beats and hippies) something

Artists’ networks in the 1960s: Mexico City  209

that increasingly attracted a younger generation of Mexicans and certainly found an echo in El Corno.83 Clearly, Goertiz was aware of the contradictory feelings of repulsion and attraction that many felt towards the U.S. at the time. Like Goertiz, other artists, notably pop artist Andy Warhol and Brazilian Cildo Meireles, also appropriated the Coca-Cola brand to express these contradictions.84 Goeritz was not alone in experimenting with the format of the paid insertion. In the same issue, a paid insertion by California-based artist Bruce Conner was censored due to its obscenity. The insertion read: “Official Statement. Advertisement paid by Bruce Conner and refused by the editors due to its obscene content.”85 On the same page, another paid insertion by José Luis Cuevas advertised the artist’s accomplishments in winning the first prize at the Sao Paolo Bienniale and at “the VII Mostra Internatzionale di Bianco e Nero, Lugano (Switzeralnd) etcetera.”86 The irreverent use of paid insertions for self-promotion became prevalent amongst conceptual artists by the mid-1960s; they increasingly turned away from creating art objects in order to escape the art market and access wider publics. Many turned to the mass communication possibilities of new technologies as ways to develop alternative means of art distribution and circumvent the gallery system. Implicit in this aim was the goal of making art truly accessible and democratic.87 Magazines, artist’s books, and mail art were some of the most important vehicles for conceptual artists who turned successively to text, photos, maps, lists, and diagrams that either served as records of their artistic acts or were the art itself. For instance, by 1967 U.S.-based conceptual artists Dan Graham associated with the magazine Aspen:The Magazine in a Box, established by Phyllis Glick in 1964, began to use paid advertisements as way to distribute work. Encouraging artists to employ the advertisement space of commercial magazines, Graham claimed that this “functioned like holes in the topography of the magazine”, suggesting,“they were intended to puncture or disrupt its discourse.”88 As Allen suggests, this turn also had an antagonistic dimension: “Taking out paid advertisements was a way for artists to siphon off the commercial publicity of the art magazine and repurpose it for their own interests.”89 However, as various scholars have noted, the aspirations of conceptual artists for circumventing the market were mired in contradictions, as many of these same artists continued to broker relationships with the economies and institutions of art.90 Like El Corno (and most other Mexico City-based cultural endeavors that claimed to be independent and anti-establishment) some of Los Hartos’ members received funding from the Mexican government. They also showed in commercial and public art galleries. Hence, just like Goertiz, who was fed-up with Coca-Cola but still a fan, many of El Corno’s collaborators were anti-establishment but still enjoyed their privileged positions as artists in a country where the state funded much of its metropolitan cultural production. While private art galleries and collectors existed in Mexico City, the state was the main patron for the arts up to the 1980s. This funding model began with the establishment of the Secretaría de Educación Pública, SEP (Ministry of Public Education) in the aftermath of the 1910 Revolution and was formalized with the creation of the Instituto Nacional de Bellas Artes, INBA (National Institute of Fine Arts) in 1946.

210  Gabriela Aceves Sepúlveda

Other artists with strong influences on the Mexico City art scene during the sixties included the Chilean Alejandro Jodorowsky, the Spanish film director Fernando Arrabal, and the French graphic artist Roland Topor. Jodorowsky had established the Movimiento Panico (Panic Movement) collective along with Arrabal and Topor with the objective of critiquing contemporary French philosophy through humor.91 Jodorowsky began to intervene in the theater scene in Mexico City in the early 1960s with a variety of proposals, including Efímeros Teatrales (panic ephemera), which were unique and improvised performative events that at times followed a script and employed artists.92 One such event, Efímero de San Carlos of April 1964 took place in a set that included “a relief formed of bread and tortillas” in which a character designated as “Monster-monster” tore apart a living dove with his teeth, followed by a chorus dressed in black tights kneeling and religiously intoning a set of slogans and clichés, such as “Vote for the PRI, it’s the program that matters.”93 As Cuauhtémoc Medina argues, art historians have exclusively used the term “happenings” to describe the turn to performative practices by visual artists such as Allan Kaprow.94 However, in the early 1960s this turn was clearly embraced across disciplinary traditions including the live poetry sessions by beat poets such as Ferlinghetti and the theater experiments of Jodorowsky. While Jodorowsky’s and Topor’s experiments with improvised events were rooted in the French surrealist Antonin Artaud’s Cruel Theater,95 the similitude and coexistence with the international happenings of the era is made evident through various exchanges recorded in the pages of El Corno such as Ferlinghetti’s letter to the editors. A closer investigation of these exchanges could further reveal El Corno’s role in enabling shared discourses and art experimentations across geographies. Certainly, El Corno was a meeting place for artists and an alternative exhibition space for artists the world over. Its letter section became a site of protest, ­solidarity, and means of communication between friends. Through its pages El Corno prompted encounters that developed into meaningful friendships. In the span of seven years, El Corno tracked the development of such relations, which endured well past its own demise. As we can see, El Corno’s legacy extended well beyond the literary field. Still another way to track that legacy rests with two young collaborators: Felipe Ehrenberg and Martha Hellion. Hellion and Ehrenberg physically ensured that El Corno continued both within and outside of Mexico.96 The young Felipe Ehrenberg began to collaborate with El Corno in 1967 when he first illustrated the cover and several pages of Issue 22 (1967). By Issue 26 (1968), he had become part of the editorial board. He and his wife, Martha Hellion, were part of a group of young artists interested in transforming the Mexican art scene. Before joining El Corno, both had established forums to foster dialogues between artists in remote communities in the state of Guerrero and Mexico City.97 Like other close collaborators of El Corno, Ehrenberg and Hellion fled Mexico in 1968. They established themselves in Devon, England, where they remained in exile until 1974. Their participation in El Corno had changed their artistic focus to the production of artists’ books, and in Devon they bought an old manor and a printing

Artists’ networks in the 1960s: Mexico City  211

press, establishing the publishing house Beau Geste Press (BGP). Like El Corno, BGP also served as a “meeting place” for a community of global artists who would stay at Hellion and Ehrenberg’s house while working on their publications.98 Soon enough, BGP began to participate in independent publishing networks related to Fluxus. In 1974, Ehrenberg returned to Mexico, bringing with him a cumulus of new relations that, along with his previous experiences with El Corno, were hugely influential in the development of conceptually-based art practices in Mexico in the mid-1970s (mail art, artists’ books, community arts, and the movement of art collectives or grupos). Indeed, it was through Ehrenberg and Hellion that the legacies of El Corno were brought back to Mexico. In Ehrenberg’s words, his participation in El Corno was more than a stage in his life; it was an experience that showed him a “way of being in the world” that repeated itself constantly throughout his life.99 As Gwen Allen argues, magazines provide a different kind of information about the past than do other kinds of publications. Magazines “emphasize the role of the accidental” and “the unintended in what often gets passed down as inevitable. “They show us things that might otherwise get lost, that might not be considered important enough to be recorded in more authoritative documents.”100 In pointing to the value of El Corno as a site of artistic encounters, debates, and conversations, and as an alternative exhibition space, this chapter makes visible the ways in which El Corno fosters a re-visioning of the sixties that considers the role of transnational relations and exchanges between artists and intellectuals across the globe.

Notes   1 Timothy Scott Brown and Andrew Lison, “Introduction,” in The Global Sixties in Sound and Vision: Media, Counterculture, Revolt, ed.Timothy Scott Brown and Andrew Lison (New York, N.Y,: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014); Sönke Kunkel, Empire of Pictures: Global Media and the 1960s Remaking of American Foreign Policy (New York, N.Y,: Berghahn, 2016).   2 Dick Higgins, “Intermedia with Appendix by Hannah Higgins,” Leonardo 34, no. 1 (2001).   3 Gwen Allen, Artists’ Magazines. An Alternative Space for Art (Cambridge, MA; London, UK: MIT Press, 2011), 1.   4 Harvey Wolin was only involved with the first two issues of the magazine. Margaret Randall, “El Corno Emplumado, 1961–1969: Some Notes in Retrospect,” in The Little Magazine in America: A Modern Documentary History, ed. Elliott Anderson and Mary Kinzie (Yonkers, N.Y.: Pushcart, 1978), 412.   5 Ibid.   6 Ibid., 418.   7 George Bowering, interview by Gabriela Aceves Sepulveda, 14 June, 2010, E-mail; Felipe Ehrenberg, interview by Gabriela Aceves Sepulveda, 13 April, 2011, E-mail.   8 Irene Rostagno, “The Plumed Horn/ El Corno Emplumado:The Spell of Cuba in the 1960s,” in Searching for Recognition.The Promotion of Latin American Literature in the United States, ed. Irene Rostagno (Westport, CT and London, UK: Greenwood Press, 1997), 60–87.   9 With the exception of Alan Davison’s detailed study of the magazine, published in 1994, from which this study draws extensively, and Irene Rostagano’s chapter, few literary studies are dedicated to the magazine. Alan R. Davison, El Corno Emplumado =the Plumed Horn: A Voice of the Sixties (Toledo, OH: Textos Toledanos, 1994). However, in recent years scholars have turned their attention to the broader legacies of El Corno.

212  Gabriela Aceves Sepúlveda

These works include: Olivier Debroise, La era de la discrepancia: Arte y cultura visual en México, 1968–1997 (Mexico: Universidad Autónoma de Mexico, 2006); Anne Mette Nielsen and Nikolenka Beltran, directors, “El Corno Emplumado - Una historia de los Sesenta” (Nikolenka Beltrán y Asociados, 2005). In early 2015, Giuliana Prevedello and Lorena Botello hosted the exhibition “El Corno Emplumado, A Magazine” from Mexico City at the Centro Cultural Tlatelolco in Mexico City and Harris Feinsod curated an online exhibition and archival project Corno Emplumado: Hemispheric Poetry Networks, 1962–1969, http://opendoor.northwestern.edu/archive/exhibits/show/elcorno-emplumado-hemispheric, accessed April 27, 2016.   10 For a discussion on the reception of U.S. writers see Rostagno, “The Plumed Horn/ El Corno Emplumado: The Spell of Cuba in the 1960s,” 64; For a discussion on the reception of El Corno by the Mexican literary milieu see Randall and Mondragón, “Editor’s Note,” El Corno Emplumado/The Plumed Horn, no. 21 (1967), 5–7.   11 Randall, “Remembering El Corno Emplumado”.   12 Ibid.  13 Brown and Lison, “Introduction,” in The Global Sixties in Sound and Vision: Media, Counterculture, Revolt, 1.   14 Ibid.   15 Ibid.; Christopher Dunn,“Mapping Tropicália,” in The Global Sixties in Sound and Vision: Media, Counterculture, Revolt (New York, N.Y.: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), 29–42.   16 Eric Zolov, “Introduction: Latin America in the Global Sixties,” The Americas 70, no. 3 (2014), 349–362; G.M. Joseph, Anne Rubestein, and Eric Zolov, eds, Fragments of a Golden Age:The Politics of Culture in Mexico since 1940 (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2001); Eric Zolov, Refried Elvis: The Rise of the Mexican Counterculture (Berkeley, CA and London: University of California Press, 1999).   17 Zolov, 353.   18 Karen Dubinsky et al., eds, New World Coming: The Sixties and the Shaping of Global Consciousness (Toronto: Between the Lines, 2009), 3; G.M. Joseph and Daniela Spenser, eds, In from the Cold: Latin America’s New Encounter with the Cold War (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2008).   19 Debroise, LA era de la discrepancia Discrepancia: Arte y cultura visual en México, 1968–1997; Alex Alberro, “A Media Art: Conceptualism in Latin America in the 1960s,” in Rewriting Conceptual Art, ed. Michael Newman and Jon Bird (London, UK: Reaktion Books, 1999); Luis Camnitzer et al., Global Conceptualism: Points of Origin, 1950s–1980s (New York, N.Y.: Queens Museum of Art, available through D.A.P./Distributed Art Publishers, 1999).   20 Monica Juneja, “The Ethnic and the Global—Tangled Trajectories of the ‘Primitive’ in Modern and Contemporary Art,” in Global Art Challenges:Towards an Ecology of Knowledges (Faculty of Geography and History, Barcelona University and MACBA, Museum of Contemporary Art Barcelona, 2016) ; Lamoni Giulia, “Exploring the Role of Friendship in Transnational Artistic Networks: Lourdes Castro in Paris (1960s–1970s),” ibid. (2016); Béatrice Joyeux-Prunel, “Graphs, Charts, Maps: Plotting the Global History of Modern Art,” ibid.   21 Boaventura de Sousa Santos, Another Knowledge is Possible: Beyond Northern Epistemologies (London and New York, N.Y,:Verso, 2007).   22 Juneja, “The Ethnic and the Global—Tangled Trajectories of the ‘Primitive’ in Modern and Contemporary Art.”; Lamoni Giulia, “Exploring the Role of Friendship in Transnational Artistic Networks: Lourdes Castro in Paris (1960s–1970s),” ibid. (2016).   23 Béatrice Joyeux-Prunel, “Graphs, Charts, Maps: Plotting the Global History of Modern Art,” ibid.   24 Some of these magazines included: Pájaro cascabel and Cuento from Mexico; Eco contemporáneo and Airón from Buenos Aires, El techo de la ballena from Caracas; and Los tzántzicos from Quito; and The Floating Bear, Caterpillar, Ikon, Monk’s Pond, The Sixties and many others in the United States. See Margaret Randall,“Remembering El Corno Emplumado” Open Door Archives, http://opendoor.northwestern.edu/archive/exhibits/

Artists’ networks in the 1960s: Mexico City  213

show/el-corno-emplumado-hemispheric/remembering-el-corno-randall. Accessed April 20, 2016.   25 Allen, Artists’ Magazines. An Alternative Space for Art, 9.   26 Ibid., 7.   27 Randall, “El Corno Emplumado, 1961–1969: Some Notes in Retrospect,” 407.   28 Peter Faulkner, “Philip Lamantia: An American Original,” http://www.pennilesspress. co.uk/annexe/philip_lamantia.html.   29 Randall, “El Corno Emplumado, 1961–1969: Some Notes in Retrospect,” 407.  30 Randall, Mondragón, and Wolin, “Editor’s Note,” El Corno Emplumado/The Plumed Horn, no. 1 (1962).   31 Randall, “Remembering El Corno Emplumado”.   32 Randall and Mondragón, “Editor’s Note,” El Corno Emplumado/The Plumed Horn, no. 15 (1965), 5–6. Unless otherwise noted all translations are by the author.   33 Ibid.   34 Randall and S Mondragón, “Editor’s Note,” El Corno Emplumado/The Plumed Horn, 24 (1967), 5–6.   35 Davison, El Corno Emplumado=the Plumed Horn: A Voice of the Sixties, 7.   36 Randall and Mondragón, “Editor’s Note,” El Corno Emplumado/The Plumed Horn, no. 26 (1968), 6.   37 Ibid.   38 Randall and Mondragón, “Editor’s Note,” El Corno Emplumado/The Plumed Horn, no. 28 (1968), 6–7.   39 Ibid., 7   40 Ehrenberg, “Felipe Ehernberg, Electronic Communciation.”   41 Randall, Some Notes in Retrospect, 413.   42 Ibid.   43 Randall, To Change the World; My Years in Cuba (New Brunswick, N.J.: Routledge, 2009), 33–35.   44 Rostagno, The Plumed Horn/El Corno Emplumado:The Spell of Cuba in the 1960s, 60–87.   45 Matti Rossi, “Letter to the Editors,” El Corno Emplumado/The Plumed Horn, no. 13 (1965), 121–22; Edwin Yllescas and Roberto Cuadra, “Letter to the Editors,” no. 1 (1962), 63–65.   46 Carlos Coffeen Serpas, “Letter to the Editors,” El Corno Emplumado/The Plumed Horn, no. 2 (1962): 124–125.   47 Bowering, “George Bowering, E-Mail Communciation.”   48 Cecilia Vicuña in Nielsen and Beltran, “El Corno Emplumado Una Historia De Los Sesenta.”   49 Kathleen Fraser, “Letter to the Editors,” El Corno Emplumado/The Plumed Horn, no. 3 (1962), 131.   50 A list of distributors was printed in the magazine, which changed from edition to edition. Issue 19 lists distributors in Germany, Argentina, Australia, Brazil, Canada, Cuba, Costa Rica, Colombia, Ecuador, England, India, Paraguay, Puerto Rico, Venezuela, Guatemala and Spain. Margaret Randall and Sergio Mondragón,“Representates/Representatives,” ibid., no. 19 (1967), 2.   51 Bowering, “George Bowering, E-Mail Communciation.”   52 Davison, El Corno Emplumado=the Plumed Horn: A Voice of the Sixties, 17.  53 Alan Rodes, “Letter to the Editors,” El Corno Emplumado/The Plumed Horn, no. 9 (1964), 147.   54 Tom Stirbling, ibid., no. 7 (1963), 173.   55 Everett Gendler, ibid., no. 23 (1967), 163.   56 These included the Inter-American Foundation for the Arts, The Center for InterAmerican Relations, and the cultural division of the Organization of American States (OAS), all of which in one way or another followed Kennedy’s U.S. foreign policy towards Cuba through the program Alliance for Progress.

214  Gabriela Aceves Sepúlveda

 57 Rafael Squirru, “Letter to Editors,” El Corno Emplumado/The Plumed Horn, no. 9 (1964), 144–145; Fidel Castro, “Carta a Los Intelectuales (Fragmento),” ibid., no. 7 (1963) 38–40.   58 Randall, “El Corno Emplumado, 1961–1969: Some Notes in Retrospect,” 416.   59 Ernesto Cardenal, “Letter to the Editors,” El Corno Emplumado/The Plumed Horn, no. 5 (1963), 145–146.  60 Rostagno, “The Plumed Horn/ El Corno Emplumado: The Spell of Cuba in the 1960s,” 85.   61 Randall and Mondragón, El Corno, (11) July 1964.   62 Thomas Merton, “Message to Poets,” El Corno Emplumado/The Plumed Horn, no. 10 (1964), 127–129.   63 See the discussion between Roger Taus, Ted Enslin, Robert Bly and Denise Levetrov in El Corno Emplumado, no. 17 (1966); Ibid., no. 19 (1966); and Ibid., no. 21 (1967).   64 Allen, Artists’ Magazines. An Alternative Space for Art, 17.   65 Laurette Sejourne “En busca de la Cultura Perdida,” El Corno Emplumado/The Plumed Horn, no. 5 (1963), 8–26; and Cuauhtémoc Medina, Pánico Recuperado, 90–103.   66 Ernesto Cardenal, “Letter to the Editors,” El Corno Emplumado/The Plumed Horn, no. 19 (1966), 179.   67 Randall and Mondragón, “Editors Notes,” ibid., no. 10 (1964), 5–6.   68 Randall, “El Corno Emplumado, 1961–1969: Some Notes in Retrospect,” 410.   69 Arturo Warman, De Eso Que Llaman Antropología Mexicana (Mexico: Editorial Nuestro Tiempo, 1970).   70 Randall and Mondragón, Editor’s Notes, El Corno Emplumado/ The Plumed Horn, no. 10 (1964), 4–6.   71 For more on “Magiciens de la Terre” see Rasheed Araeen, “Magicians of the Earth: On ‘Magiciens De La Terre’, 1989,” in Exhbitions, ed. Lucy Steeds (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2014).   72 Cited in Allen, Artists’ Magazines. An Alternative Space for Art, 15.   73 Juneja, “The Ethnic and the Global—Tangled Trajectories of the ‘Primitive’ in Modern and Contemporary Art.”; Lamoni Giulia, “Exploring the Role of Friendship in Transnational Artistic Networks: Lourdes Castro in Paris (1960s–1970s),” ibid. (2016).  74 In Issue 15 (1965), two parallel events were organized to raise funds to publish El Corno. In Mexico, Galeria Pecanins organized an art auction of more that 80 artworks from artists of 12 different countries. In San Francisco, a group of poets celebrated a collective poetry reading. See Randall and Mondragón, “Editor’s Note,” 5–6.   75 Lawrence Ferlinghetti, “San Francisco, 27 April 1964,” ibid., no. 11 (1964), 154.  76 Michael Newman and Jon Bird, Rewriting Conceptual Art (London, UK: Reaktion Books, 1999), 6.   77 Higgins, “Intermedia with Appendix by Hannah Higgins.”   78 George Maciunas,“Manifesto of 1963,” http://georgemaciunas.com/about/cv/manifesto-i/   79 Los Hartos, “Manifesto De Los Hartos,” El Corno Emplumado/The Plumed Horn, no. 2 (1962).   80 Alberto Hijar, Frentes, coaliciones y talleres. Grupos visuales en México En El Siglo Xx (Ciudad de México: CENIDIAP, 2007).   81 Ibid.   82 Mathias Goeritz,“Mathias Goeritz Está Harto Pero Toma Coca Cola,” El Corno Emplumado/The Plumed Horn, no. 3 (1963), 143.   83 Zolov, Refried Elvis:The Rise of the Mexican Counterculture.   84 For a discussion on the use of Coca-Cola in the work of Meireles and Warhol see Alberro, “A Media Art: Conceptualism in Latin America in the 1960s.”  85 Bruce Conner, “Official Statement,” El Corno Emplumado/The Plumed Horn, no. 3 (1963), 136.   86 Jose Luis Cuevas, “Jose Luis Cuevas,” ibid.   87 Allen, Artists’ Magazines. An Alternative Space for Art, 15.   88 Ibid., 39.

Artists’ networks in the 1960s: Mexico City  215

  89 Ibid.   90 Ibid., 15.   91 Jodorowsky, “Las Fábulas Pánicas,” in era de la discrepancia: Arte y cultura visual en Mexico, 1968–1997, ed. Olivier Debroise (Mexico City: Universidad Autónoma de Mexico, 2006), 104–105.   92 Ibid.   93 Medina, “Pánico Recuperado,” in La era de la discrepancia: Arte y cultura visual en México, 1968–1997, ed. Olivier Debroise (Mexico City: Universidad Autónoma de Mexico, 2006), 94–95.   94 Ibid.   95 Ibid.   96 For more on Ehrenberg see Vanessa D. Kam, “Archives as Art: The Accumulations of Felipe Ehrenberg and Lynn Hershman Lesson,” Imprint 1, no. 26 (2008); Felipe Ehrenberg and Fernando Llanos, eds, Felipe Ehrenberg (Mexico: Editorial Diamantina, 2007).   97 Martha Hellion, “Milnovecientosesenta,” in Felipe Eherenberg, ed. Fernando Llanos and Felipe Ehrenberg (Mexico: Editorial Diamantina, 2007), 97–110.   98 Ibid.   99 Felipe Ehrenberg in Nielsen Anne Mette Beltrean Nicolenka. El corno emplumado una historia de los sesenta. Denmark: Angulos Production, 2005 (DVD). 100 Allen, Artists’ Magazines. An Alternative Space for Art, 11.

Selected bibliography Allen, Gwen. Artists’ Magazines. An Alternative Space for Art. Cambridge, Massachusetts; London: The MIT Press, 2011. Beauchesne, Kim, and Alessandra Santos eds. The Utopian Impulse in Latin America. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011. Bronfman, Alejandra, and Andrew Grant Wood. Media, Sound, and Culture in Latin America and the Caribbean. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2012. Brown, Timothy Scott, and Andrew Lison, eds. The Global Sixties in Sound and Vision: Media, Counterculture, Revolt. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014. Camnitzer, Luis, Jane Farver, Rachel Weiss, and László Beke. Global Conceptualism: Points of Origin, 1950s–1980s. New York: Queens Museum of Art: D.A.P./Distributed Art Publishers, 1999. Carey, Elaine. Plaza of Sacrifices: Gender, Power, and Terror in 1968 Mexico. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2005. Debroise, Olivier. La era de la discrepancia: Arte y cultura visual en México, 1968–1997. Mexico: Universidad Autónoma de Mexico, 2006. Dubinsky, Karen, Catherine Krull, Susan Lord, Sean Mills, and Scott Rutherford, eds. New World Coming: The Sixties and the Shaping of Global Consciousness. Toronto: Between the Lines, 2009. Flaherty, George F. Hotel Mexico: Dwelling on the ’68 Movement. Oakland, California: University of California Press, 2016. Hijar, Alberto. Frentes, Coaliciones Y Talleres. Grupos Visuales En México En El Siglo Xx. Ciudad de México: CENIDIAP, 2007. Joseph, G.M., and Daniela Spenser, eds. In from the Cold Latin America’s New Encounter with the Cold War. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2008. Joseph, G.M., Anne Rubestein, and Eric Zolov, eds. Fragments of a Golden Age: The Politics of Culture in Mexico since 1940. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2001. López, Rick A. Crafting Mexico: Intellectuals, Artisans, and the State after the Revolution. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2010.

216  Gabriela Aceves Sepúlveda

Newman, Michael, and Jon Bird, eds. Rewriting Conceptual Art. London, UK: Reaktion Books, 1999. Pensado, Jaime M. Rebel Mexico: Student Unrest and Authoritarian Political Culture During the Long Sixties. Stanford, California: Stanford University Press, 2013. Randall, Margaret. To Change the World: My Years in Cuba. New Brunswick: Routledge, 2009. Santos, Boaventura de Sousa. Another Knowledge Is Possible: Beyond Northern Epistemologies. London and New York:Verso, 2007. Zolov, Eric. Refried Elvis: The Rise of the Mexican Counterculture. Berkeley and London: University of California Press, 1999. Zolov, Eric. “Latin America in the Global Sixties.” The Americas 70, no. 3 (2014).

11 “KILL THAT GOOK, YOU GOOK” Asian Americans and the Vietnam War Karen L. Ishizuka

Alan Takemoto’s penetrating cartoon of a white officer ordering an Asian American soldier to “Kill that gook, you gook!,” on the cover of the May 1972 issue of Gidra: The Monthly of the Asian American Experience hit at the heart of the singular experience that Americans of Asian descent faced during the Sixties: looking like the enemy. Here, the intentional reiteration of the term “gook,” a racial epithet for Asians, the origins of which are tied to the US military, describes an idiosyncratic subject position that became inescapable for Asian Americans during the 1960s.1 Simultaneously bizarre and perilous, this instantiation as both enemy and citizen led to a decidedly Asian American analysis of the Vietnam War, which in turn strengthened a distinct Asian American identity.2 The following essay explores this analysis and the impact it had on the formation of a specifically Asian American political identity as it was presented in Gidra, the first and longest running newspaper of the Asian American movement. In so doing, this inquiry ventures inward within the parameters of the United States to examine how such transnational issues as power, race, imperialism and colonialism played out in a local context during the worldwide phenomenon that historian Arthur Marwick called “the cultural revolution of the Long Sixties”—a time of worldwide change that spanned from the 1950s to the 1970s.3 As one who came of age during the Sixties, and also as a third generation American of Asian descent, I was a participant in the culture I have come to examine.4 As a social scientist of color whose history was marginalized, I have come to understand the criticality of primary documents such as Gidra as well as oral histories in order to reconstitute my collective history and position it within its larger national and international contexts. I was an undergraduate at California State University, Los Angeles when Gidra was first published and immediately became an avid reader and subscriber. Aware

of Gidra: Monthly of the Asian American Experience, Vol. IV, No. 5 (May 1972) by Alan Takemoto.5

FIGURE 11.1 Cover

Asian Americans and the Vietnam War  219

of the significance of the nascent Asian American movement as it was unfolding at the time, I archived my copies of Gidra (as well as other documents from the Sixties) during the historical moment and amassed approximately 350 units of materials dating from 1968 to 1988 that I have made use of in my research and teaching over the decades. Bernardine Dohrn, another participant observer of the Sixties known more for her anti-Vietnam War activity with the group called the Weather Underground than for the law professor she became, claimed in 2001 that the Sixties “began in 1954 and they’re not over yet.”6 Her contemporary Tom Hayden, co-founder of the New Left organization Students for a Democratic Society and former California state senator, added, “If the Sixties are not over, it is up to the Sixties generation to continue trying to find our truth.”7 As a member of that generation, this essay is part of my effort to find our truth. By 1970, approximately 80 percent of Japanese Americans and 50 percent of Chinese and Filipino Americans were U.S.-born citizens. Unlike European immigrants, our grandparents were barred from becoming naturalized citizens and were considered “aliens ineligible for citizenship.” However, two, three and even four generations later, we grew up as “all Americans” and were shocked when we discovered that others did not see us as “fellow Americans” but as “Orientals”—foreigners in our own country. Philosopher and public intellectual Cornel West, pointed out that whiteness is parasitic on blackness.8 Cultural theorist Stuart Hall claimed “without the Rest, the West would not have been able to recognize and represent itself as the summit of human history.”9 And professor of African American and Asian American Studies Helen H. Jun noted that the Chinese immigrant acted as the “negative instance of national belonging.”10 In this legacy, as I have contended elsewhere, “Orientals” in America—originally considered “aliens” and “heathens” as well as being nonwhite, acted as the Opposite Other by which Americanism was fully articulated.11 With this racial baggage, incited by an imperialistic war against people who looked like us, and inspired by the vision of a Third World, Asians of all ages in the United States subverted the Orientalist tactic of lumping all Asians together in order to form a deliberately pan-Asian and adamantly American political identity as Asian Americans.12 Law professor and activist Chris Iijima asserted that, because the construction of Asian American identity was a mechanism and by-product of Asian Americans organizing in the Global Sixties, the development of a distinctly Asian Pacific American identity was never meant to be a synonym for common heritage or even racial pride. Iijima declared, “It was the recognition of this dynamic that marked the beginning of Asian American identity.”13 Asian American Studies professor Elaine Kim further delineated the activist roots of the hybrid identity of Asian American. Noting that Asian American writing tended to focus more on claiming an American than an Asian identity, she questioned whether this emphasis in fact revealed a veiled wish to “hide our ancestry,” a collective colonized spirit attempting to align itself with the hegemonic society.

220  Karen L. Ishizuka

In response, she called to mind that we must consider such questions within the complexity of minority discourse, tied as it is to issues of gender, class and historical erasure. She noted that our self-invention—stimulated as it was in opposition to U.S. aggression in Southeast Asia—in effect enabled Asian Americans to create links with our countries of origin on our own terms, instead of being objectified in Orientalist terms. Hence, she concluded, rather than out of any desire to deny our Asianness, our claim on America “is in fact a celebration of our marginality and a profound expression of protest against being defined by domination.”14

Gidra: the monthly of the Asian American experience In the 1960s and 1970s, thousands of Americans turned to alternative news sources such as the Berkeley Barb, the Los Angeles Free Press and Liberation News Service to fill in what mainstream newspapers left out. As cultural historian Morris Dickstein wrote, “The history of the Sixties was written as much in the Berkeley Barb as The New York Times.”15 Yet, like their mainstream counterparts, these major alternative newspapers also tended to overlook communities of color. Through the decades, the ethnic press has played a key role in maintaining, serving and organizing their respective communities in the United States.16 In this long tradition, progressive people of color across the nation developed their own dissident newspapers. In addition to the widely known The Black Panther, among the most important were Akwesasne Notes (1969–1996) based in Rooseveltown, New York, which considered itself “the Voice of Indigenous Peoples”; El Grito del Norte (1968–1973), a Chicano/a movement newspaper based in Española, New Mexico; and Gidra (1969–1974) in Los Angeles, California, “the Monthly of the Asian American Experience.” Vol. I, no. 1 of Gidra was born at the University of California, Los Angeles in April 1969 as a newspaper for Asian American students and moved off campus after its first issue to focus more on community than student issues. Published until April 1974, Gidra was the first and longest running Asian American movement newspaper and gave material expression to such burning topics as racism and selfdetermination at home as well as the Southeast Asian war and Third World solidarity abroad. Gidra’s title reflected the paper’s founders, a group of idealistic college undergraduates who wanted a name that signaled something totally new. More by default than through revolutionary zeal (and reflecting their youthful zaniness), after rejecting contenders like “Epicanthus” and “Yellowstone,” they decided on Gidra—a misspelling of the obscure Japanese movie monster, Ghidorah (or Ghidrah as released in the U.S. in 1965), the nemesis of the better known Godzilla. As it turned out, although Tracy Okida, who had come up with the name, had thought Ghidorah/Gidra was a “good monster,” the creature was actually a destructive extraterrestrial. Both Godzilla and Ghidorah/Gidra were radioactive super antiheroes born—as were the newspaper’s founders—in the aftermath of World War II.17 Following the 2014 remake of the movie Godzilla, a reviewer commented

Asian Americans and the Vietnam War  221

on the monster’s post-war origins: “The fact that Godzilla is a giant Hibakusha should not go unnoticed. He’s a reminder of the destructive power of radiation, and the transformative properties of the atomic bomb’s devastation.”18 Similarly, in light of the magnitude of the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and their significance to Asian Americans—topics that were deliberated frequently throughout Gidra’s tenure—naming the paper “Gidra” was a nod to a post-nuclear world, underlying Gidra’s reflection of the Global Sixties. Not tethered to the dictates of a specific party line or functioning as a house organ to promote the mission of a particular organization, Gidra maintained an editorial policy of inclusiveness that reflected the range of issues and interests that were unfurling at the time—from reformist to radical, from critical to countercultural. In its first issue, the editorial declared, “Too often it is position and power that determine who is heard. This is why Gidra was created. Gidra is dedicated to truth.”19 While from today’s vantage point this statement sounds more naïve than discerning, in the context of the times, it is as reflective of the passion and commitment of the oppositional Sixties as it was of the hopes and aspirations of the infant Gidra.

Looking like the enemy: a singular experience During the Global Sixties, the Vietnam War in particular was a flash point for political conflicts around the world. While protests in Western Europe and the United States are well known, there were also innumerable rallies, strikes and oppositional movements throughout Eastern Europe, South America, Africa and Asia, giving expanded meaning to the chant made famous during the National Democratic Convention in 1968: “The whole world is watching!”20 For the United States, historian Christian Appy argued that no other event in modern history demanded more soul-searching, and never before had such a wide range of Americans come together in a shared oppositional culture of common values and goals, cutting across color, age, gender, religion and class.21 Polarizing doves and hawks, the escalating war created respective kinships of shared experience on both the right and the left. On the left, cultural historian Morris Dickstein likened the feeling of solidarity and unanimity evident in counter-cultural protest events to the “festivities of an ethnic group coming together to reaffirm its common identity.”22 On the right, former leftists Peter Collier and David Horowitz ultimately concluded that youth of the Sixties were “the destructive generation,” responsible for infecting the world with anti-Americanism.23 Yet, in the midst of these shared ideas and attitudes on both sides of the political fence was a singular experience exclusive to Americans of Asian descent: that of looking like the enemy. To the average “American,” Chinese Americans looked no different than Japanese Americans or Filipino Americans. And during the war in Southeast Asia, all Asians not only looked alike, they looked suspiciously like gooks. Of course, this was not the first time that Asians in the United States were ensnared in the liminal position that sociologist Mia Tuan dubbed “forever foreigners.”24 Despite their residency in the United States as early as the 1800s, Chinese

222  Karen L. Ishizuka

could not become naturalized citizens until 1943 when the Chinese Exclusion Act was repealed; and Japanese and Filipinos were barred from naturalization until 1952 with the passage of that year’s Immigration and Nationality Act. In addition, because Asian immigrants were “aliens ineligible for citizenship,” they were not allowed to buy land, were not protected under the law, and had no recourse to civil justice. Another example of state decreed racism against Asians occurred during World War II. Although the United States was at war with Germany and Italy besides Japan, only the Japanese discernibly looked like the enemy. Targeted as a threat to national security, 120,000—two-thirds of whom were U.S. citizens by birth—were incarcerated en masse for the duration of the war. During the Vietnam War, the term “gook” generally and uncritically associated persons of Asian ethnicity with the enemy.25 One of the first essays to document this phenomenon appeared in the June/July 1970 issue of Gidra in 1970. Written by Norman Nakamura who had recently completed a tour of duty in Vietnam, the article detailed rampant racist attitudes and incidents that were heaped upon Vietnamese women, children and the elderly in addition to being applied to North Vietnamese soldiers, the official enemy. As Nakamura indicated, such behavior was not only widespread, it was condoned because U.S. soldiers were taught that the Vietnamese were not people but “only Gooks.”26 As Alan Takemoto’s striking cover of Gidra incisively asserted, the Catch-22 of looking like the enemy was even extended to American soldiers fighting for the United States on the frontline. Gidra published articles that revealed that it was not only the Vietnamese that were subjected to the depersonalization of being considered gooks but Americans of Asian descent as well. Former Marine Mike Nakayama reported on the testimony he gave at the Winter Soldier Investigation, which was held in January 1971 in Detroit. In the three-day event sponsored by Vietnam Veterans Against the War, 125 veterans and civilians attested to the imperialistic and racist nature of the events they committed or witnessed.27 During basic training, Nakayama said that he was told to “Stand up! Turn around so everybody can see you!” To the rest of the men, the drill instructor announced, “This is what a gook looks like.” Within a year, Nakayama would be awarded a Bronze Star and wounded twice.The second time he was shot, he lay in a dirty cot in a military hospital in Da Nang with an open chest wound and shrapnel in his skull. Realizing that other U.S. soldiers with less severe wounds were getting treated, he managed to utter, “Hey man, when’re you gonna deal with me?” The answer: “Oh, you can speak English? Why didn’t you tell us you were an American? We thought you were a gook.”28 Nakayama’s experience was not unique. Scott Shimabukuro also testified at the Winter Soldier Investigation. “When I went into the Marine Corps, I thought I was going to serve my country and be brave, a Marine and a good American. As I stepped off the bus at [the Marine Corps Recruit Depot] in San Diego … the [drill instructor] came up to me and said, ‘Oh, we have a gook here today in our platoon.’ ”29

Asian Americans and the Vietnam War  223

Evelyn Yoshimura wrote in 1971 how the abuse of Asian women by GIs in Vietnam was transferred to Asian American women at home.30 Regarding the generalized use of “gook” to refer to all Asians, Robert G. Lee theorized that identifying Asian Americans as gooks was the flip side of figuring them as the “model minority,” an inexhaustible common stereotype of Asian Americans that was initiated in the mid-1960s in the midst of racial tensions and Black uprisings.31 Lee contended that Asian Americans became scapegoats onto which national anxiety over economic decline and the psychic trauma of the Vietnam War was transferred.32

Gidra goes to war Although the Vietnam War would prove to be Gidra’s dominant theme (as determined by total texts and images, as well as the quantity of reader reactions in letters to the editor), Gidra’s coverage and analysis of the war built up slowly.33 Because Gidra was initially concerned with matters of Asian American identity and empowerment as well as local issues specific to Los Angeles where it was based, the Vietnam War was not mentioned until the third issue in June 1969. In this issue was a submitted article advocating conscientious objection to the draft and a brief report on an Asian American soldier killed by friendly fire.34 Still preoccupied with vetting the emergence of an Asian American consciousness, which included issues of racism and sexism, Asian American Studies, community building and historical recovery, the war did not appear again until three months later. In September 1969, a short announcement for a meeting of a group called the Asian American Mobilization and Education Committee to End the War in Vietnam was published. It described itself as an organization unlike most social action and civil rights groups, “composed of old and young—second and third generation Asians, who have united for a common cause.”35 While the premise was enlightened, no further mention of this group was found in subsequent issues. On October 15, 1969, the mainstream American anti-war movement became more vociferous, launching a series of nationwide Moratoriums to End the War consisting of marches and rallies held on that same day across the country. Gidra reported on the moratorium at California State College, Long Beach, at which Gidra columnist Warren Furutani, who was fast becoming a nationally known spokesperson for the nascent Asian American movement and would later become a California State Assemblyperson, was one of the main speakers. Reflecting the optimism that surrounded the anti-war efforts of the time, the article ended with the announcement that a second moratorium was scheduled for the following month, adding, “These plans are subject to cancellation in the event that President Nixon withdraws all troops from Vietnam.”36 Contrary to that hopeful caveat, it would not be until 5 years later that Congress finally rejected Nixon’s continuing requests to send more military troops to Vietnam. The second moratorium on November 15, 1969—also convened at different sites around the nation—is believed to have been the largest anti-war protest in

224  Karen L. Ishizuka

United States history.37 In the November 1969 issue, Gidra reproduced the text of a speech made by Professor Isao Fujimoto at the moratorium held at the campus of the University of California, Davis.38 It was one of the first public condemnations of the war from a distinctly Asian American point of view. In that second Moratorium, Fujimoto put forth what would become a major theme in the Asian American anti-war discourse: the recurring history of U.S. oppression of Asians. He outlined the history of American wars against Asians (World War II, the Korean War and Vietnam) and pointed to the mass incarceration of Americans of Japanese descent during World War II. The publication of his speech in the increasingly widely read Gidra ensured that its impact reached far beyond the relatively small audience of students who attended the moratorium, introducing hundreds of readers across the country to a specifically Asian American analysis of the war. The shocking disclosure in November 1969 of the My Lai massacre that occurred more than a year and a half earlier prompted Gidra to issue its first editorial against the war. My Lai had been the first publicly reported indication that the United States was not only guilty of cover-up but also of committing unspeakable cruelties against civilian populations. The editorial stated that while the American people as a whole were ultimately to blame for the atrocity by allowing the unjust war to continue, it argued, “we as Asian Americans,” should feel an even stronger commitment to ending the conflict because “our brothers are killing and dying on both sides of a senseless war.”39 This marked the first mention in Gidra of another major theme in the Asian American analysis of the war: that we were Asians fighting Asians. From then on explicitly Asian American contingents and organizations against the war were formed around the nation. In the January 1970 issue, a full page was dedicated to promoting the first Asian American anti-war march in Los Angeles. The goal of the event was to break “the characteristic silence of Asian Americans.”40 I was listed among 190 Asian Americans—including professors, ministers, professionals, workers, mothers, and students—who endorsed a statement titled, “Asian Americans Against the Crime of Silence.” It asserted that we would not give tacit consent to the war by remaining silent, that we believed America’s policy in Vietnam was politically and morally bankrupt, and that we demanded immediate cessation of American military action. The entreaty ended with, “We Asian Americans appeal to you, our fellow Asian Americans, who are concerned with justice and peace, to join us and speak out against the war.”41 In the following issue, Gidra reported that more than 200 Asian Americans participated in that first march through Little Tokyo that culminated in a rally in which community leaders articulated specific Asian American connections to the war.42 Along with a centerfold of photographs of the event, Gidra published a speech by Warren Furutani who underlined his identification with the Vietnamese. Referencing his little brother, his mother and bachan (grandmother), Furutani challenged, “What if we didn’t live in Gardena or Monterey Park or Crenshaw Square or Little Tokyo or Chinatown? What if we lived in a village like My Lai?”43

Asian Americans and the Vietnam War  225

The March 1970 cover of Gidra was the first of many to graphically convey support for the Vietnamese. Featuring a drawing of a Southeast Asian mother holding a baby, rifle and the Little Red Book of quotations by Chairman Mao Zedong, the caption read, “We will fight and fight from this generation to the next.” Although this image and caption referenced the identification Asian Americans felt with Southeast Asians, both were previously published in The Black Panther.44 While the use of such a subjectively Asian-centric image in a Black political newspaper might seem discordant, it reflected the overreaching Sixties value of internationalism and especially Third Worldism. In addition, with the young woman warrior clutching the Red Book, the Panthers’ use of the image also illustrated their embrace of Chairman Mao Zedong’s philosophy. (Co-founder Huey Newton was inspired by his early visit to the Peoples’ Republic of China in 1971 and the Black Panther Party both studied and sold copies of the Red Book.)45 The April 1970 issue further articulated the growing Asian American position against the war by featuring reports and announcements about specifically Asian American anti-war efforts across the country. One article reported the placement of a full-page ad in the Sunday, March 22, 1970 edition of the New York Times by an East coast group called Asians Against the Vietnam War, which was comprised of concerned Asian students and professionals in the U.S. and Canada.46 Scholar and activist Glenn Omatsu was among the activists involved in the Asian American anti-war effort on the East Coast and provided important insights into this event. He indicated that the ad campaign and accompanying march had been initiated by a group that included South Vietnamese ex-patriots. He added that some activists questioned the effectiveness of raising the large amount of funds needed for a The New York Times ad vs. conducting grassroots anti-war organizing. Another point of difference was that the group initiating the ad and march placed an emphasis on the broad issues of peace and anti-war while other activists wanted stronger and more specific messages of condemning U.S. foreign policy as well as support for the Provisional Revolutionary Government’s Peace Proposal. Omatsu concluded that the significance of the event was that it reflected the broad spectrum of anti-war sentiments in the Asian American communities as well as the activism of Vietnamese in the United States.47 And then the tempest that would galvanize the Asian American anti-war effort hit. On April 30, 1970, Nixon announced that, two days earlier, he had ordered a secret invasion of Cambodia that was unknown even to top government and military officials. The news unleashed a firestorm of outrage that reflected not only the escalation of the war but also the intensification of the anti-war effort at home.While the outcry came from every sector of American society, colleges in particular amped up their antiwar activities resulting in approximately 400 campus strikes and 200 closures. Already on edge following the murder of protesting students at Kent State University by the Ohio National Guard the previous day, on May 5, 1970, the Los Angeles police were called in prematurely to quell a rally at the University of California, Los Angeles. The riot that ensued exposed Asian American participants, many of whom were first time protesters, to an undeniable and unnerving level of

226  Karen L. Ishizuka

police brutality. Steve Tatsukawa, a Gidra contributor, was beaten and then arrested for felonious assault when four small rocks were found in his pocket. When Gidra staffer Colin Watanabe came to his aid, Watanabe was also arrested—for failure to disperse, participating in a riot, unlawful assembly and interfering with the duties of a police officer. “But the most frequent wound of all,” an article in the May issue of Gidra reported, “was the sharp slap of realization [of police oppression] felt by most everyone who was there to witness the rampage.”48 This disturbing event motivated a large number of previously reserved Asian Americans to become politically active. Many joined Gidra as a way “to do something.” The Gidra office soon functioned as a community outpost for the subsequently formed strike committee. The resulting profusion of anti-war activity was so consuming that, for the first and only time in its five-year tenure, Gidra was not able to make the next month’s deadline. In the combined June/July issue that followed, 13 of its 20 articles were about the war, revealing—as well as fueling—the growing anger about the war amongst what had previously been one of the least politically active groups in the country. From then on, Gidra published numerous reports, analyses, commentaries, and visual and poetic texts on the Vietnam War, each of which increased readers’ awareness and understanding of the conflict’s complexities and effects. As the first Little Tokyo anti-war march conducted five months earlier had intended, the Asian American silence on Vietnam was finally broken.

“Kinship of blood and oppression” “Because we had been defined historically by race,” Asian American Studies professor Elaine Kim noted, “it was difficult for many of us not to respond to the racial character of the war in Vietnam.”49 While fighting against an unjust war like other anti-war activists, Asian American activists had substantive differences with the mainstream anti-war movement regarding its underlying values and tactics. For example, a common anti-war stance argued that Vietnam was of little strategic importance to the U.S and posed no threat to America’s national security. In contrast, the Asian American perspective differed in both tone and substance. Rather than arguing impersonally from a state perspective regarding “strategic importance” and “national security,” Asian American anti-war discourse emanated from a collective racial identification with, as well as political support for, the Southeast Asians under siege. Instead of chanting, “Bring the Troops Home!” Asian Americans carried banners that demanded, “Stop Killing Our Asian Brothers and Sisters.” As mentioned earlier, one recurrent theme in the Asian American position against the war was the history of U.S. aggression against Asians: from the ­Philippine-American War in 1899–1902 to the World War II mass incarceration of Japanese Americans without due process, and particularly the excessive use of not one but two nuclear bombs on the small island of Japan. The exceptionally brutal Philippine-American War and the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki during World War II were a critical part of the Asian American anti-Vietnam War discourse. In the July 1971 issue of Gidra, activist Pat Sumi wrote

Asian Americans and the Vietnam War  227

that reports of the mass murder of unarmed men, women, and children in the Philippines by American soldiers rivaled those emanating from the Vietnam War. Sumi quoted a 1971 Los Angeles Times article that reported an ex-Marine as saying, “They said My Lai was the first time American soldiers in a war had killed so many unarmed civilians. I knew that wasn’t so.We did it in the Philippines over 70 years ago.”50 Throughout its tenure, and especially on the anniversaries of the atomic bombings, Gidra published commentaries citing parallels between the severity of devastation wreaked on Hiroshima/Nagasaki during World War II and on Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos during the Long Sixties. One article compared Nixon’s assertion that the invasion of Cambodia would shorten the Vietnam War and reduce casualties to Truman’s justification that the atomic bombs were used to shortened World War II and save the lives of “thousands of young Americans.”51 Theoretical physicist and best selling author Michio Kaku indicated that the equivalent of a Hiroshima bomb had been dropped on Vietnam and Cambodia every week for seven years.52 It was not only the racial character of the war to which Asian American protestors responded, but to the broader injustice of imperialistic aggression. Gidra contributor Pat Sumi noted: “Our commitment and understanding and sympathy for the Indochinese people must go beyond mere blood kinship, for there is a kinship, which extends even farther and deeper than that of blood. It is the kinship of oppression.”53 This kinship of blood and oppression summed up the heart and soul of the Asian American standpoint on the war. Gidra reported on events that manifested this heart and soul, which received little attention from other alternative newspapers while being virtually absent in the mainstream media. In so doing, Gidra both reflected and helped create a distinctly Asian American anti-war movement. In May 1971 Gidra covered the Anti-Imperialist Women’s Conference in Vancouver and Toronto that brought six women from North Vietnam, South Vietnam and Laos to meet with hundreds of women from North America in an effort to end the war.54 Asian American veterans were invited to meet with the Southeast Asian women and provide security. In their report, they stated, “As veterans, we have invaded and destroyed their land, and murdered and raped their families and friends, [yet] these women met and talked with us as brothers and sisters.”55 In June 1971 Gidra reported on a gathering of famous celebrities and local Asian American activists at the historic Hollywood Roosevelt Hotel in Los Angeles. U.S. Senator Spark Matsunaga, Olympic Gold Medalist Rafer Johnson and entertainers Jane Fonda, Herb Alpert, and George Takei (then at the height of Star Trek’s popularity) shared the stage with activists Warren Furutani, Pat Sumi, and Mike Naka-yama in a common bond that crossed the tracks of fame and fortune.56 In July and August 1972, Gidra published statements and follow-up reports from the Emergency Summit Conference of Asian, Black, Brown, Puerto Rican, and Red People, the first national gathering of activists of color against the war. Held at a Holiday Inn in Gary Indiana, more than 300 delegates convened, representing more than 50 grassroots organizations. Its primary political principles were victory to the Indochinese generally, and support for the Provisional Revolutionary Government’s Seven Point Peace Program specifically.57

228  Karen L. Ishizuka

In September 1972, Gidra reported on a march consisting of Asian American youth calling themselves the Thai Binh and Van Troi Anti-Imperialist Youth Brigades, named after two young Vietnamese freedom fighters.58 The cultural significance of this event was that it was not held at an anti-war rally, but in the traditional Nisei Week parade in Los Angeles’ Little Tokyo. This annual event, the focal point of a weeklong summer celebration of Japanese American heritage, was instituted in 1934 to bolster business in Little Tokyo. Shut down during World War II because of the mass removal and incarceration of Japanese Americans, it resumed again in 1949 and continues as both a community and tourist attraction. As a cultural event, bystanders as well as parade participants and officials were alarmed at the 150-member youth brigade led by an effigy of Richard Nixon, especially when the Japanese war flag was burned in opposition to Japanese militarism and imperialism. These and many other articles, like those on the nationwide Vietnam Medical Supply Drive initiated by Asian American Vietnam veterans to send medical supplies to Vietnam, and the brutal assassination of foreign student Nguyen Thai Binh for his anti-war activities, conveyed Asian American anti-war stances that also emphasized committed support for the victims of U.S. aggression against Southeast Asians.59

Why an Asian American contingent? On the occasion of the April 22, 1972 National Moratorium, Gidra published three articles that addressed why a distinct Asian American anti-war contingent was formed separately from the mainstream anti-war movement. Each pointed to widely held differences Asian American anti-war activists had with the white antiwar movement. One article, published before the moratorium, urged Asian Americans to participate despite problems many had with the National Peace Action Council (NPAC), the organizer of the event.The article charged that NPAC overlooked critical issues of imperialism, racism and sexism. Yet, in the interests of their common goal of ending the war, the article urged: “We must support the Moratorium even if we feel disillusioned by the effectiveness of demonstrations. … This will be a massive event—the power of the people can be demonstrated.”60 Another article, reporting on the Moratorium, posited that the considerable time and energy that went into organizing and participating in such events could be better used—and were more needed—in “less glorious situations,” such as working at Gidra and other community organizations. Steve Tatsukawa, the reporter (who had been beaten and arrested at the UCLA anti-war demonstration), concluded, “The real struggle in America today manifests itself not so much in these huge rallies but in the day-to-day work being carried out in the community and on the campuses.”61 The third article was specifically titled, “Why an Asian Contingent?” The author, Mike Murase, listed three main reasons: 1) because the United States was committing genocide in Southeast Asia; 2) because genocide was racist since “it justifies the extermination of an entire people”; and 3) because the systematic

Asian Americans and the Vietnam War  229

dehumanization of “gooks” in the military affected Asians in America since “it is to America that trained killers of Asians return.”62 In support of these claims, Murase included a reproduction of a March 13, 1972 Time magazine report on the violent behavior exhibited by soldiers upon returning from Southeast Asia. Acknowledging that U.S. veterans of other wars were also trained to be killers, the Time article reported the example of a veteran who twice indulged his hatred for “gooks” by attacking waiters in Chinese restaurants and concluded that readjustment problems seemed more pronounced among Vietnam vets because they generalized all Asians as the enemy.63

Identity, internationalism, imperialism In addition to the war in Southeast Asia, as part of the global fight against imperialism, Asian American activists adopted an internationalist perspective, especially when their countries of origin were involved. For example, many were inspired by the Zengakuren (Communist youth organization in Japan), the Red Guards (Communist youth organization in China), and many participated in demonstrations against Japanese militarism and imperialism that included Japan’s takeover of the Tiao-yu Tai islands in 1969, the renewal of the US–Japan Security Pact in 1970 and the reversion of Okinawa to Japan in 1971. When Marcos declared martial law in the Philippines in 1972, Filipino Americans established anti-Marcos organizations such as Katipunan ng mga Demokratikong Pilipino (KDP), the Union of Democratic Filipinos. As sympathetic as progressive Asian Americans were to such international acts of imperialism, however, for the majority of us who were born and raised in the U.S., it was the Vietnam War that particularly raised our ire. We took it personally. Not only did we share a kinship of blood and oppression that Pat Sumi articulated, those of us who were Baby Boomers had literally grown up and come of age with the Vietnam War. In the January 1973 issue, Bruce Iwasaki, Gidra’s in-house expert on the war, noted: U.S. involvement in Vietnamese affairs began around the time we were born; stayed hidden from the national consciousness during our years of innocence; escalated as we matured; and has reached climactic proportions while our generation gains the will and seeks the means to end that involvement.64 Precisely and poignantly locating our loss of innocence, Iwasaki not only spoke for our generation, he articulated the intersection of the global on the local, while making clear the influence of the political on the personal: “When we probed the roots of the war we discovered more than the Pentagon Papers sequence of governmental deceit. We also discovered the Empire, its rulers, their methods—all at once.”65 The upside of this insight was Iwasaki’s simultaneous understanding that this rude realization contained the seed of political maturity: “This hard look at the U.S.

230  Karen L. Ishizuka

no doubt developed our national consciousness of being Asians, Third World People, in America.”66 In reiterating the domestic adoption of the transnational concept of the Third World, Iwasaki underscored the influence of such international concepts on the home front. Instead of being disenfranchised “minorities,” being part of the Third World meant being part of the vast majority.This bond gave added weight to the popular slogan, “All Power to the People.” Hence, the localization of being “Third World people in America” was both empowering and unifying. While a few contemporary scholars have reached similar conclusions regarding the connections between the Vietnam War and the making of an Asian American identity, Iwasaki, writing in the early 1970s, displayed what Raymond Williams called a diagnostic understanding of the situation in which he lived.67 In light of the “kinship of blood” (identification of Asian Americans with Southeast Asians) heightened by the “kinship of oppression” (empathy and admiration Asian Americans felt for their plight), Iwasaki argued that we “must end our romanticization of the Vietnamese people’s struggle.”68 Because, he warned, when we glamorize the heroic actions of the Vietnamese, we run the risk of basking in borrowed glory. He contended that when we deploy Vietnamese agency for our liberation, it diminishes their achievement and blinds us to the real gravity of war. Iwasaki harshly criticized, “Vietnam is not just some kind of organizing tool.”69 Additionally Iwasaki, now a Los Angeles County Superior Court Judge, pointed out that by standing up to the United States, the tiny agrarian country of Vietnam, considered backward by U.S. standards, destroyed the myth of American exceptionalism and the accompanying lies that “control our minds.” In America, he pointed out, minds are controlled by controlling memory. By erasing consciousness of resistance and struggle, we are rendered weak and vulnerable. Therefore, he adamantly contended, “Among the countless other tasks of our movement is to keep alive this history of resistance to domination, to pass the word, to make known the true facts.”70 This, Iwasaki conjectured, was the true significance of Vietnam to Asian America. “The Vietnamese have stripped the Emperor’s clothes; we must spread the news. They have opened our eyes to our genocidal past, our bloody present, and future potential of our own liberation. By forcing us to see what we really are, Vietnam’s revolution lets us seize the possibility of our own.”71

Asian America: the global in the local Russell Leong, poet and former long-time editor of the Amerasia Journal, the oldest periodical in Asian American Studies, put forth the concept of “lived theory” in his introduction to the Journal’s double issue on theory in 1995.72 Defined as “the theory of living that emerges from work and working with others,” Leong added that it is an area that is often neglected in academic discussion, no doubt because they are too often dismissed as overly-impassioned, unobjective or merely anecdotal. Like Cherrie Moraga and Gloria Anzaldua’s “theory in the flesh,” which prioritizes “flesh and blood experiences,”73 Leong emphasized that lived theory emerges

Asian Americans and the Vietnam War  231

not from the classroom or from conferences but from practice. Of the contributors who presented their theories on theory in that issue of Amerasia, Leong indicated that few “chose to refer to their own [his emphasis] specific involvement in social or community issues and how such involvement had shaped their own theoretical perspectives.”74 In contrast, Gidra contains a rich repository of theory born of practice. In both visual and written texts, they were authored by scholar-activists whose core agenda was direct engagement with the concrete social and historical issues about which they wrote and envisioned. Gidra conveyed—even as it incubated—distinctly Asian American epistemological understandings, not only about the Vietnam War but also of other key issues such as Third World identity and alliances, community empowerment and responsibility, and inequalities of gender, class, and age. Such knowledge only makes itself visible when we look deeply into the ways in which disenfranchised communities around the globe actively participated in the making of their own histories. Not that everything in Gidra was erudite. Some articles and graphics were downright vacuous, the result of youth being youth, exacerbated by too much Sixties excess. Notwithstanding the exuberance of the era however, embedded within Gidra (and no doubt within other Sixties cultural productions) are narratives of resistance that are not found elsewhere. From lived theories expounded in Gidra, the Asian American anti-war movement resulted in two far-reaching political and social consequences. For the anti-war movement as a whole, Asian American activism brought previously unheeded questions about race and racism into the nationwide anti-war movement. For Asian America in particular, broad based support for the Vietnamese and other Southeast Asians worked to further the formation of a distinctly political Asian American identity. As this volume attests, the period that has come to be known as the Global Sixties transcended national and demographic boundaries. As transnational as the era was, issues such as imperialism, internationalism, colonialism, hegemony and racism that defined the Sixties on the world stage also played out within the borders of nation states. In particular, the United States—the proverbial “nation of immigrants” then in the throes of the struggle over civil rights—reflected the upheaval and dynamics of the world at large. Specifically within communities of color, pressing global reference points as the Third World, colonization and self-determination were embraced and adopted. By the end of its tenure, Gidra: The Monthly of the Asian American Experience was an important vehicle, not only from an Asian American perspective. In light of the general disregard given to alternative newspapers by the mainstream, especially those considered dissident and “minority,” Gidra was recognized beyond Asian America as indicated by an enthusiastic review in 1971 by the Library Journal, libraries being one of the most populace institutions in the country.75 In 2007, Gidra was acknowledged in journalistic history as being “one of the most notable newspapers” of the era.76 Beyond providing alternative news, Gidra acted as a public forum, served as a Petri dish for politicizing Asian American youth, and provided an in-situ account of

232  Karen L. Ishizuka

a social movement as it unfolded, capturing its ineffable energy. In so doing, Gidra demonstrated how the Asian American movement shaped itself within a global context and consciousness, in alliance with the cultural revolution that was going on around the world. How Asians in America locally manifested such large-scale issues as anti-racism, anti-imperialism and self-determination renders a nuanced look at the widespread and deeply felt impact of the cultural and political capacity of Global Sixties.

Notes   1 While most standard dictionaries list the origin of the term “gook” as unknown, its use as a racial epithet is unarguably tied to the U.S. military. First used with reference to Filipinos during the Philippine–American War, it was expanded in the Korean War to refer to North and South Koreans as well as Chinese and was most ubiquitously used during the Vietnam War to vilify all Asians. Paul Dickson, War Slang: American Fighting Words & Phrases since the Civil War, 3rd edn. (Mineola: Dover Publications, Inc., 2011). David R. Roediger, “Gook: The Short History of an Americanism,” Monthly Review 43, no. 10 (1992).   2 Due to increased understanding of intra-Asian ethnic diversity, “Asian American” is now more accurately supplanted by “Asian Pacific Islander,” often shortened to API. Because this essay focuses on a time that predates this change I use the term “Asian American” as it was originally conceived, throughout.   3 Arthur Marwick, “The Cultural Revolution of the Long Sixties: Voices of Reaction, Protest, and Permeation,” The International History Review 27, no. 4 (2005): 780–806. Arthur Marwick, The Sixties: Cultural Revolution in Britain, France, Italy, and the United States, c. 1958–c. 1974 (Oxford, UK and New York: Oxford University Press, 1998).   4 Feminist scholars theorize how native researchers represent the subjects’ discourse in the language of the colonizer, thereby acting as a mediator, a cultural broker. See, for example, Faye V. Harrison, Outsider Within: Reworking Anthropology in the Global Age (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2008). Patricia Hill Collins, Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness, and the Politics of Empowerment, 2nd edn. (New York: Routledge, 2000). Irma McClaurin, “Theorizing a Black Feminist Self in Anthropology: Toward an Ethnographic Approach,” in Black Feminist Anthropology, ed. Irma McClaurin (New Brunswick, NJ and London: Rutgers University Press, 2001), 49–76.   5 With gratitude to Alan Takemoto for his art and insight.   6 Bernardine Dohrn, “Sixties Lessons and Lore,” Monthly Review 53, no. 7 (2001).   7 Tom Hayden, The Long Sixties: From 1960 to Barack Obama (Boulder, CO: Paradigm Publishers, 2009).   8 Cornel West, “The New Cultural Politics of Difference,” in Out There: Marginalization and Contemporary Cultures, ed. Russell Ferguson et al. (New York: The New Museum of Contemporary Art, 1990), 29.   9 Stuart Hall, “The West and the Rest: Discourse and Power,” in Modernity: An Introduction to Modern Societies, ed. Stuart Hall et al. (Malden, MA: The Open University, 1996), 221. 10 Helen H. Jun, “Black Orientalism: Nineteenth Century Narratives of Race and U.S. Citizenship,” American Quarterly 58 (2006): 1056. 11 Karen L. Ishizuka, Serve the People: Making Asian America in the Long Sixties (London and New York:Verso Books, 2016), 41. 12 Not all Asian American activists during the Global Sixties were youth.There were many older Asian American activists; most widely known was Yuri Kochiyama who cradled Malcolm X when he was assassinated. There were also notable organizations consisting primarily of middle-aged and middle-class activists such as the Asian Coalition for Equality (ACE) in Seattle and Asian Americans for Action (Triple A) in New York City. Ishizuka, Serve the People: Making Asian America in the Long Sixties, 89–95.

Asian Americans and the Vietnam War  233

13 Chris K. Iijima, “The Era of We-Construction: Reclaiming the Politics of Asian Pacific American Identity and Reflections on the Critique of the Black/White Paradigm,” Columbia Human Rights Law Review 29, no. 47 (1997). 14 Elaine H. Kim, “Defining Asian American Realities Through Literature,” Cultural Critique 6 (1987): 88.This article was anthologized in Kent A. Ono, ed., A Companion to Asia American Studies (Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing Ltd., 2005), 196–214. 15 Quoted in John McMillan, Smoking Typewriters: The Sixties Underground Press and the Rise of Alternative Media in America (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), xiv. 16 Todd Vogel, The Black Press: New Literary and Historical Essays (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2001). Gabriel Meléndez, So All is Not Lost:The Poetics of Print in Nuevomexicano Communities, 1834–1958, (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1997). George Hutchinson, The Harlem Renaissance in Black and White (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1995). David Yoo, “Read All About It: Race, Generation and the Japanese American Ethnic Press, 1925–41,” Amerasia Journal 19, no. 1 (1993): 69–92. Lauren Kessler, The Dissident Press: Alternative Journalism in American History (Beverly Hills, CA: Sage Publications, 1984). 17 From interview with Tracy Okida, April 3, 2011. 18 Kevin Lankes, “Godzilla’s Secret History,” Huffington Post, April 22, 2014, http://www. huffingtonpost.com. Accessed February 5, 2015. 19 “Gidra,” Gidra I, no 1 (April 1969): 1. 20 Jeremi Suri, The Global Revolutions of 1968: A Norton Casebook in History (New York: W.W. Norton, 2007). George N. Katsiaficas, The Imagination of the New Left: A Global Analysis of 1968 (Boston, MA: South End Press, 1987). Karen Dubinsky et al., eds, New World Coming:The Sixties and the Shaping of Global Consciousness (Toronto: Between the Lines, 2009). Todd Gitlin, The Whole World Is Watching: Mass Media in the Making & Unmaking of the New Left (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2003). 21 Christian G. Appy, American Reckoning: The Vietnam War and Our National Identity (New York:Viking Press, 2015), xiv. 22 Morris Dickson, Gates of Eden: American Culture in the Sixties (New York: Liveright, 1977). 23 Peter Collier and David Horowitz, Destructive Generation: Second Thoughts about the Sixties (San Francisco, CA: Encounter Books, 2006), 4. 24 Mia Tuan, Forever Foreigners or Honorary Whites? The Asian Ethnic Experience Today (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1998). 25 Toshio Whelchel, From Pearl Harbor to Saigon: Japanese American Soldiers and the Vietnam War (London and New York:Verso, 1999), 18. Although “gook” was widely used as a racist slur, to some South Vietnamese refugees in the U.S., it was a term they used to refer to Communists. Sang Chi and Emily Moberg Robinson, eds., “Hi-Tek Demonstration Flyer, ‘America Has Freedom,’ 1999,” in Voices of the Asian American and Pacific Islander Experience (Santa Barbara, Denver and Oxford: Greenwood Press, 2012), 606. 26 Norman Nakamura, “The Nature of G.I. Racism,” Gidra II, no. 6 (June/July 1970). Also anthologized in Amy Tachiki, ed., Roots: An Asian American Reader (Los Angeles, CA: ­University of California Los Angeles. Asian American Studies Center, 1971) and John Kuo Wei Tchen and Dylan Yeats, eds., Yellow Peril! An Archive of Anti-Asian Fear ­(London and New York:Verso, 2014). 27 Not widely reported at the time, a complete transcript of the Winter Soldier Investigation was later entered into the Congressional Record, which can be found at www. wintersoldier.com. 28 Mike Nakayama, “Winter Soldiers,” Gidra III, no. 6 (June 1971): 12. Gidra III, no. 6 (June 1971): 12. Interviews with Mike Nakayama, June 26, 1995, July 15, 2012. 29 http://www.wintersoldier.com 30 Evelyn Yoshimura, “G.I.’s and Asian Women,” Gidra III, no. 1 (January 1971). Also anthologized in Tachiki, Roots: An Asian American Reader. Tchen and Yeats, Yellow Peril! An Archive of Anti-Asian Fear. 31 Robert G. Lee, Orientals: Asian Americans in Popular Culture (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1999). William Petersen, “Success Story, Japanese-American Style,” New

234  Karen L. Ishizuka

York Times Magazine, 1966. “Success Story of One Minority Group,” U.S. News and World Report, 1966. “Success Story: Outwhiting the Whites,” Newsweek, 1971, 24–25. Pew Research Center, “The Rise of Asian Americans” (Washington, DC, June 19, 2012). Rosalind S. Chou and Joe R. Feagin, Myth of the Model Minority: Asian Americans Facing Racism, 2nd edn. (New York and Oxford: Routledge, 2014). Erika Lee, The Making of Asian America: A History (New York, London, Toronto, Sydney and New Delhi: Simon & Schuster, 2015). 32 Lee, Orientals: Asian Americans in Popular Culture, 190. 33 Other major themes were: vetting Asian American identity and consciousness, building Asian American community and culture and Third World solidarity at home and abroad. Karen L. Ishizuka, “Gidra, the Dissident Press and the Asian American Movement: 1969– 1974” (Ph.D. dissertation, University of California, Los Angeles, 2015). 34 O.J. “Thinking?” “Oops!!!,” Gidra I, no. 3 (June 1969): 2. 35 “Condensed News: End War,” Gidra I, no. 6 (September 1969): 6. 36 Alan Ota, “Moratorium Day,” Gidra I, no. 8 (November 1969): 2. 37 http://news.bbc.co.uk/onthisday/hi/dates/stories/october/15/newsid_2533000/ 2533131.stm 38 Isao Fujimoto, “The High Cost of Saving Face the American Way,” Gidra I, no. 8 (November 1969): 8–9. 39 “Editorial,” Gidra,Vol. I, no. 9 (December 1969): 4. 40 Mike Murase, “Asian Americans to March for Peace,” Gidra I, no. 9 (December 1969): 2. 41 “Asian Americans for Peace Rally Jan. 17,” Gidra II, no. 1 (January 1970): 15. 42 Mike Murase, “Asian Americans March for Peace,” and Alan Ota, “The Asian American March,” Gidra II, no. 2 (February 1970): 2, 8. 43 Warren Furutani, “The March: Text of Speech by Warren Furutani, Asian Americans for Peace Rally, Little Tokyo, January 17, 1970,” Gidra II, no. 2 (February 1970): 8. 44 David Hilliard, ed., The Black Panther Intercommunal News Service (New York: Atria Books, 2007), 18. 45 See, for example, Fred Wei-han Ho and Bill Mullen, Afro Asia: Revolutionary Political and Cultural Connections Between African Americans and Asian Americans (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2008). Chao Ren, “ ‘Concrete Analysis of Concrete Conditions’: “A Study of the Relationship between the Black Panther Party and Maoism,” Constructing the Past 10, no. 1, Article 7 (2009). 46 Henry Hayase, “Asians for Peace,” Gidra II, no. 4 (April 1970): 3. 47 Email from Glenn Omatsu, April 20, 2012. 48 Tracy Okida, “Heads Popped,” Gidra II, no. 5 (May 1970): 3. 49 Elaine H. Kim, “Defining Asian American Realities through Literature,” Cultural Critique 6 (1987): 102. 50 Pat Sumi, “U.S. War Crimes in the Philippines,” Gidra III, no. 6 (1971): 6. 51 Yuji Ichioka, “Hiroshima-Nagasaki: Twenty-Five Years Later,” Gidra 2, no. 7 (August 1970): 6–7. 52 Michio Kaku, “Hiroshima, Nagasaki, Vietnam: When It Rains It Pours,” Gidra V, no. 10 (October 1973): 22. 53 Pat Sumi, “Laos: A Nation in Struggle,” Gidra II, no. 3 (March 1971): 10–14. 54 “Solidarity with Our Indochinese Sisters and Brothers,” Gidra III, no. 5 (May 1971): 9–13. 55 Asian Veterans, “From the Vancouver Conference . . ., ” Gidra III, no. 5 (May 1971): 12. 56 Steve Tatsukawa, “Peace Sunday,” Gidra III, no. 6 (June 1971): 10–11. 57 “Third World People’s Anti-War Conference and Statement from Asian Contingent, Third World People’s Coalition,” Gidra IV, no. 7 (July 1972): 3. Third World Peoples’ Coalition, “Third World Coalition,” Gidra IV, no. 8 (August 1972): 7. 58 Mike Murase, “Nisei Week,” Gidra IV, no. 9 (September 1972): 2–3. Thai Binh Brigade, “Statement from the Thai Binh Brigade,” Gidra IV, no. 9 (September 1972): 5–6. 59 Asian Movement for Military Outreach (AMMO), “Vietnam Medical Supply Drive,” Gidra IV, no. 10 (October 1972): 15. Thai Binh Nguyen, “Death of Peace,” Gidra IV, no. 6 (August 1972): 2.

Asian Americans and the Vietnam War  235

60 61 62 63 64 65 66 67

68 69 70 71 72 73 74 75 76

Concerned Asians, “End the War,” Gidra IV, no. 4 (April 1972): 20. Steve Tatsukawa, “April March,” Gidra IV, no. 5 (May 1972): 12. Mike Murase, “Why an Asian Contingent?” Gidra IV, no. 5 (May 1972): 13. “The Violent Veterans,” Time Magazine, March 13, 1972. Bruce Iwasaki, “You May Be a Lover but You Ain’t No Dancer: Helter Skelter,” Gidra V, no. 1 (January 1973): 16. Ibid.: 16. Ibid.: 16. Judy Tzu-Chun Wu, Radicals on the Road: Internationalism, Orientalism, and Feminism during the Vietnam Era (New York: Cornell University Press, 2013). Sylvia Shin Huey Chong, The Oriental Obscene: Violence and Racial Fantasies in the Vietnam Era (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011). Iwasaki, “You May Be a Lover but You Ain’t No Dancer: Helter Skelter”: 16. Ibid.: 17. Ibid.: 17. Ibid.: 17. Russell Leong, “Lived Theory (Notes on the Run),” Amerasia Journal 21, no. 1&2 (1995): v–x. Cherrie Moraga and Gloria Anzaldua, This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color (Watertown, MA: Persephone Press, 1981), 23. Leong, “Lived Theory (Notes on the Run)”: vii. As reported in Gidra IV, no. 3 (March 1972): 2. Stephen L.Vaughn, Encyclopedia of American Journalism (New York: Routledge, 2007).

Selected bibliography Appy, Christian G. American Reckoning:The Vietnam War and Our National Identity. New York: Viking Press, 2015. Chong, Sylvia Shin Huey. The Oriental Obscene:Violence and Racial Fantasies in the Vietnam Era. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011. Chou, Rosalind S. and Joe R. Feagin. Myth of the Model Minority: Asian Americans Facing Racism. New York and Oxford: Routledge, 2014. Gonzalez, Juan, and Joseph Torres. News for All the People: An Epic Story of Race and the American Media. London and New York:Verso Books, 2011. Ishizuka, Karen L. Serve the People: Making Asian America in the Long Sixties. London and New York:Verso Books, 2016. Lee, Erika. The Making of Asian America: A History. New York, London, Toronto, Sydney and New Delhi: Simon & Schuster, 2015. Lee, Robert G. Orientals: Asian Americans in Popular Culture. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1999. McMillan, John. Smoking Typewriters: The Sixties Underground Press and the Rise of Alternative Media in America. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011. Whelchel, Toshio. From Pearl Harbor to Saigon: Japanese American Soldiers and the Vietnam War. London and New York:Verso Books, 1999. Wu, Judy Tsu-Chun. Radicals on the Road: Internationalism, Orientalism, and Feminism during the Vietnam Era. New York: Cornell University Press, 2013.

12 THE EXPORT OF ZIONISM? Global images of Israel in the 1960s Jérôme Bourdon

Throughout the 1960s, the state of Israel (established over a decade earlier in 1948) received a lion’s share of media attention, particularly in view of its size and population. This chapter analyzes the repertoire of representations of Israel in media and popular culture in order to explain why the Western media became so fascinated by this small country at this time. It argues that understanding this fascination requires placing this phenomenon both within the context of historical changes in the media, and within a specific temporal frame, one that begins with the intervention of the major powers during the Suez war of 1957 and ends with the Six-Day War and its aftermath. The sixties were a year of global media growth. Thanks to the invention of the portable transistor radio in 1955, radio became a truly mass medium worldwide. Although cinema attendance started declining slowly in the West, cinema kept growing globally and was soon avidly recycled on the rapidly expanding medium of television. That said, in 1960 there were only two countries where a majority of citizens had access to television: the US and the UK. And yet, by the 1970s television had spread until it reached most populations in Western and Eastern Europe (including the USSR), and the Americas. Indeed, TV was soon available in all major urban centers around the planet. Unlike the commercial television that was dominant in the US, however, for the most part this was public, state television, broadcast on one or two channels. For international news—especially with the rise of EuroVisionNews—this meant that national audiences often viewed the same images across a variety of countries, although not (given linguistic and political differences), with the same commentary. News and current affairs programs were central to programming both because of the ethos of public stations and because of the West’s thirst for moving images from around the globe. The year 1968 had a decisive impact; it has rightly been called “the year of media decision”: student protest movements, the Prague Spring crushed by Soviet tanks, the Civil War in

Global images of Israel in the 1960s  237

Nigeria with the brutal repression of the Igbo secession and the now familiar icon of the starving child were major events in world news.1 Boosted by growing literacy rates, the paperback book (born in the fifties) joined audiovisual media as a new mass media phenomenon. As we shall see, many of these developments helped shape media coverage of Israel. It stands to reason that constant tension between Israel and its Arab neighbors, superpower intervention, and the subsequent potential for global conflict attracted media interest in the Middle East during this period. But much of the media coverage in the West was about Israel and Israeli society. My claim here, consequently, is that during the 1960s Israel became central to the image of the entire region; indeed, in the West the entire history of the relations between Jews, and Arabs and Muslims was at stake. Meanwhile, the USSR had its own set of cultural, diplomatic, and military reasons for being interested in Israel, while for the Arab (not yet Muslim) world, Israel had been an enduring obsession, one only exacerbated after 1948. Thus on a global scale, both long term cultural and short term political factors contributed to the construction of Israel’s mediatic image. This chapter reveals that this image was not static, and that 1967 was a crucial turning point.While the years prior to the Six-Day War were the acme of the (relatively) positive global media treatment of Israel (with the blatant exceptions of the Arab countries and the Soviet bloc), things changed quickly afterwards, with consistent positive coverage surviving in only one country, the USA, and traditionally friendly Europe turning more critical. This chapter also proposes an interpretation of this dramatic transformation.

Methodological precautions Scholarly research on media coverage of Israel–Palestine has long focused primarily on Western perceptions of Israel. This chapter draws on such research, including my own in France, and on secondary material for other countries.2 However, I also aim to sketch a global picture. To this end it should be borne in mind that Western media, such as news agencies, had a global reach outside the Communist and Soviet world, and major European publications were regularly read by global elites. Second, where no studies of either Israeli media or popular culture exist, I use diplomatic history to make cautious inferences. Israel, relative to its size and resources, deployed considerable diplomatic activities on all continents to secure international support during the 1960s, especially to counter Arab initiatives.This has been much researched in Israel, largely due to Israeli concerns about how they are viewed abroad; diplomatic activity affected the image of the country and often included public relations. In addition, many Third World regimes were authoritarian ones at this time; consequently, favorable official positions found their ways into the media. For these reasons, while my specific examples are drawn mainly from the West, I propose some generalizations about Israel’s global image.3 Finally, although my sources are drawn primarily from news and current affairs, it is crucial to remember that both Israel (and the Arab world) were represented

238  Jérôme Bourdon

across a variety of media genres, including cinema (both fiction and documentary), novels, travelogues, and journalistic books. A multi-faceted image of Israel, soon to become Israel-cum-Palestine, developed during the 1960s and is still evolving, with much cross-fertilization between genres.

The old and the new Jew To a large extent, the media’s image of Israel in the sixties inherited a very long tradition of fascination with this small area, due not only to its relation to Christianity, but also to the enduring practice of Western travel to (and wars with) the Orient. Before the birth of the state of Israel in 1948, Europe, but also the US and the Christian world at large, were captivated by this little piece of land seen as both “inferior and backward, but also as old, exotic, and connected to the West through Jewish and Christian history.”4 Already in the nineteenth century, in the US, “the audience for reports and descriptions of the Holy Land seemed insatiable.”5 By the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries the Holy Land had begun to be endlessly photographed, filmed, and discussed.6 After (and even prior to) 1948, these earlier depictions morphed.Western travelers started combining and contrasting an older, more romantic vision of the country against a new, modern one.7 The old: the diasporic, weak and persecuted Jew, and the Holy Land, typified by the “backwards” Arab, especially the Bedouin on his donkey.The new: the rebirth of the State of Israel as a “miracle” with a new kind of returning Jew vividly juxtaposed against the old, negative image.8 In a direct continuation with Zionist ideology, Israel was represented as reborn, returning to a lost sovereignty. For example, although not always supportive of Israel, the Spanish press bought into this scenario. The popular daily la Vanguardia wrote in a typical editorial: “In Tel Aviv, the newest city, the new Jewish State has been proclaimed, on land where was once the … oldest Jewish state.”9 After its inglorious departure in 1948, Britain became Israel’s ally, including during the failed military Franco-British intervention of Suez against Egypt in 1956. This alliance weighed favorably on the British media, especially The Times (then the country’s “newspaper of record”).10 The concept of the Israeli “Sabra” (in English, prickly pear) offers a typical case of the successful export of a modern Israeli representation.The fruit is known to be sweet on the inside and tough on the outside.The term was first used in Hebrew in the 1930s to refer to the first generation of Jews born in Palestine. It was adopted widely during the sixties to contrast a new, modern, tough, young, active, outgoing Jew against the diasporic pale, intellectual Jew locked in his ghetto, heavily covered. The term became popular outside Israel and the contrast between the new and the old Jew was evoked again and again, especially around the Six-Day War. Witness this blurb on the cover of one of the numerous books about the war published across the Western world: “Who is this new breed of Jew, this Israeli, this Sabra?”11 Or, to take another example, this 1967 report of the daily Spanish newspaper ABC on “the war from the Israeli side” that begins with a description of “exuberant [Israeli] girls moving their hips above the shortest miniskirts I have

Global images of Israel in the 1960s  239

ever seen. I have to say that this melting pot of the Jews of all words and countries, of modern Jewry, produces the most joyful, healthy, lively and relaxed females in the modern world”, and concludes: “the classical type of the emaciated, thin Jew has disappeared.”12 Obviously, this image is heavily gendered; both seductive girls in mini-skirts and highly sexualized female soldiers repeatedly attracted the eyes of reporters and cameras.While this gendering of Israel has not been researched in full, it can be read as a modernization of the old Orientalist stereotype of the seductive Jewess, one that also raises questions about the relation between modern, purportedly favorable images, and older antisemitic ones.

Cinema: the case of Exodus The image of the new Jew found its most popular and powerful embodiment in the 1960 blockbuster film Exodus, with Paul Newman in the leading role of a young Zionist militant named Ari Ben Canaan.13 The story unfolds against the backdrop of the history of the creation of the state of Israel, beginning with the Holocaust, the death camps, and clandestine immigration. It focuses on the saga of the SS ship Exodus and its aftermath (the Exodus—which gives its name to the film—was the ship carrying Jewish immigrants to Palestine in 1947 that was famously blocked by the British). For Americans who knew little about Israel, the book and the film immediately became the major “historical” source of information about the birth of the new country. This source was unashamedly pro-Israeli and anti-Arab, with clear racist overtones.The film is an “enthusiastic portrait of Israel and the Jews who founded it. They are brave and valiant, they take up arms reluctantly but they fight well … they take care of their own … [and] have a democratic ethos.”14 Both the author of the book and the scriptwriters clearly stated that they wanted to change the image of the diasporic Jew and promote that of the new state. Exodus, both the book and the film, was a huge phenomenon. Enormously successful in America, the film also did very well outside the US, grossing in the region of $21,750,000 worldwide in the first decade of its release. In France, it sold about 3,800,000 tickets in theaters, and was broadcast several times on national television.The theme song was adapted in French and sung by Edith Piaf and other popular singers. Exodus was only the first of many cultural products that presented the story of the young country of Israel in a highly favorable light. In America, these also included the Broadway hit Milk and Honey (produced in 1961), which told the story of two middle-aged American tourists in Israel who fall in love with each other and with the country at the same time. The opening song began, “Shalom, shalom, you’ll find shalom the nicest greeting you know.”

Making the desert blossom? Exodus is a good example of the constant dialogue between news and other popular genres. Whereas the film shows the Jewish hero both fighting and making agricultural plans for his land, the theme of Israel “making the desert blossom” was

240  Jérôme Bourdon

likewise present in documentaries and current affairs programs. It included the mistaken notion, dating from the nineteenth century, that there had been only desert and a few nomads in the region before the arrival of the industrious Jews. The blossoming desert was present from the onset, for example in pro-Israeli reports published by star photographer Robert Capa in 1948–1950.15 In the early sixties, when (apparently) looming overpopulation and lack of food increasingly occupied Western experts, Israel was often presented as a country that could help solve global problems. On December 23, 1962, the French TV magazine Visa for the Future devoted a broadcast to the “conquest of the deserts”. In a long report filmed in Israel, the popular presenter, Roger Louis, claims: “In 20 years, the world will be faced with a problem similar to the one which Israel has to confront now …. We came to Israel for one reason: this [showing a pipeline]. … Maybe, in a few years, you will just have to open a faucet to turn this sand into a vegetable garden”. These images reflected both domestic and foreign Israeli policy where, for diplomatic reasons the new state tried from the very start to develop ties with the Third World through technological and agricultural aid. Such media representations were most successful on two continents, Latin America and (Black) Africa. These regions had no reason to get involved in the Israeli–Arab conflict (notwithstanding Arab pressure in various Third World forums, which took time to make gains).16 Beginning with the 1955 Bandung conference in Indonesia, the first mass gathering of independent African and Asian states, resolutions critical of Israel were published, but open criticism of Israel insistently proposed by Arabs was watered down. African states did not want to bow to Arab pressure, as they feared hindering the development of numerous aid programs. Evidence of Israel’s success in propagating a favorable image is that until 1973, some “six thousand Africans [were] trained in Israel and some sixteen hundred Israeli experts … served in Africa.”17 Indeed, with the exception of Somalia, Mauritania (affiliated with the Arab League) and Guinea (with the Soviet Union), all the countries south of the Sahara had established diplomatic relations with Israel. While officially pro-Arab and later proPalestinian, India recognized Israel and at times accepted its aid.The two great leaders of Indian nationalism, Gandhi and Nehru, came out in favor of the Arabs but had some sympathy for the historic plight of the Jews. This policy, however, would change after Nehru’s death in 1964. Overall, in the non-Arab Third World, Israel was depicted in ambivalent ways, on the one hand as a new nation with left-wing leanings who had fought a colonial power, and on the other as one born at the expense of another people.

The kibbutz: between community and communism Throughout the sixties, the new dynamic, technology-savvy Jew was also represented as a member of a new kind of community, the Kibbutz, which held broad political appeal and was idealized both inside Israel and in the West. This image was successfully exported via news, current affairs, documentaries and novels. Left-wing media and personalities, including communist sympathizers, were sympathetic to

Global images of Israel in the 1960s  241

this “socialist” representation of the new State, while they were simultaneously (or would become) critical of its policy regarding the Arabs. In Israel itself, despite the fact that only a small minority of the population lived on them, the kibbutz was likewise considered a key achievement, and many of the elites of the nation came from kibbutzim. Media representations of the kibbutz, while still in need of comparative international research, are a remarkably rich source for media scholars. One early enthusiastic British example promises “The first comprehensive study in English of one of the most revolutionary and significant experiments in the world’s history.”18 A 1962 French television report describes a group of young people dancing in a new kibbutz, with this strange caption: “That is a kibbutz: a few barracks thrown into the desert, around, nothing. The army has built the barracks, these youth have to irrigate, to plant, if they want to live there.” The commentary links the kibbutz and the desert; interestingly, however, from the start, most kibbutzim were actually located in fertile land in the Northern or central part of the country. The kibbutz, part pastoral Rousseauian community, part socialist revolution, part new Jewish achievement, part successful irrigation project, proved particularly seductive to 1960s Western culture. In one 1961 TV report, after a trip to Jerusalem a group of youth from Paris decide to resurrect a deserted French village, Pardaillan, by transforming it into a kibbutz. According to the voice over, their story, which attempts to create an experience “unique in France,” can be read “like a parable of the Bible.” Here again, as noted above, we see the media associating a modern Israeli development with the ancient (read religious) past. The word “kibbutz” was also popularized across languages: In Chapter 36 of Rayuela ­(“Hopscotch”), the partly autobiographical novel written by Argentinian Julio Cortázar in 1963, the protagonist (who stands for the author) describes his aspiration for humanity as the creation of “a kibbutz of desire.” All this did not completely erase the image of the suffering, persecuted Jew. It came back to play a major role, but this time as the victim of a major German/ European crime: the Holocaust, and around a spectacular trial that the new State and its leader David Ben-Gurion were keen to publicize both inside and outside the country. The event received substantial coverage, but it failed to elicit only sympathy.

The Holocaust: the Eichmann trial and the rise of the witness In 1961, the Eichmann trial triggered the first major flow of special envoys to Jerusalem in the history of the new state. Israeli historians have described the way that the Eichmann trial became part of a project, which flourished in the 1960s, that was aimed at incorporating the Holocaust into Israeli/Jewish collective memory.19 The event also generated immense interest in the international press. Hannah Arendt’s work for the New Yorker triggered a major debate on the motivations of the Nazi murderers.20 Less well known is the fact that numerous envoys and correspondents

242  Jérôme Bourdon

of major Western media passionately observed the long proceedings in a special room to which images of the trial taking place next door were broadcast live.21 The Eichmann trial was the first moment in the rise of a new transnational (mostly Western) collective memory of the Holocaust.22 While the first construction of the Israeli and Jewish memory of the Holocaust insisted on the resisting, fighting Jew, the Eichmann trial allowed the irruption of another key figure of contemporary culture, that of the witness reporting on his or her own suffering. However, it would be wrong to see the Eichmann trial as creating only a global wave of empathy for Jewish victims of the Holocaust, and, by extension, for the state of Israel. In Argentina, the breach of sovereignty involved in the secret kidnapping of Eichmann by Israelis was not well received, although it did not, in the end, affect the good relations between both countries. But diplomacy and social realities do not always converge: the kidnapping gave the pretext for an antisemitic campaign led by right wing organizations and publications.These “made frequent assertions concerning Jews’ lack of loyalty to Argentina, or their divided loyalties that in moments of crisis made them support Israel instead of remaining loyal to the Argentine republic, the sovereignty of which had been violated by the Zionists.”23 One of the right-wing organizations was in close contact with the Arab League’s representative in Buenos Aires, “who encouraged antisemitism under the guise of anti-Zionism and as a part of the anti-colonialist and anti-imperialist struggle.”24 The government did not interfere with the campaign. The event demonstrated that there was an active antisemitic minority, with some Catholic figures providing the “intellectual” rationale, notably the priest Julien Meinvielle, whose inflammatory 1936 antisemitic book, El Judio en el misterio de la historia, was republished in 1959. While most extreme in Argentina, antisemitism occasionally flared up in other Latin America countries.

Between anti-Zionism and antisemitism: The Soviet and the Arab worlds During the 1960s, antisemitism appeared as a minority phenomenon in Latin America; it was neither condemned nor condoned by Latin American governments, especially as most entertained good relations with Israel at the time. Not so in two other geopolitical zones, the Soviet and the Arab world. There, Western sympathy for Israel did not filter. In the Soviet Union, the Eichmann Trial occasioned a more long-lasting anti-Israeli campaign, with the obvious support of the authorities. The thesis was that Jerusalem gave publicity to the Eichmann trial in order to divert attention from the West German authorities, who, in cahoots with neo-Nazis, were supposedly preparing a new world war against … the Soviet Union. Hence some headlines such as: “A trial or a farce?” or “The executioner Eichmann and his protectors.”25 It must be recalled here that by the 1950s under Stalin, traditional Russian antisemitism had already morphed into anti-Zionism. The Soviet media had initiated the move to focus on Zionists instead of Jews, thus giving a political justification for antisemitism, for example during the Prague trials, which, as early as

Global images of Israel in the 1960s  243

1953 prompted Jean-Paul Sartre to write about a new “left-wing antisemitism.”26 While official Soviet positions (reflected in the press), were based on a formal political, anti-Israeli position, other media, brochures, pamphlets, press cartoons, and even novels, could draw on the old antisemitic repertoire. Zionism was sometimes described as directly inspired by Judaism, for example in Contemporary Judaism and Zionism, a brochure published in 1964, where Israel was presented as a racist, theocratic state where Arabs and poor Jews alike were oppressed by the bourgeois Zionist Jewish ruling class.27 Soviet pro-Arab diplomacy was also a factor in media depictions. These made good use of the “common enemy,” the state of Israel. The growing links between the Soviet Union and the Arab world, especially the Syrian-Russian alliance of 1966, renewed Soviet attacks, especially on the occasion of the visit of the Syrian delegation to Moscow that same year. On April 26 Pravda published this joint statement: “Both sides have confirmed their solidarity with the Arabs of Palestine and expressed their support for their lawful rights in the just struggle against Zionism used by imperialist forces to increase tension in the Middle and Near East.”28 Beyond the Soviet Union and its allies, this point of view affected a whole range of directly or indirectly Soviet-inspired media across the world, especially in the Communist press. In the popular daily French Communist newspaper, denunciations of Israel as a “racist State” and a “theocracy” started (at least) in 1960.29 The condemnation of Israel as a racist state became quite frequent in the radical left some 30 or 40 years later. By then, however, the systematization of the occupation had brought some substance to this accusation, including the increased use of the “apartheid” analogy.

The Six-Day War: a major turning point Fought from June 5 to 10, 1967 between Israel, on the one side, and Syria, Egypt and Jordan on the other, the Six-Day War resulted in huge territorial conquests by Israel: Sinai (handed back to Egypt following the 1977 Camp David accord), the Golan Heights, the West Bank of the Jordan River, East Jerusalem, and the Gaza Strip (these last three would soon be known as “the occupied territories”, at least outside of Israel). It contributed, more than any other event, to the global transformation of the media image of Israel. The military prowess led to (more or less open) admiration in many quarters, especially in militaristic regimes (Latin America and Spain). On June 9, the highly popular Spanish daily newspaper Ya claimed that if the Arabs had compromised with Israel, they would have spared themselves a humiliating defeat at the hands of a “small and well led army,” which had “given the world a lesson in efficiency and discipline.”30 The article used a clearly orientalist representation of Arabs as a people dominated by emotion and incapable of reasoning in a Western (Israeli?) way. However, in Western Europe, the war brought an end to the sort of media privilege that had put Israel on the proscenium of Middle-East reporting for many years. Basically, Israel was no longer a vulnerable, “small country surrounded by

244  Jérôme Bourdon

enemies.” Instead, it became an occupier.31 Western European countries who had been wholly supportive of Israel thus far, now viewed the occupation as a problem. This critical perspective became part of a quasi-global consensus, which translated into resolution 242 adopted unanimously by the UN Security Council on November 22, 1967 (undoubtedly the most well-known UN resolution). It calls for a peace on the basis of “withdrawal of Israeli armed forces from territories occupied in the recent conflict” and the right of countries of the region “to live in peace within secure and recognized boundaries.” Five days later, the French president Charles de Gaulle, previously considered close to Israel, used a press conference to issue a prepared statement that referred to the Jewish people as “an elite people, self-confident and dominating” (a phrase with anti-Semitic connotations that echoed across the Jewish world).32 De Gaulle also condemned Israel as a country that “organizes, on the territories it has taken, an occupation which cannot proceed without oppression, repression, expulsions [and that nevertheless provokes] a resistance which in her turn she calls terrorism.” Many journalists, without necessarily taking a stand, agreed that Israeli conquest of the territories (which quickly turned into an occupation) had destroyed the state’s almost pristine (Western) reputation. In January 1968, the host of the most popular French current affairs program introduced a story on Israel with the question: “how can one become an occupier without risking the loss of one’s pacific soul?” He similarly described Gaza, taken from Egypt, as follows: “Hundreds of thousands of refugees, barely fed by international charity, are in the Gaza Strip. For the Israelis, it is a poisoned conquest.” The same new tensions about Israel’s moral status could be felt in other Western media coverage.While the British The Guardian placed the blame for the 1967 conflict on Egypt’s blockade of the canal, one of the newspaper’s lead writers signaled a crucial change of mood and representation: At the receiving end, Zionism looks just like any colonial movement: settlers flowed in, to acquire eventually much of the land and all the political power. Throughout most of the colonized world, including Algeria and other Arab lands, the indigenous peoples have either checked or reversed that process …. In any case, acquiescence in what they take to be the injustice of a permanently Zionist Palestine seems as much out of the question for many Arabs as acquiescence in Mr. Ian Smith’s Rhodesia by many Africans.33 Thus, in Europe, 1967 remains the moment when media attitudes towards Israel started losing their mostly friendly tone. Tensions between editors and reporters with divergent views on the Arab and Palestinian situation were evident, a fact later confirmed by witnesses. In 2007, Eric Rouleau, long the Middle-East editor for France’s Le Monde (and a man with Arab and Palestinian sympathies), remembered that it became easier to get his viewpoint in print in the seventies.34 In the UK, Middle-East correspondent Michael Adams decided to leave The Guardian after he was denied the right to publish a piece on the expulsion of Palestinians from three villages in the Latrun area (the report was published in The Times, which was

Global images of Israel in the 1960s  245

moving to a more critical vision of Israel). Before leaving, Adams wrote a paper (on June 15, 1967), which echoes sentiments expressed in De Gaulle’s press conference. Explaining what he saw as the effects of Israel’s expansionist policies, he suggested: “We in the West, and Israel too, and possibly the whole world, will live in the shadow of theses consequences—and it is at least conceivable that out of them will emerge a people as tempered by adversity, as hard and determined as the present generation of Israelis.”35 Adams later co-wrote a book in which he excoriated the favorable British coverage of Israel.36

Global dynamics In the rest of the world, the war gave a decisive impetus to Arab efforts against the state of Israel, while strengthening the Soviet-Arab alliance. Pravda put the responsibility of the Six-Day War squarely on Israel’s shoulders. Soon after the war, the Soviet Union broke its diplomatic links with Israel. The war was the occasion of a renewed wave of propaganda in the USSR, with much use of the Israelis-asnew-Nazis analogy.37 Despite repeated official declarations against antisemitism, the Soviet media once again resorted to the antisemitic repertoire and, as before, “when the anti-Israel policy in the USSR became stronger, the wave of anti-Semitic publications increased.”38 This had international implications, especially in the Arab world. Radio Moscow had programs aimed at Arab audiences, which demonized the Zionists/Jews, and associated them with imperialist Americans. They stated, for example: “The facts demonstrate that members of Zionist organizations control 75 percent of US and world press agency [and half of the] national newspapers and magazines in the US.39 In 1968, the uprising against the Communist regime known as the Prague Spring was denounced and linked to “Czech Zionists.”40 As for African states, they “could no longer resist Egyptian pressure for support, especially when the issue was presented in terms of African territory—The Sinai— occupied by the aggressor state, Israel.”41 Israel’s continued (especially military) links with South Africa, whose regime was the target of growing international condemnation, also played a part. In multilateral forums one resolution after another became more critical of Israel and supportive of the Arabs, until, in 1973, “the vast majority of African states severed diplomatic ties with Israel.”42 In India as well, there was a pro-Palestinian turn, although there was no social or political consensus on the issue. After the war, reflecting the position of some opposition parties, major English language newspapers such as Times of India, Indian Express, Statesman and Hindustan Times remained critical of India’s support of the Arabs.43 Diplomatic considerations were present as Arab links with the Pakistani enemy had long been an irritant for India. Although barely noticed at the time, another crucial change also took place:The Israeli–Palestine conflict was increasingly framed as a religious one, and Islam took on a political valence.The Arabs used the new occupation of Jerusalem to revive an old worry: Israeli presence was depicted as a threat for the Al Aqsa Mosque; the Al Aqsa compound is the third Holy Place of Islam, but also, as the Temple Mount, the first of Judaism. The participants of the first Islamic Summit conference in Rabat,

246  Jérôme Bourdon

Morocco, declared, “the continued threat upon the sacred shrines of Islam is a result of the occupation of this City (i.e. Jerusalem) by the Israeli forces.” 44 But the Six-Day War contributed to a religious escalation on both sides. While the Arabs reframed the conflict as religious (although it would take years for this to have a strong diplomatic effect), in Israel, and then again, in the US, the conquest of the Holy City was interpreted in a religious, if not eschatological, manner.45 In this, it was also a turning point in the history of Zionism, which would make its successful “export” more difficult, and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict ever more global.

The new political map of the Middle-East coverage For journalists too, 1967 was a turning point. The occupation became the central story, and made the plight of the Palestinians (so far largely ignored by the Western media) much more visible. “The Israeli Arab conflict engage[d] journalists very deeply, and usually commit[ed] them to one or other of the struggling parties.”46 At the elite, liberal British weekly the Economist, a senior editor reflected: If shame for Britain’s part in the Suez affair set off my exasperated affection for the Arab world, a far deeper, European, shame fed my passionate advocacy of Israel’s existence, a passion that survived, just, [emphasis added] my first visit to the Middle East. My way to Israel led through the Palestinian refugee camps in Lebanon, and the gross injustice of evicted Palestinians paying for Europe’s guilt. . . .The scene changed after the 1967 War, a war in which Israel captured all the rest of the land that the Palestinians could call home.47 Furthermore, 1967 also saw a change regarding the identities of foreign correspondents operating from Israel. Slowly, a cohort of correspondents, mostly sent from Western capitals, based primarily in Jerusalem, replaced the old guard of binational Israeli–European or American correspondents covering Israel mostly from Tel Aviv. For them, the occupation became a major story, and, often, the main story, to be covered from Israel.48

The rise of the Palestinians The Six-Day War was the first conflict that gave real media visibility to the Palestinians, also the ground had been prepared in the few years before. Until 1967, the term “Palestinian” was rarely employed in the Western press. Palestinians were mostly referred to as the “Arab refugees of 1948.” The fact that Israel had expelled these people or prevented their return was ignored, even when such information was available. Israelis were seen primarily as Europeans who had sought refuge in an antique but unexploited land, one peopled uniquely by primitive populations. Thus, on the whole until at least the early sixties the concept of Israeli settler colonialism was not understood negatively in Europe. In addition, it took some time for the Palestinians to develop a national consciousness, and to begin to organize

Global images of Israel in the 1960s  247

politically, a dual phenomenon that, ironically, was given some momentum by both the creation of Israel and—even more emphatically—the post-1967 occupation of Gaza and the West Bank. During the 1960s, a few journalists started cautiously taking an interest in the Palestinian question. By 1964, the Arab Summit in Cairo and the creation of the Palestine Liberation Organization gave more visibility to the Palestinian refugee problem. In 1967, TV stations filmed the war and also, for the first time, Palestinian refugees in flight. On French television Roger Louis, the same journalist who had earlier vaunted Israeli plans for making the desert blossom, interviewed Palestinian refugees at length. On July 7, he spoke to a refugee who insisted that the Palestinians wanted to—and would—return to Israel, and who showed his five sons to the camera, explaining that they would die, one by one, if needed, until such a return took place. In September, Louis interviewed five young Palestinians in Eastern Jerusalem, who each claimed that the Israelis had treated them as viciously as the Nazis had treated the Jews, a crucial comparison in our narrative. Three years later, the terrible massacre of Palestinians by the Jordanian army in Amman, known as Black September, would reinforce this image of the Palestinians as victims. On the other hand, the increasingly powerful Palestine Liberation Organization was busy trying to promote another image, that of the fighter, one that cannot be dissociated from that of the first leader of the Palestinians, Yasser Arafat. He became the president of the Palestinian Liberation Organization in 1969, one year after the battle of Karameh, which he led against the Israeli army. The event brought the Fedayeen (Arab for “fighter”, a new word in global journalistic parlance) to prominence for the first time. Arafat made the cover of Time magazine on December 13, 1968, as “Fedayeen leader Yasser Arafat.” Arafat was much more, however, than simply the president of the PLO. He became, for many years, the Palestinian, the sole rival to the gallery of Israeli leaders much covered by the Western media (Ben-Gurion, Moshe Dayan, Yitzhak Rabin, Golda Meir). As the sixties drew to a close, the Palestinians started initiating a new strategy: plane hijacking, a tactic that drew public sympathy as long as there were no victims. The association between Arabs and terrorism, already taken for granted within Israel’s borders, slowly developed in the wider world: the Munich 1972 massacre of Israeli athletes fueled this new connection. To date, the question of whether Palestinian attacks against civilians should be qualified as terrorist remains hotly debated. The main difference between then and now is that today, debates over Islam as a major inspiration for terrorism are central to the conversation. In the sixties and early seventies, in contrast, Islam was rarely, if ever, mentioned. The year 1967 also saw the emergence of a new media image, this one embodied in the trope of the couple, first systematically framed as an Israeli soldier and Palestinian civilian (preferably, a woman or a child, a choice that accentuated the contrast between the strong and the weak). This media couple had its foil: an image of equals dialoguing to make peace. The media spared no time producing such a counter-image, presumably either because peace accords and reconciliations were (and remain) part of the small repertoire of positive,“good news” that media capitalize

248  Jérôme Bourdon

on to win audiences, or because media bodies had their own political aspirations: occasionally, journalists put energy into organizing such dialogues. On June 20, 1967, a French talk show tried to trigger a debate between Israeli Jews and Arabs after a screening of the film Exodus (a choice that in itself revealed the total ignorance of the organizers about the Arab point of view). But the Arab guests demanded that they not be put in the same room with the Israelis and denied that this was a dialogue. For lack of better alternatives, the ensuing “dialogue” both in this show and in other coverage, had to be created through audiovisual sleight of hand.This was achieved by the skillful editing of reports contrasting pro-Israeli and pro-Arab points of view, as well as through following the physical movement of the journalists between both parties, and sometimes between countries. In fact, journalists often came to act as quasi-diplomats: Walter Cronkite, as historians know, played an important part in the dialogue between Sadat and Carter in 1977, and the list goes on.49

US exceptionalism While it triggered a major change in the image of Israel in Europe, and made the balance tilt markedly in favor of the Arabs and the Palestinians in the Third World, one country stood apart: US policy, media and public opinion became even more supportive of Israel in the aftermath of the conflict, and this support has remained strong ever since. In contrast, US media support for Arabs (and later Palestinians) has always been minor.The reasons for these divergent national responses across the transatlantic divide can be found, of course, in the relative status of Jews and Arabs within each culture (to be sure, one risks speaking of a homogeneous “European culture” here, but not without cause). Many European countries have had both long relationships with Islam (epitomized by the mixture of repulsion and fascination that Edward Said has characterized in his work), and long histories of Arab/Muslim immigration (since at least the early twentieth century—including immigration by Palestinians after 1948 although this was a very small number).50 In Europe, this meant that the image of the Middle East was contextualized via the visibility and importance of Arab communities, especially in big cities. This presence created a familiarity that was absent in the US, where “Arabs played a largely symbolic role … until the 1980s.”51 Instead, in the US, knowledge of Arabs amongst the broader public was mediated through news and popular culture, not actual contact—a sharp contrast with knowledge of Jews, who had a visible presence, both in some urban communities (obviously New York) but also, and increasingly so, in American public life. At the same time, multiculturalism was perceived differently in Europe and the US, a fact that played against popular perceptions of the Jews in Europe. Furthermore, Europe has been less willing to accept cultural differences among its populations (with differences, of course, with France at one end of the spectrum, and the UK at the other). Jews, in general, have taken more time to present themselves as Jews in public life. By the time that Jews began to be visible in the media in the 1980s, the defense of Israel had become problematic: at this point many European media had turned critical of the Israeli occupation of the West Bank and Gaza.

Global images of Israel in the 1960s  249

The same factors that explain interest in the Middle East conflict in Europe had different effects in the US, where sympathy for the Jewish people was not complicated by memories of the Holocaust. For the US, Christian interest in the Holy Land also held a specific valence. In some Protestant eschatologies, the Jews, with their modern nation seen as the rebirth of the ancient kingdom, have a specific role to play in the final fight between God and Magog. This is a strong component of US popular (religious) culture, one reflected in bestselling books and also in some popular media, religious television especially.52 Another remarkable feature of US coverage of Israel since at least the 1960s is the remarkable coherence between the three arenas where the support for the country was manifested: the media, politics, and public opinion. Elite US journalists were (and still are) remarkably pro-Israeli. In a 1979–80 survey of leading journalists, “fully 72 percent agreed that the United States was morally obligated to defend Israel.”53 While 1967 led to many European countries distancing themselves from Israeli policies, in the US, the political links were strong and reinforced after the war. Lyndon Johnson, US president during the war, was very close to Israel, based “in part on his religious upbringing” and “in part on his identification with the Israelis as a frontier people,” but this comment can be generalized to much of the US political elite, both Republican and Democrat.54 In addition, Johnson’s case illustrates the strength of pro-Israeli diplomats and advisers (Jewish or not) at key moments of Israeli-American history.55

Public opinions The United States is probably the only country in the world where a majority of public opinion (at times an absolute majority) has long shown support for Israel, while support for Palestinians has always been a minority phenomenon. A Gallup poll, conducted during the three days before the outbreak of the 1967 war and extending through the first three days of the fighting, found that 45 percent of Americans sympathized more with Israel than with the Arab states, 4 percent sympathized more with the Arab states and 26 percent with neither, while another 24 percent had no opinion.56 In Europe, support for Israel was high at the time of the war, but has declined steadily since. In France, for example, in June 1967, 56 percent of the French supported Israel, and 2 percent the Arabs.57 In May 2008, 19 percent of the French claimed to have more sympathy for the Palestinians and 14 percent for Israel (the proportions were similar in Western Europe).

Conclusion: the growing newsworthiness of Israel in the 1960s The remarkable space occupied by Israel in the global culture of the 1960s in a variety of media genres thus appears as the result of a combination of factors that vary from country to country, if not from continent from continent. In an age of rising global media, first radio, then television, Israel had all the elements of a good journalistic story. It provided colorful leaders and characters,

250  Jérôme Bourdon

many of whom were part of a new, personalized political landscape, one rendered more visual by television, with Yasser Arafat and his commandos emerging at the end of the sixties as a competing figure. The development of Israel fitted another major “grand narrative” of the period: that of faith in technological progress as the ultimate solution to the world’s pervasive problems. In this vein, throughout the period, Israel continued forging its image, via new agricultural programs and technological advances, as a modern nation—an image that also impacted its relations with (and its image in) the Third World, before the post-1967 break. Moving to more specifically Jewish/Israeli factors, I suggest that after the Holocaust, the Western world felt compelled to make amends towards a people that had historically been so grievously and irreparably wronged by antisemitism. While the Holocaust itself only emerged as a broader topic of media interest following the Eichmann trial, Western guilt about and compassion for the Jewish victims, translated into support for the new state. After all, if the Jews had a home, if their state was resurrected (as the term was then used), then the presence of Israel functioned symbolically as a kind of counter-Holocaust. Amplified by the media, this presence paradoxically contributed, at first, to hiding the genocide while providing relief for guilty consciences—all at precisely the same time that Germany was repressing its own memories of the Holocaust.58 The narrative of the rebirth of the people of Israel that we see in the media in the early 1960s thus fit many different needs, both inside and outside of the country. In the US, it supported a specific, burgeoning Jewish-American culture, and also fueled very specific forms of Protestant philosemitism. By contrast, the degree of media indifference—even hostility—towards the Arabs as a people, who were almost universally depicted as backwards, was visible in Western media that exported this perspective far beyond the West. With the exception of the American (and Israeli) religious perspective, the story of Israel in the sixties—at least as seen by the media, also appears as a secular period. Then again, the image the country wanted to project of itself fitted the zeitgeist. The Six Day War was a dramatic turning point. The war created a new situation and, in its wake, very different images of Israel. In its new status as occupier, Israel suddenly appeared as a powerful, militarized state, whose main character was the soldier more than the young pioneer; familiar pictures of soldiers and police harassing civilians were immediately reminiscent of the conflicts over decolonization had been only recently reshaping the global map (especially the Algerian War, 1954–62, which had attracted global attention). At the same time, in a culture that gave increasing space to victims (a process in which the story of the Jews, ironically, played some part), the Jewish occupation repositioned the Palestinians as victims in the eyes of both the media and the world.59 Palestinians were able to capitalize on this to their own ends. As the Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwich interviewed by an Israeli intellectual would ironically observe: Do you know why we Palestinians are so famous? Because you are our enemy. The interest for the Palestinian question was a consequence of the interest

Global images of Israel in the 1960s  251

for the Jewish question. In the final analysis, people are interested in you, not in me. If the Palestinians had been at war with Pakistan, nobody would have heard of us. So, we are unlucky to have Israel for enemy, as Israel has so many supporters in the world, and we are lucky, because the Jews are at the center of the world.You gave us defeat and renown.60 Darwish’s comments explain only part of the story. As we saw, whether Israel has had only supporters can be debated. In addition, in the years that followed the war the Palestinian struggle, framed as anti-colonial emancipatory fight and embodied by Yasser Arafat, gained much ground in the Western media, but also in the Third World. And of course, some other scholars prioritize different reasons for Israel’s changing media status. Two years after the Six-Day War, the historian of antisemitism Léon Poliakov suggested that the Soviet strategy of legitimizing and recycling antisemitism by claiming political hostility vis-à-vis Israel had become successfully exported to Europe.61 The Six Day War fueled the global fight launched against Israel by specific countries, first of all the Arab World, later allied with the Soviet Union. In those two arenas, anti-Israeli campaigns had long used antisemitic representations, and the Six Day War reinforced and legitimized these trends. On a global level, the war helped the Arab Countries to counter Israel’s diplomatic success, eventually leading to the cutting off of diplomatic ties with most of Sub-Saharan Africa, and, in the long run, affecting friendly Latin American policies (which had never hidden the persistence of antisemitism). After 1968 an increased number of Latin American countries affiliated themselves with non-aligned movements, which led them to reframe the Palestinian struggle as anti-colonialist, and also to develop their relations with the Arab states.62 Finally, the Six-Day War and the conquest of the Holy City of Jerusalem encouraged a religious framing of the Middle-Eastern Israeli-Arab conflict as a global Jewish-Muslim conflict. It would take some 10 years after the events of 1967 before the rise of political Islam, paralleled by the rise of political Judaism in Israel, definitively transformed what had previously been seen as a primarily (but never solely) political conflict. With the media’s assistance, by the end of the 1960s the United States had become the only country in the world where, at all levels (policy, media, public opinion), the Jewish State enjoyed strong support. Which is not to say that sympathies for Israel disappeared: in Europe, for example, some such sentiments remained, although lagging behind sympathies for the Arab world.The process of competitive victimization must not blind us to the fact that there never is an automatic “transfer of sympathies” from one side to another. Racism (against both Arabs and Jews) still coexists (for example among today’s extreme rights in various countries) and sympathies for both sides can also grow together, especially following the brokering of peace agreements. The most remarkable fact is the low level of indifference for a relatively small and local conflict. An examination of the changing representations of Israel on the global stage during the 1960s thus serves as a haunting reminder of the ways in which the

252  Jérôme Bourdon

media both reveals and shapes ideology and belief, with short-term local political factors (especially US, Arab and Soviet policies), interacting with longer term global cultural ones (e.g. Western/Christian antisemitism and orientalism), in a complex and potent manner.

Notes   1 Giles Robert and Snyder Robert. 1968: The Year of Media Decision (New Brunswick: Transaction Publishers, 2001).  2 Jérôme Bourdon. Le récit impossible. Le conflit israélo-palestinien et les médias (Paris: De Boecke et INA, 2009) and “Israel-Palestine l’emprise des images”, DVD published by the National Institute of Audiovisual (Paris: INA, 2008), which is the source of the references to French newsreels and television programs.   3 I will leave aside the Far East, where the interest for Israel was the lowest.   4 Melanie McAllister, Epic Encounters. Culture, Media and U.S. Interests in the Middle East, 1945–2000 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001), 13.  5 McAllister, Epic Encounters, 14.   6 Yeshayahu, Nir, The Bible and the Image:The History of Photography in the Holy Land 1839– 1899 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1985).   7 One of the earliest depictions of the new Israeli Jew, sun-tanned, hard working his land, is by the renowned French journalist Albert Londres, Le juif errant est arrivé (The wandering jew has arrived) (Paris: Albin Michel, 1929), translated into several languages.   8 The term, with its religious connotations, was widely used, for example on January 1, 1951, by the International Herald Tribune, “I have seen the new land of Israel and I can say that a miracle has been achieved.” See also for France Jacques Dalloz, La presse française et la création de l’Etat d’Israël (the French Press and the Creation of the State of Israel) (Paris: La Documentation française, 1993).   9 Maya Siminovich “Como la prensa espanola se refiere a Israel y a sus otredades 1948– 2005” (How the Spanish press refers to Israel and its alterities) (PhD dissertation, Madrid Carlos III University, 2013), 25–26. 10 Daphna Baram. Disenchantment:The Guardian and Israel (London: Guardian Publications, 2004). 11 Ted Berkman, Sabra (New York: Pyramid, 1969). 12 Siminovich, “Como la prensa”, 37. 13 The film was based on a bestselling novel by Leon Uris, which, by 1980, had sold 20 million copies on the US market (McAllister, Epic Encounters, 159). 14 McAllister, Epic Encounters, 160. 15 Robert Capa, “Israel Fight the Desert”, Illustrated (London), 2 June 1951, pp. 14/9 (photographs only, text by Martin Foster), quoted in Andrew L. Mendelson and C. Zoe Smith, Vision of a New State, Israel Mythologized by Robert Capa, Journalism Studies, 7:2, 210. 16 Michael Curtis and Susan Gitelson, eds, Israel in the Third World (New Brunswick: Transaction Books, 1976). Shimeon Amir, Israel’s Development Cooperation with Africa, Asia, and Latin America (New York: Prager, 1974). 17 Benjamin Rivlin and Jacques Fomerand, Changing Third World Perspectives and Policies Towards Israel, in Curtis and Gitelson, eds, Israel and the Third World, 337. 18 Dr. H. Darin-Drabkin, The Other Society: the Kibbutzim of Israel (London: Gollancz, 1962). 19 Tom Segev, The Seventh Million: The Israelis and the Holocaust (New York: Hill and Wang, 1993). 20 Later published as: Hannah Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem: An Essay on the Banality of Evil (New York:Viking Press, 1963). 21 The French television legal affairs correspondent devoted seven stories to the trial. This was depicted in the 2012 film Hannah Arendt directed by Margarethe von Trotta. 22 Sylvie Lindeperg and Annette Wieworka, eds, Le Moment Eichmann (Paris: Albin Michel, 2016).

Global images of Israel in the 1960s  253

23 Raanan Rein, The Eichmann kidnapping: its effects on Argentine–Israeli relations and the local Jewish community, Jewish Social Studies 7/3, 2001. See also: Evelyne Kénig, L’antisémitisme en Espagne et en Amérique Latine, in Léon Poliakoff, ed., Histoire de l’antisémitisme 1945–1993 (Paris: Seuil, 1994), 165–196. 24 Ibid. 25 First quote from the Pravda (Truth), 28 Avril 1961, second one from Troud (Work), 28 July 1961, both major Soviet dailies, in Léon Poliakov, De Moscou à Beyrouth, Essai sur la Désinformation (Paris: Calmann-Lévy, 1983), 56. 26 Poliakov, De Moscou, 50. 27 Poliakov, De Moscou, 57. 28 Yosef Govrin, Israeli–Soviet Relations, 1953–1967, From Confrontation to Disruption (London: Frank Cass, 1990). 29 Jean-William Lapierre, L’information sur l’Etat d’Israël dans les grands quotidiens français en 1958 (Paris: Editions du Centre national de la recherche scientifique, 1968). 30 Siminovich, “Como la prensa…”, 38. 31 On June 7, 1963, a French current affairs report stated: “Facing 40 million Arabs who dream of reconquering Palestine, 2,5 million Israelis stand guard over a territory just as big as a small French province.” 32 Raymond Aron. De Gaulle, Israël et les Juifs (Paris: Plon, 1968). 33 Baram, Disenchantment, 105. 34 Bourdon, Le récit impossible. 35 Baram, Disenchantment, 113. 36 Michael Adams and Christopher Mayhew, Publish it not, the Middle East Cover-Up (London: Longman, 1975). 37 Jérôme Bourdon, Outrageous, inescapable? Debating historical analogies in the coverage of the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict, Discourse and Communication, 9/4, 2015. 38 Govrin, Israeli-Soviet Relations, 161. 39 Poliakov, De Moscou, 63. 40 Ibid., 65. 41 Rivlin and Fomerand, “Changing Third World Perspectives”, 343. 42 Ran Kochan, “Israel in Third World Forums”, in Curtis and Gitelson, Israel, 263. 43 K.M. Sajad Ibrahim, India’s Collaboration with Israel: A Policy of Opportunism, Foreign Policy Research Center Journal (New Delhi) 5, 2011. 44 Ran Kochan, “Israel in Third World Forums”, in Curtis and Gitelson, Israel, 264. 45 Tom Segev, 1967. Israel, the War, and the Year that Transformed the Middle East. (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2007), 383. 46 Baram, Disenchantment, 119. 47 Barbara Smith,“Half a century at the Economist”. The Economist, December 18, 2003. Last viewed November 15 at: http://www.economist.com/node/2281819. 48 Jérome Bourdon, Strange Strangers. The Jerusalem correspondents in the network of nations. Journalism (online before print), 2015. 49 Eytan Gilboa, Media-broker diplomacy: When journalists become mediators, Critical Studies in Media Communication, 22, 2005. 50 Edward Said, Orientalism (New York: Pantheon, 1978). See also: Ivan D. Kalmar and Derek Penslar, Orientalism and the Jews (Lebanon and New Hampshire: Brandeis, 2005). 51 McAllister, Epic Encounters, 39. See also Anne G. Geyer. “The American Correspondent in the Arab World”, in M.C. Hudson and R.G. Wolfe, eds, The American Media and the Arabs (Washington: Center for contemporary Arab Studies, Georgetown University, 1980). 52 The high point in the publication of such books was, just at the end of the decade, The Great Late Planet Earth. In 1970, it repackaged, for modern readers, the millenarian interpretation of the Bible formulated early in the nineteenth century (according to which God’s plan for the Holy land included the restoration of Jews to the land of Palestine and the rebuilding of the Temple prior to Christ’s second coming).

254  Jérôme Bourdon

53 S. Robert Lichter, “Media support for Israel: A survey of leading journalists”, in Television Coverage of the Middle East, William C. Adams, ed. (Norwood: Ablex, 1981), 43. 54 Charles D. Smith, Palestine and the Arab–Israeli Conflict. A History with Documents (Boston: Bedford/Saint Martin’s, 2013), 278. 55 Segev, 1967, 109–113, 253; Smith, Palestine. 56 Pew Research Center (2007). A Six-Day War. Its Aftermath in American Public Opinion, accessed June 28, 2016, http://www.juf.org/pdf/ealert/six_day_war_in_american_ public_opinion.pdf 57 Atlantico.fr (2014). 1967–2014. Evolution des Français sur Israël et le Proche-Orient (August 6), accessed June 26, 2016, http://www.atlantico.fr/rdv/politico-scanner/19672014-evolution-regards-francais-israel-et-conflits-au-proche-orient-ifop-1693136. html/page/0/1 58 Gisela Dachs, Soixante-ans de relations germano-israéliennes (Paris: Notes du Cerfa, 2009). 59 Jean-Pierre Chaumont, La concurrence des victimes (Paris: la Découverte, 1997). 60 Mahmoud Darwich, La Palestine comme métaphore. Entretiens (Paris: Sinbad/Actes Sud, 1997). 61 Léon Poliakov, De L’antisionisme à l’antisémitisme (Paris: Calmann-Lévy, 1969). 62 Barromi, “Latin American State’s Conduct at the UN Assembly on Issues Affecting Israel”, in Curtis and Gitelson, eds, Israel and the Third World.

Selected bibliography Jérôme Bourdon. Le récit impossible. Le conflit israélo-palestinien et les médias (Paris: De Boecke and INA, 2009). Neil Caplan. The Israel–Palestine Conflict. Contested Histories (London: Wiley, 2010). Michael Curtis and Susan Gitelson, eds, Israel in the Third World (New Brunswick:Transaction Books, 1976). Yosef Govrin, Israeli–Soviet Relations, 1953–1967, From Confrontation to Disruption (London: Frank Cass, 1990). Melanie McAllister, Epic Encounters. Culture, Media and U.S. Interests in the Middle East, 1945– 2000 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001). Léon Poliakoff, Histoire de l’antisémitisme 1945–1993 (Paris: Seuil, 1994). Elias Sanbar. The Palestinians. Photographs of a Land and its People from 1839 to the Present Day (London:Yale University Press, 2015). Tom Segev, 1967: Israel, the War, and the Year that Transformed the Middle East. (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2007). Charles D. Smith, Palestine and the Arab–Israeli Conflict. A History with Documents (Boston: Bedford/Saint Martin’s, 2013).

13 LOOKING OUT, CHEERING ON Global leftist vocabularies among Palestinian citizens of Israel Maha Nassar

In early 1969, 28-year-old poet and political activist Samih al-Qasim penned a review of a poetry collection written by his fellow Palestinian citizen of Israel, 50-year-old writer and journalist Michel Haddad. Haddad’s collection, the first book of Arabic prose poetry to be published in Israel, utilized a modernist style and invoked a celebration of the individual spirit that was popular in Western literary circles. But Qasim, who had been strongly influenced by the socialist realist approach to literature promoted by the Soviet Union, found Haddad’s apolitical poetry distasteful. “We live in a society dominated by bourgeois thought and bourgeois tastes,” Qasim wrote in his review. “In such a society, truly humanistic art defies the terroristic campaign . . . that claims ideology and politicization corrupt art.” Citing Chilean poet-diplomat Pablo Neruda and German poet-playwright Bertolt Brecht as examples, Qasim insisted there existed a rich global tradition of cultural producers who “proved to the world that art with a cause is the only longlasting art. And they proved that ideological [underpinnings] tend to bestow upon artistic works tremendous fervor and attention.”1 Qasim’s criticism of modernism and his defense of cultural productions that expressed clear political views illustrate the ways in which the intense and highly charged global discussions regarding the role of art in political struggles reverberated far beyond the intellectual centers typically associated with the global 1960s. By linking local cultural production to global trends, Qasim, along with Mahmoud Darwish and other young poets who had recently come to dominate the Arab literary scene, sought to place their cultural productions within a broader global context. Recent years have witnessed a proliferation of scholarship that approaches the history of the 1960s through a transnational lens. In particular, strides have been made in demonstrating the ways in which Cold War rivalries and expressions of decolonization have transcended national boundaries.2 The cultural dimensions of these struggles have likewise received long overdue attention, allowing scholars to

256  Maha Nassar

elaborate upon the ways in which an “international language of dissent” (to borrow Jeremi Suri’s term) developed around the world.3 Yet these analyses have largely overlooked the ways in which activists and intellectuals from the Middle East—and particularly from the Arab world—have participated in these developments.4 In fact, Arab intellectuals and cultural producers were deeply engaged in these issues and saw themselves as intimately linked to wider global debates. This was also true for Palestinian citizens of Israel, who, despite their physical and political isolation from the Arab region and the world, held a deep and abiding interest in global cultural and political developments.5 This chapter focuses on how Palestinian cultural producers in Israel—largely associated with the Israeli Communist Party (ICP)—sought to position themselves and their community within the larger cultural and intellectual developments emerging during this period. I argue that they drew upon the rich international vocabularies of socialist humanism and decolonization in order to position themselves as part of a worldwide community working together to overturn the forces of exploitation and violence. I argue further that print ­material—especially periodicals—played a key role in circulating the voices of socialist humanism and anticolonial dissent from around the world among Palestinian citizens of Israel. Activists and cultural producers utilized the Arabiclanguage publications of the ICP—especially its semi-weekly newspaper al-Ittihad (The Union) and its monthly cultural journal, al-Jadid (The New)—to familiarize readers with global leftist political vocabularies from the past and present. Finally, I argue that by translating and analyzing pieces of global literature that embodied the socialist realist approach to literature, and by composing their own works that reinforced a sense of solidarity with anticolonial and anti-imperialist movements, these Palestinian cultural producers in Israel sought to add their own voices to these global conversations, conveying the message that their community’s quest for justice within Israel was a universal one, not one that was exclusively located within the confines of the nation-state. Examining these dynamics sheds new light on how the transnational political vocabularies of the 1960s were adapted to a specific Arab context, and how those Arab cultural producers contributed to the international sense of collectivity that emerged during this period.

Palestinian access to global vocabularies For much of the twentieth century, Arab intellectuals broadly—and Palestinian intellectuals specifically—were deeply engaged with global cultural vocabularies of humanism and dissent. Many intellectuals in the region were eager to adapt elements of European enlightenment and positivist discourses to their local contexts while simultaneously pushing back against the colonial discourses that often accompanied the increasing European penetration into the region. Intellectuals associated with the late 19th-century Arab cultural renaissance project (nahda), largely concentrated in the Arab intellectual capitals of Alexandria, Cairo and Beirut, published translations of works by European writers and scientists from

Looking out, cheering on: Palestinian citizens  257

Dickens to Darwin and beyond in their newly bourgeoning newspaper and book publishing endeavors.6 But they also adopted elements of international socialist, anarchist and radical discourses that stressed social justice, workers’ rights, access to education, and redistribution of land and wealth. As such, they participated fully in the development of a global radical culture that stressed translation and printing as two key methods by which to expand individuals’ minds and thereby liberate society.7 Among those socialist and radical writers who were translated into Arabic at the turn of the twentieth century were Russian writers Maxim Gorky and Leo Tolstoy.8 These pioneers of leftist thought would re-emerge on the pages of the ICP Arabic publications in later decades. This regional interest in global dynamics also took hold in Palestine, where the Palestinian Arab elite followed closely the political, social and cultural conversations throughout the region.9 Moreover, late-nineteenth-century British, French and Russian rivalry over Palestine led to the establishment of several missionary schools in the country that promoted each country’s respective language and cultural heritage. Several Palestinian graduates of these missionary schools went on to found periodicals and publishing houses that translated foreign works into Arabic. Translations of Russian realist literature by such writers as Pushkin and Tolstoy, which depicted the everyday lives of people in simple, unadorned prose, were especially popular prior to World War I. After the war, with the advent of British rule over Palestine and French rule over neighboring Syria and Lebanon, English and French works were increasingly translated into Arabic by Palestinian cultural agents.10 During the interwar period, educated Palestinians were increasingly able to access English-language texts directly. Under British Mandatory rule (1920–1948), primary schools were established in rural areas while secondary schools in the cities saw a rise in enrollment. Arabic was the principal language of instruction (though English was introduced as a second language in primary school) and students aiming for a bureaucratic position upon graduation strove to become fluent in English. In addition, since Palestine lacked a university of its own, high-school graduates seeking a college degree typically enrolled either in the American University of Beirut (where the language of instruction was English) or in a British university. As a result, most educated Palestinians could read English, many at quite an advanced level.This allowed them to access not only print material originally written in English but also a wide array of texts from around the world that were translated into the increasingly global language. The ability to read print material in English proved crucial to introducing Palestinian intellectuals, not only to the tenets of literary realism, but also to the principles of socialist realism, which stressed that poetry and prose writings should celebrate the masses and instill communist principles by being a “literature of the people.” This approach was introduced by Soviet leaders Lenin and Stalin in the 1920s and disseminated through a network of ideologues and thinkers. These ideas were further spread though the International Union of Revolutionary Writers (founded in 1925) and its literary organ, International Literature, a bimonthly journal that appeared in Russian, French, German and English and was distributed

258  Maha Nassar

to communist parties around the world. This included the Palestine Communist Party (PCP, founded in 1919), whose Jewish and Arab members played a key role in familiarizing readers and party activists in Mandate-era Palestine with the writings and perspectives of socialist realist writers beyond their borders. The Englishlanguage version of the journal, which featured translations of non-anglophone writers into English such as Nicolas Guillen, Pablo Neruda, Federico García Lorca, Nazim Hikmet, and others, was especially useful for Palestinian Arab members of the PCP who were likely unfamiliar with the other languages of the journal. During the 1940s the monthly magazine al-Ghad and the weekly Arabic newspaper alIttihad were launched by Arab communist activists, introducing readers to the basic tenets of Marxist thought, including socialist realist literature.11 These themes— along with the repertoire of writers promoted by the Soviet Union—would be revived after the loss of Palestine in 1948.

Palestinian Citizens of Israel and the ICP In the wake of the 1948 war, in which more than 750,000 Palestinians were expelled or fled from their homes, only about 160,000 Palestinians remained inside the territory of the new state of Israel. The vast majority of those who remained were rural villagers, constituting less than 14 percent of the total Israeli population.12 Although Israel technically granted most of them citizenship in 1952, their identity cards distinguished them as “Arab,” and until 1966 they faced an oppressive military regime that limited their mobility, confiscated their property, and routinely detained and jailed them for oppositional political expression.13 They also had little contact with Palestinians and other Arabs beyond the Green Line (which effectively demarcated Israel’s borders between 1949 and 1967). Claiming security concerns, Israeli authorities prevented its Palestinian population from traveling to Arab countries, restricted the importation of media from the Arab world, and limited the number of Arabic newspapers and periodicals that could be published within the state.14 Moreover, most students were enrolled in a segregated Israeli educational system that underfunded Arab schools and enforced a curriculum that downplayed Arab history and literature.15 Within this context, the ICP emerged as a crucial site for political and cultural resistance within Israel.16 By shying away from the more explicit Arab nationalist positions of the surrounding countries, and by echoing the analyses of communist parties throughout the decolonizing world, the ICP articulated the struggles of their local population as part of a global class struggle against bourgeois-capitalist forces. The party’s diverse membership (which included Ashkenazi and Mizrahi Jews as well as Palestinians), coupled with the support it received from the Soviet Union, allowed it to emerge as the most prominent legal, non-Zionist political party in Israel at this time. As such, the ICP attracted large numbers of politically conscious Palestinian citizens of Israel, including many who did not necessarily share the party’s official Marxist outlook. These dynamics allowed the ICP a greater degree of latitude in criticizing the Israeli state than other Arab political parties enjoyed, though it was still highly circumscribed as compared to Zionist parties in the state.17

Looking out, cheering on: Palestinian citizens  259

The vast majority of the party’s limited resources went to support its Hebrew and Arabic publications.18 Al-Ittihad reprinted news items from Western wire services, the Soviet TASS news agency, and regional publications, as well as commentary on local and regional events. Al-Jadid, founded in 1953 and edited during the 1960s by a team of ICP activists, published Arabic translations of global resistance literature as well as locally produced essays that highlighted the role of cultural resistance in anticolonial struggles. While the ICP outlets did face competition from the Arabic publications of other party outlets, by the 1960s its newspaper and journal came to dominate the Arabic media landscape in Israel.19 But despite the ICP’s official sanction, the party faced numerous obstacles in spreading its message, including harassment from the authorities and an inability to compete with the government’s largesse in garnering political support.20 In addition, like all publications in Israel, those of the ICP needed to submit all their copy ahead of time to the military censor. Due to its persistent criticism of government policies, and especially the military government, the ICP’s publications were usually subject to greater objections from the censor’s pen than those of parties with greater ties to the establishment.21 Given the strong Marxist-Leninist beliefs of early party leaders, Palestinian ICP leaders strengthened their call for cultural productions to reflect social realities. Veteran party leaders were ardent proponents of Marxist-Leninist views, a stance reflected in their approach to literature. In his keynote address at a January 1954 conference convened to discuss al-Jadid’s duty to society, party leader and al-Ittihad editor Emile Habibi declared: We seek a literature that leads the people towards a brighter future, a literature that affects the self-consciousness of the souls of the people, bestowing them with an understanding of their position, of the position of the world around them and of the essential conflict in society between those who obtain a morsel [of food] through the sweat of their brow and those who steal that morsel.22 Habibi’s call was very much in keeping with the socialist realist approach to literature. He wished to see locally produced literature that reflected the lives of both writers and readers, portrayed the hurdles faced by the downtrodden, and created a sense of solidarity among the working classes and colonized peoples around the world. This approach to literary production continued into the next decade as ICP publications reprinted socialist realist works and published local works that adhered closely to the socialist realist style.23

The Cultural Cold War and the vocabularies of socialist realism This emphasis on socialist realism was inextricably linked to broader Cold War dynamics. The Soviet Union’s strong promotion of the belief that liberation and

260  Maha Nassar

social justice could only be achieved through working-class revolution, coupled with its support for non-communist anticolonial movements, allowed its message to resonate with many in the colonized world. By the time the United States sought to contain the spread of communism in Asia and Africa after World War II, support for anticolonial and nationalist movements was already linked in the minds of many to the Soviet Union. Moreover, the United States’ interventions during the 1950s in such places as Korea, Indonesia, Iran, and Lebanon, coupled with its support of British and French colonial interests, fostered a worldview—common across Asia, Africa and Latin America—that stressed the need to end Western domination over other countries.24 Seeking to mitigate the prevalence of this worldview, U.S. policymakers and diplomats actively sought to present the United States as having benevolent interests in the world and as possessing a culture superior to that of the Soviet Union. To do so they promoted an “art-for-art’s-sake” approach to cultural productions (including visual arts, performance arts and literary works) and held that, “art should be autonomous from the practice of daily life, not subject to evaluation by social or political criteria.”25 By promoting artistic and literary works that celebrated individual liberty and personal freedom, they believed they could attract support for American bourgeois values at the expense of the socialist ideals promoted by the Soviet Union. For its part, the Soviet Union continued to promote socialist realism as the best means to promote a culture of humanism that tied together people from all over the world.26 While various artistic forms were encompassed in this cultural Cold War, print material (periodicals and books) emerged as a central means of hashing out these debates. According to historians Greg Barnhisel and Catherine Turner, for both superpowers, print, more than other creative forms, “provided a critical medium for defining state power, creating narratives about the nation, and controlling the meaning of history.”27 As a result, both the United States and the Soviet Union devoted considerable energies to the printed word in order to win hearts and minds over to their respective sides. For the Soviet Union this meant expanding its publishing and translation endeavors through the dissemination of its periodicals (such as International Literature and Soviet Literature) to a global audience, through the broad distribution of pamphlets explaining Marxist principles, and through inexpensive book translations of Soviet and other socialist realist writers. Cultural Cold Warriors in the United States grew anxious about the flurry of print material and soon established offices of their own, such as the Congress for Cultural Freedom, which sought to provide a counterweight to these publications.28 This included launching the Books in Translation series and its subsidiary, Low-Priced Books in English, which flooded global markets during the 1950s and 1960s with a variety of inexpensive books that ranged from anti-communist tracts to works by well-regarded American authors associated with literary realism, such as Ernest Hemingway.29 Far from being a secondary arena, the Middle East was a crucial site of Cold War contestation at both the political and cultural levels. American Cold Warriors

Looking out, cheering on: Palestinian citizens  261

believed that helping to support the establishment of libraries, books and other print material in local languages would help win the political allegiances of those in the region while simultaneously aiding in modernizing projects and opening up commercial markets for American book publishers.30 As a result, the Franklin Book Program was established as a quasi-governmental program that sold inexpensive copies of books in local languages.31 By 1963, an estimated 29 million copies of over 1,000 titles translated into Arabic, Persian, Urdu, Pashtu, Bengali, Malay and Indonesian had been distributed in bookstores and libraries throughout the Middle East and South and Southeast Asia.32 But Arab leftist intellectuals were skeptical of American cultural programs that they viewed as a further encroachment into their societies.This was also true among Palestinian ICP activists who followed Arab regional trends and were likewise leery of what they saw as American meddling in their cultural affairs. Mahmoud Darwish, who was then an up-and-coming poet as well as columnist for al-Ittihad, expressed these views most directly. In a two-part column for the newspaper, Darwish chided Franklin Publishers for what he saw as the underlying propagandistic aim of the Program. Darwish insisted he was not opposed to reading the cultural productions of all peoples, and he cited the realist literature of American writers Mark Twain and Ernest Hemingway as examples of excellent American literature. The problem, Darwish argued, was that Franklin Publishers aimed to use its considerable resources to “overwhelm Arab writers and dissuade them from writing authentic Arabic literature that springs from the Arab hopes for liberation” by “flooding the market with books that are cheap in price and in content.” Darwish specifically criticized the prevalence of books that stressed the dominance of the individual will in the stories published, to the exclusion of wider social issues and matters of interest to the Arab masses.33 Darwish’s criticism of Franklin Publishers, and specifically of its promotion of modernist literature emphasizing individual consciousness over the collective good, revealed a skepticism about the American endeavor that was quite common in leftist intellectual circles around the region.34 His criticism also shows that not only were translation projects conceived of as part of the cultural Cold War within the halls of power, but were also recognized as such by intellectuals in the region. As a result, the choice of what to translate and print in local publications was not just about the aesthetic preference of the editors, but it carried a political message as well. Thus, it is not surprising that, in additional to publishing poems, short stories and essays by local and regional writers, throughout the 1960s, ICP publications also regularly included Arabic translations and/or summaries of international literature that adopted a decidedly realist message. Included in this literary corpus were works by the most prominent figures of the socialist realist genre who had been promoted during Stalin’s rule, such as Soviet writers Maxim Gorky,Vladimir Mayakovsky, and Mikhail Sholokhov, Turkish poet Nazim Hikmet, Spanish poet Federico García Lorca and Chilean poet Pablo Neruda.35 This international repertoire also included classics from the nineteenth century associated with the realist

262  Maha Nassar

genre, such as the works of Russian writer Anton Chekhov, American writer Mark Twain, and French writer Guy de Maupassant.36 Local Palestinian poets in Israel quite consciously drew upon this broader realist heritage and the more specific socialist realist legacy as inspiration for their own works.37 But during this heady decade, newer intellectual currents were also emerging. The Soviet intellectual and cultural thaw that took place under the premiership of Nikita Khrushchev ushered in a new wave of writing from inside and outside the Soviet Union that challenged previous Stalinist orthodoxies. The most famous and influential piece of work to do this was Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s 1962 novel, One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, which (with Khrushchev’s approval) provided the first public account of Stalinist gulags. Solzhenitsyn’s book caused an immediate international sensation, including in Israel where a younger generation of ICP members who were not as enamored with the Soviet Union as veteran party members had been, welcomed the critical account. One of those younger writers was Darwish, who wrote about the worldwide response to the book in a January 1963 essay in al-Ittihad. Relying on press summaries of the book because he had not yet gained access to a translation of the entire work, Darwish praised Solzhenitsyn and other writers who “now feel the need to uncover the realities of that time.”38 Darwish’s column conveyed his sense of urgency in communicating to his readers his appreciation and support for writers who depict social realities, not just in capitalist and bourgeois societies, but in Stalinist Russia as well. This sense of urgency about engaging in global conversations also coalesced around other themes.

Vocabularies of decolonization Palestinian intellectuals and political activists in Israel were not just looking out of a proverbial window, following conversations that were happening elsewhere in the world. They were actively engaged in those conversations, particularly as they pertained to another major theme of the 1960s: decolonization. Palestinian activists and cultural producers sought to connect to the peoples of Africa, Asia and (to a lesser extent) Latin America who were themselves engaged in anticolonial and anti-imperial struggles for independence. Since most Palestinians in Israel could not travel abroad, the Arabic press played a crucial role in acquainting them with these independence movements from around the world and in providing a platform to express their sense of solidarity with them. Throughout the decade, Palestinian intellectuals engaged in a variety of solidarity discourses with Afro-Asian liberation movements. These included political, poetic and intellectual discourses that allowed Palestinians in Israel to compare their condition as indigenous second-class citizens to that of other colonized and oppressed peoples in the world. These solidarity discourses were aimed not only at demonstrating support for other decolonizing movements, but also at disrupting Zionist narratives of Israeli exceptionality by drawing parallels between their circumstances within the Israeli state and those of other colonized peoples, all the while staying within the bounds of acceptable political discourse in Israel.39 In

Looking out, cheering on: Palestinian citizens  263

doing so, they also established what Alex Lubin calls “geographies of liberation” that tied Arab and African political imaginaries together.40 One decolonizing struggle that attracted significant international attention was that of the Congo, which had achieved formal independence in June 1960, and whose leader, Patrice Lumumba, had expressed strong anticolonial and socialist views. After Lumumba was assassinated that December, al-Ittihad covered events in the Congo extensively, with several editorials that placed at least part of the blame for Lumumba’s death on imperialist forces. In addition to analysing developments in the Congo itself, the paper also sought to guide its readers towards a belief that in condemning Lumumba’s assassination, they were standing with the rest of the world in support of the Congolese people. Al-Ittihad ran front-page banner headlines trumpeting the large demonstrations that had taken place in Moscow, Accra, Cairo, Pyongyang, Warsaw, Paris, Havana, Belgrade, London, Jakarta and Lagos decrying Lumumba’s assassination and calling for the resignation of UN Secretary General Dag Hammarskjold for failing to prevent the killings.41 The paper’s coverage of decolonizing movements also extended beyond the Congo; additional articles called attention to African struggles in such places as the Cameroon, South Africa, Rwanda and Burundi, Zambia, Nigeria and Angola.42 But the most enduring coverage of anticolonial movements concerned Algeria’s war for independence against French colonial rule. As news of France’s brutal repression of the rebels spread, Algeria became a symbol of Third World revolution, inspiring people around the world, and especially in Asia and Africa, to overthrow their colonial overlords.43 Palestinians in Israel had been following the news from Algeria since the war began, thanks in part to its extensive coverage on the pages of al-Ittihad.44 And like others around the world, they sought to demonstrate their support for the Algerian people. In March 1958 the ICP arranged a gathering to affirm Palestinians’ solidarity with the Algerian people, despite the Israeli government’s support for France. The protest was itself part of an international day of solidarity with Algeria that had been announced by the Conference of Asian-African Solidarity in Cairo earlier that year, whose declaration of intent reflected the broader anti-imperialist tone of the conference.45 As news of the Algerian War of Independence continued to dominate al-Ittihad’s headlines in the early 1960s,46 Palestinian cultural producers in Israel turned to other means to declare their solidarity with the Algerian people. Poetry was a central means of doing so, because of both its long history as a medium of communication in the Arab world and the ease with which its verses could be transmitted to large numbers of people. A number of Palestinians in Israel composed and declaimed poems in support of the Algerian people in which they re-imagined their geographic spaces and located themselves within the broader decolonizing world. Some solidarity poems had a wistful tone, acknowledging the geographic barriers that existed between Palestinians in Israel and those with whom they sought solidarity. This can be seen in a Darwish poem, written for Algerian fighters in 1960: “My friends!/My relatives!/Your news, my relatives/is joy in the hearts of

264  Maha Nassar

my country’s workers/elation in the lives of my country’s children./If only I were a bird’s wing/if only!/To sing, to call out to the morning/among the ranks of the mighty revolutionaries/in the fields of oil and olives.”47 Darwish’s invocation of solidarity is clear, although his plaintive longing to be a “bird’s wing” that could fly to the revolutionaries in Algeria also reflects his recognition that despite the sense of solidarity he feels, geographic realities prevent him from joining the fighters. In addition to reimagining geographic spaces, such poems reinforced the socialist realist message that linked politics and art. This theme was dominant among Palestinian poets in Israel—and indeed in much of the decolonizing world. In order to reinforce this message, ICP publications also ran translations and reviews of works by writers in the decolonizing world who deployed themes of humanism, anti-colonialism and realism in their work. Al-Ittihad printed a review of an anthology of African poetry edited by Langston Hughes and published as part of the UNESCO Collection of Contemporary Works series.48 Al-Jadid published studies and/or works by several figures, including Bengali writer Rabindranath Tagore, Senagalese poet-diplomat Leopold Senghor, and Ghanaian political leader Kwame Nkrumah.49 What tied these pieces together was their insistence that the campaign for decolonization be waged at the cultural level in addition to the political and military levels. Reprinting these works from around the world also allowed Palestinian intellectuals in Israel to develop what Aimé Césaire and Leopold Senghor termed “horizontal solidarity” in which colonized people around the world develop a sense of shared struggle.50 The intellectual appeal of this concept can be seen in Mahmoud Darwish’s 1961 column devoted to a discussion of three writers from Angola, which was at the time seeking independence from Portuguese rule. Darwish provided short introductions to the lives and works of Viriato de Cruz, a poet forced to flee his homeland due to his revolutionary verse; Mário Pinto de Andrade, Angola’s most famous poet and the first to write in his native Kimbundu language; and the physician-poet Agostinho Neto, leader of the Popular Movement for the Liberation of Angola. Darwish became acquainted with their work through Sovietsponsored translations into English that “presented to the world the truth about the reality of this small community of people who have lived under the yoke of colonial rule for five centuries.”51 Darwish commented on prominent themes in the poetry, such as the recurring image of a sad mother anxious about her son’s return and the growing anticipation that the people of Africa will soon be rid of colonial machinations. These themes would also find prominence in Darwish’s own poetic work and would prove invaluable in catapulting the young poet onto the international stage. In addition to connecting to the themes of other Third World poets, Darwish and his colleagues were also deeply interested in the question of cultural identity in the face of colonial rule. The Algerians’ struggle for cultural sovereignty following their formal independence from France in 1962 was a particular source of inspiration for Palestinian cultural producers in Israel. Al-Ittihad covered Algeria’s postindependence Arabization program,52 while al-Jadid reprinted essays on Algerian

Looking out, cheering on: Palestinian citizens  265

literature, emphasizing how these works of literature and historical studies were “part of a larger struggle for independence.”53 Darwish also devoted several columns to the Algerian struggle for cultural sovereignty and independence. He was especially interested in the ways in which, despite French attempts at the erasure of Arabic cultural traditions, Algerians had utilized various cultural media to fight against the French, using whatever ­language—classical Arabic, colloquial Arabic, or French—that was available to them. In Algeria, Darwish explained to his readers, “literature stood side by side with the pistol [and] the rifle” to liberate the country from colonial rule. Because of the prominent role that literature played in Algeria’s liberation struggle, Darwish predicted that subsequent developments in Algerian cultural expression would have a great impact on the rest of the Arab world.54 Given Darwish’s own sense that Arabic was under assault in Israel, as expressed elsewhere in his columns, his admiration of the Algerians’ deployment of literature was also subtly pointing to parallels that he and others within the Palestinian minority faced. Thus, in addition to acquainting readers with the great writers of the realist and socialist realist genres, ICP’s Arabic publications also allowed Palestinian intellectuals and cultural producers in Israel to express their support for international political and cultural struggles for independence and sovereignty. Doing so allowed them to establish a shared vocabulary of decolonization that extended beyond their borders. This theme was expressed in Samih al-Qasim’s 1964 poem in which the narrator declares, “From a revolutionary in the East/to revolutionaries lighting up the darkness/to fellow revolutionaries, wherever they are/in the Nile, in the Congo, in Vietnam./… / My brothers! With blood you write/your history—and headlines!”55 Qasim’s poetic reference to revolutionaries making “headlines” highlights the nexus of political and poetic discourses that generated a sense of solidarity across national and geographic divides. And while the struggles in Africa dominated much attention during the early- to mid-1960s, as Qasim’s reference to Vietnam indicates, attention would soon shift eastward.

The Vietnam War and the New Left As the decade progressed, the global vocabularies of socialist realism and decolonization took on renewed vigour with the rising opposition to the American War in Vietnam. With the ranks of the Viet Cong swelling and the American troop presence increasing during the mid-1960s, the conflict in Vietnam soon came to dominate front-page headlines and international news over all over the world. American policymakers and their supporters insisted that the escalation was needed to contain Soviet-sponsored communism and prevent it from spreading across Asia. But critics around the world viewed the war as an American attempt to establish a more pliant government in Vietnam, brutally suppressing the will of the Vietnamese people in the process. Communist publications in particular excoriated the United States for what they described as violent imperialist machinations perpetuated against the proud and innocent Vietnamese people.

266  Maha Nassar

Al-Ittihad was no exception.56 Most of the paper’s coverage highlighted the international condemnation of the United States and its policies in Southeast Asia, as well as the growing domestic opposition to the war in the United States. And as with the Congo, the paper also gave prominence to the global protests of solidarity with the people of Vietnam.57 The theme of solidarity with the Vietnamese people also came through in al-Ittihad’s reprint of Sajjad Zaheer’s “Tribute to Vietnam,” in which the famous Indian poet described the atrocities to which the Vietnamese people were subjected, but predicted that the goodwill of people around the world would “vouchsafe a resplendent victory/for humanity.”58 Palestinian cultural producers also looked to Vietnamese poetry as a source of inspiration and solidarity. Al-Jadid published poems by Vietnamese poets and military leaders Nguyen Koa Diem and To Huu, who urged their people to resist imperialist aggression.59 In a column for the journal, Qasim translated into Arabic selections of the prison poetry of Viet Cong leader Ho Chi Minh that had recently appeared in English. Qasim began his column by noting that “a critic . . . once said, ‘The poet and the [revolutionary] hero are twins: many are the poets who have been blessed with heroism, and many are the heroes who have been blessed with poetic talent.’ ” Citing Ho Chi Minh as one such example, Qasim explained that while he had hoped to translate the entire collection of Ho’s Prison Diary, he only had time to translate half a dozen quatrains, which he then presented to the reader.60 As with Darwish’s discussion of Solzenitsyn’s new novel, Qasim’s sense of urgency came through in his essay. Not only was he up against a deadline (though that was surely a consideration), he also wanted to make sure his readers did not fall behind in the global conversation that was emerging at the time regarding the escalating war in Vietnam and the role that poetry could play in broader political struggles. Moreover, given the prominence of prison poetry in the Palestinian context, Qasim’s translation of these vivid and at times heart-wrenching poems further drew attention to the parallel fates of political prisoners both at home and around the world while simultaneously reinforcing a common refrain in al-Jadid: the organic link between politics and literature. But Palestinian critics of the Vietnam War were also keen to point out that a growing number of Americans were condemning their own country’s assault on the Vietnamese people. Even before the 1968 Tet Offensive was launched, al-Ittihad ran front-page stories, along with pictures, covering the growing anti-war protests in the United States and the rest of the world. Much of the coverage was based on reports from American news outlets such as The New York Times and Newsweek,61 demonstrating that access to American news and media outlets did not necessarily help the United States in its attempt to win the cultural Cold War, especially as its policies were so objectionable to many of the very people it was trying to convince.62 Palestinian cultural producers in Israel likewise took notice of the ways in which their American counterparts deployed artistic means to express their opposition to the war. Poet Tariq ‘Awnallah wrote a tribute to American folk singers and antiwar activists Joan Baez and Pete Seeger to convey his admiration for the ways in

Looking out, cheering on: Palestinian citizens  267

which they utilized their music to carry a political message. Titled, “The Other Face of America,” ‘Awnallah lauded Baez as “the most magnificent of those who sing for the liberated,” whose voice “burns through my veins.” He urged: “My sister/sing, sing/(until the revolutionaries prevail).”63 ‘Awnallah ascribed a moral and political power to Baez’s voice that not only moves people’s consciences, but also inspires political actions. As for Seeger, ‘Awnallah wrote, “The screams of the cha cha cha/and the twist/and rock and roll/have been silenced/by you.”64 By contrasting Seeger’s political music with that of other genres of American popular music, ‘Awnallah was implicitly criticizing the modernist approach advocated by the West, arguing from a socialist realist perspective that the most powerful American music is that that carries a populist political message. In both these tributes, the Palestinian poet sought to reimagine the moral geographic landscape, reinscribing American voices into the global call for peace and justice. By spring 1968, a new dynamic emerged in the global uprisings that were taking place around the world. Led mainly by youth and student protesters in cities throughout Europe and North America, the uprisings of that fateful year are best understood “in reference to the global constellation of forces and to each other.”65 Widespread opposition to the American escalation of the Vietnam War and growing impatience with the lingering vestiges of colonialism, coupled with domestic economic and political grievances, led hitherto marginalized groups, particularly students, to take to the streets. Referred to as the New Left, they not only called for improvements in their own lives, but also called for fundamental changes to the world order. Observers around the world tried to make sense of these events and their protagonists. Protesters were deeply critical of the capitalist system, but were avowedly not old-style communists. Many New Left leaders were inspired by philosophers affiliated with the Frankfurt School, such as Herbert Marcuse and André Gorz, who were critical of both the capitalist system and Soviet-style socialism.The emergence of protests in eastern European countries ruled by socialist governments led some analysts to conclude that the New Left was equally critical of capitalist and socialist systems, though its strong anticolonial orientation, including its strong denunciation of American involvement in Vietnam and its celebration of revolutionary figures such as Che Guevara, led protesters to adopt a position more critical of the United States than of the Soviet Union. Despite its strong anti-imperialist orientation, the New Left did not gain the laudatory attention of ICP-affiliated Palestinian intellectuals that earlier movements had experienced. The protests in France, the United States, Britain, Germany, and Czechoslovakia received some coverage in al-Ittihad, but without the bold headlines that such protests had garnered elsewhere in the world. In contrast to the enthusiastic cheers in support of Third World liberation movements and global anti-war protests, ICP intellectuals were decidedly less enamoured with the protests in Europe and the United States.Veteran party activists appreciated the anti-imperialist sentiments that many of the protesters expressed, especially in the United States and France, though they took issue with what they saw as the intellectual inconsistencies of New Left thought.

268  Maha Nassar

For example, in summer 1968 veteran ICP leader Emile Tuma took to the pages of al-Jadid to explain the underpinnings of the New Left, highlighting what he saw as problematic elements of the movement. In the first of a two-part series, Tuma disputed claims in the Western media that student protesters in France and the United States were primarily motivated to take to the streets as a result of housing shortages and other material concerns. Rather, according to Tuma, “the horror in France at their disgusting war in Algeria and in the United States at their barbaric war in Vietnam” was a prime motivator in bringing out the student protesters.66 Tuma also provided his readers with a synopsis of some of the major works that informed the New Left, including Herbert Marcuse’s One Dimensional Man, André Gorz’s Strategies for Labor: A Radical Proposal, and Frantz Fanon’s Black Skin, White Masks and The Wretched of the Earth. Tuma took issue with these works’ criticisms of communism, mounting a robust defence of the need to approach contemporary problems using class-based analysis. In the end, he argued, there was not much “new” in New Left thought.67 Tuma’s rather uncharitable criticism of the New Left reflected a defensiveness that was not uncommon in Old Left responses to the movement. Yet the movement’s one redeeming factor, according to Tuma, was its powerful antiwar and anti-imperialist stance. Thus, despite Tuma’s strong Marxist orientation, his analysis also demonstrates that decolonization continued to serve as the primary axis around which questions of contemporary global affairs turned. If the philosophers of the New Left elicited a measure of defensiveness from veteran ICP activists, its philosophy did not seem to inspire much enthusiasm from younger ICP intellectuals either. Under the editorship of the young guard, in 1968 most of the examples of global literature run by al-Jadid were by the exemplars of socialist realism, like Neruda and Hikmet, although more sophisticated examples of Marxist aesthetics, such as works by Brecht, also received attention on the pages of the journal.68 What tied these developments together was an engagement with the shifting landscape of global leftist discourses that nonetheless continued to prioritize the importance of socialist realist approaches to literature and a firm commitment to supporting anticolonial and anti-imperialist movements around the world. * * * * * Throughout the 1960s, Palestinian activists and cultural producers in Israel affiliated with the Israeli Communist Party were keenly aware of and engaged with the global leftist discourses taking place around them. As a minority community with second-class status whose intellectuals saw themselves as part of the Third World, they shared with many of their counterparts in other regions a profound disdain for American policies and the modernist aesthetics promoted by the United States. Building on their long history of familiarity with the great realist literary works of the 19th century and the socialist realist works of the 20th, these cultural producers continually emphasized the need for literary productions to play a constructive role in building a better society. The struggle for decolonization was central in this project, with a focus on African struggles for independence in the early 1960s

Looking out, cheering on: Palestinian citizens  269

giving way to greater attention to the Vietnamese struggle later in the decade.They affirmed that the central duty of the cultural producer was to cheer on the revolutionaries through literary and other creative productions. Examining these dynamics allows historians to better understand the transnational circulation of political vocabularies during this important decade. And by focusing on a region that often gets overlooked in such discussions, this chapter encourages scholars to consider other areas that have been hitherto neglected but that were nonetheless deeply engaged with the vicissitudes of the “global 1960s.”

Notes   1 Samih al-Qasim, “ʿAn al-fann wa’l-mawqif ” (On art and positionality), al-Jadid 16, no. 2 (Feb. 1969): 6-8, 43, here 43.   2 Samantha Christiansen and Zachary A. Scarlett, eds, The Third World in the Global 1960s (New York: Berghahn Books, 2013); Quinn Slobodian, Foreign Front: Third World Politics in Sixties West Germany (Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press, 2012); Odd Arne Westad, The Global Cold War: Third World Intervention and the making of Our Times (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005).  3 Jeremi Suri, Power and Protest: Global Revolution and the Rise of Détente (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003). These works include Timothy Scott Brown and Andrew Lison, eds, The Global Sixties in Sound and Vision: Media, Counterculture, Revolt (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014); Greg Barnhisel, Cold War Modernists: Art, Literature and American Cultural Diplomacy (New York: Columbia University Press, 2015).   4 For an eloquent critique of this lacuna, see Yoav Di-Capua, “Arab Existentialism: An Invisible Chapter in the Intellectual History of Decolonization,” The American Historical Review 117, no. 4 (2012): 1061–1091.  5 While the terms “Arab Israeli” and “Israeli Arab” are still commonly used in Israel and in popular media to describe this group, recently scholars have preferred using the terms “Palestinian citizens of Israel” and “Palestinian in Israel” as they take into account their own subjectivity and preferences. See Asʿad Ghanem,“The Palestinians in Israel: Political Orientation and Aspirations,” International Journal of Intercultural Relations 26, no. 2 (2002): 135–152.   For more on the isolation of Palestinian citizens of Israel during this period—and their efforts to overcome this isolation—see Maha Nassar, Brothers Apart: Palestinian Citizens of Israel and the Arab World (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2017).   6 Marwa Elshakry, Reading Darwin in Arabic, 1860–1950 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2014).  7 Ilham Khuri-Makdisi, The Eastern Mediterranean and the Making of Global Radicalism, 1860–1914 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2010).  8 Khuri-Makdisi, The Eastern Mediterranean, 30–31.   9 Rashid Khalidi, Palestinian Identity: The Construction of a Modern National Consciousness (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997). 10 Husam al-Khatib, Harakat al-tarjama al-filastiniyya min al-nahda hatta awakhir al-qarn al-ʿishrin (The Palestinian translation movement from the Nahda to the end of the twentieth century) (Amman: al-Mu’assasa al-‘arabiyya li’l-dirasat wa’l-nashr, 1995), 15-16. 11 Musa Budeiri, The Palestine Communist Party, 1919–1948: Arab and Jew in the Struggle for Internationalism (Reading, UK: Ithaca Press, 1979). 12 Charles Kamen, “After the Catastrophe I: The Arabs in Israel, 1948–51,” Middle Eastern Studies 23, no. 4 (1987), 455–457. 13 Israel passed its Citizenship Law in 1952, which conferred Israeli citizenship (but not Israeli “nationality”—a superior category) on the majority of Palestinians who were deemed to be continual residents of Israel. But thousands of Palestinians in Israel were not adequately accounted for and were therefore denied citizenship status. Shira

270  Maha Nassar

Robinson, Citizen Strangers: Palestinians and the Making of Israel’s Liberal Settler State (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2013), 105–109.   While military rule was formally lifted in 1966, many of the restrictions and much of the discrimination they faced continue until today. See Nadim N. Rouhana and Areej Sabbagh-Khoury, “Settler-Colonial Citizenship: Conceptualizing the Relationship between Israel and its Palestinian Citizens,” Settler Colonial Studies 5, no. 3 (2015): 205–225. 14 Charles Kamen, “After the Catastrophe II: The Arabs in Israel, 1948–51,” Middle East Studies 24, no. 1 (1988), 101–103; Nassar, Brothers Apart. 15 Sami Khalil Marʿi, Arab Education in Israel. Syracuse: Syracuse University Press 1978; Muhammad Amara, and ʿAbd al-Rahman Marʿi, Language Education Policy: The Arab Minority in Israel (Berlin: Springer Science+Business Media, 2002). 16 The ICP was formed in October 1948 and comprised of (mainly Jewish) members of the former PCP and Palestinians who had split from the PCP in 1943 over questions of national identity. The latter were admitted into the ICP after taking responsibility for the previous split. See Joel Beinin, Was the Red Flag Flying There? Marxist Politics and the Arab–Israeli Conflict in Egypt and Israel, 1948–1965 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990), 51–55. 17 Nassar, Brothers Apart; Robinson, Citizen Strangers. 18 According to a 1957 central committee report, the ICP devoted 80 percent of its funds to publications. Although party leaders would not disclose funding levels or sources beyond membership dues and subscriptions, some sources point to revenue that was the byproduct of trade relations between Israel and Communist bloc countries. Ilana Kaufman, Arab National Communism in the Jewish State (Gainesville, University of Florida Press, 1997), 144–145 n. 9; 147, n. 34. 19 While exact figures are difficult to pinpoint, Mustafa Kabha and Dan Caspi estimate alIttihad’s circulation of 6,000–7,000 issues to be nearly double that of its two main rivals during this period. Likewise al-Jadid’s circulation matched or exceeded the circulation of its competitors. See Mustafa Kabha and Dan Caspi, The Palestinian Arab In/Outsiders: Media and Conflict in Israel (London:Valentine Mitchell, 2012), 113. 20 Beinin, Red Flag, 76, 141; Hillel Cohen, Good Arabs: The Israeli Security Agencies and the Israeli Arabs, 1948–1967, tr. Haim Watzman (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2010), 64. 21 Pnina Lahav, “Israel’s Press Law,” in Press Law in Modern Democracies: A Comparative Study, ed. Pnina Lahav (New York: Longman, 1985), 265–313. 22 “Al-insan hadaf al-adab wa-mawduʿihi: min muhadarat Imil Habibi fi nadwat al-jadid” (Humanity is the goal and subject of literature: from the speech of Emile Habibi at the al-Jadid conference), al-Jadid 1, no. 3 (January 1954): 38. 23 Nassar, Brothers Apart. 24 Westad, The Global Cold War, 110–157; Greg Barnhisel and Catherine Turner, eds, Pressing the Fight: Print, Propaganda, and the Cold War (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2010). 25 Barnhisel, Cold War Modernists, 2. 26 David Caute, The Dancer Defects: The Struggle for Cultural Supremacy during the Cold War (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003). 27 Barnhisel and Turner, “Introduction,” Pressing the Fight, 4. 28 Barnhisel, Cold War Modernists, Ch. 3. 29 Ibid. 30 Amanda Laugesen, “Books for the World: American Book Programs in the Developing World, 1948–1968,” in Pressing the Fight, 126–144. 31 Laugesen, “Books of the World,” 136–141. 32 Datus C. Smith, Jr., “Ten Years of Franklin Publications,” ALA Bulleitn 57, no. 6 (June 1963): 507–512. See also, Louise S. Robbins, “Publishing American Values: The Franklin Book Programs as Cold War Cultural Diplomacy,” Library Trends 55, no. 3 (April 2007): 638–650.

Looking out, cheering on: Palestinian citizens  271

33 Mahoud Darwish, “Zawiyat al-adab: muʾamama jadida ʿala al-thaqafa al-ʿarabiyya,” (Literature corner: a new plot against Arab culture), al-Ittihad Feburary 9, 1962, 2. 34 Darwish recounts the criticisms of several notable literary crtitics from Egypt in Lebanon. Ibid. See also, Darwish, “Muʾamara amrikiyya ʿala al-thaqafa al-ʿarabiyya” (An American plot against Arab culture), al-Ittihad February 26, 1962, 2. 35 Maxim Gorky, “al-um al-khaʾin” (The treacherous mother), al-Jadid 7, no. 9 (September 1960): 22–27; Vladimir Mayakovsky, “150,000,000,” al-Jadid 13, nos. 4–5 (April– May 1966): 10–14; Mikhail Sholokhov, “Kalima ʿan al-watan,” (A word about the nation), al-Jadid 13, no. 2 (February 1966): 18–21; Nazim Hikmet, “Shahid sahat bayazid” (The martyr of Bayezid Square), al-Jadid 7, no. 9 (September 1960): 30; Federico García Lorca, “Wadaʿan ya Gharnata” (Farewell, Granada), al-Jadid 11, no. 10 (October 1964): 22–25; Pablo Neruda, “Istayqidh ayuha al-hattab” (I wish the woodcutter would wake up), al-Jadid 14, no. 6 (June 1967): 26. 36 Anton Chekhov, “Al-ustadh” (The teacher [of literature]), al-Jadid 8, no. 9 (September 1961): 14–16; Mark Twain, “Maʿraka maʿ sahafi” (A battle with a journalist [the title refers here to “Journalism in Tennessee”]), al-Jadid 9, no. 7 (July 1962): 42–45; Guy de Maupassant, “Qasidat gharam” (A poem of desire), al-Jadid 10, no. 1 (January 1963). 37 Nassar, Brothers Apart. 38 Mahmoud Darwish, “Qissa tashghal al-ʿalam” (A story shaking the world), al-Ittihad January 3, 1963, 4. 39 Maha Nassar,“ ‘My Struggle Embraces Every Struggle’: Palestinians in Israel and Solidarity with Afro-Asian Liberation Movements.” Arab Studies Journal 22, no. 1 (2014): 74–92. 40 Alex Lubin, Geographies of Liberation: The Making of an Afro-Arab Political Imaginary (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2014). 41 For more on this episode, see Nassar, “My Struggle.” 42 See, respectively, al-Ittihad, January 8, 1960, April 1, 1960, July 13, 1962, October 30, 1964, January 25, 1966, and September 2, 1966. 43 Robert Malley, The Call from Algeria: Third Worldism, Revolution, and the Turn to Islam. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996). 44 For a sample of al-Ittihad headlines regarding Algeria between 1955 and 1957, see Robinson, Citizen Strangers, 238, n. 134. 45 Al-Ittihad, February 11, 1959, 2. See also Robinson, Citizen Strangers, 184. 46 During the last 2 years of the Algerian war alone (1960–1962), the paper carried 39 articles and editorials in support of that country’s struggle for freedom. About half of these were front-page news items, while the other half consisted of editorials in support of the Algerian people and condemning the French authorities. 47 Mahmoud Darwish, “ʿAnaqid al-Diyaʾ,”al-Ittihad, October 11, 1960. See also, Nassar, “My Struggle.” 48 Mikhail Buluq, “Shuʿara’ ifriqiya” (Poets of Africa), al-Ittihad March 13, 1964. The volume to which the review refers is Langston Hughes, ed., Poems from Black Africa (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1963) 49 Rabindranath Tagore, “al-Shabah” (The Ghost), al-Jadid 8, no. 1 (January 1961): 16–18; “Singhur: shaʿir min ifriqiya” (Senghor: A poet from Africa), al-Jadid 14, no. 10 (October 1967): 13–16; “Al-Qadaya al-Rahina li’l-Thawra al-Ifriqiya” (Current issues in the African revolution), al-Jadid 13, no. 2 (1966), 5–6, 22.This book to which the essay refers appears to be Kwame Nkrumah, Neo-colonialism: The Last Stages of Imperialism (London: Nelson, 1965). 50 Aimé Césaire, “Culture and Colonization,” Social Text 28, no. 2 (2010), 129–130; Leopold Senghor, “Some Thoughts on Africa: A Continent in Development,” International Affairs 38, no. 2 (1962), 189–190. 51 Mahmoud Darwish, “Zawiyat al-adab: thalathat shuʿaraʾ min anghula” (Literature corener: three poets from Angola), al-Ittihad, September 22, 1961, 2. 52 “Mustaqbal al-Lugha al-ʿArabiyya fi’l Jazaʾir,” al-Ittihad, June 19, 1964;“Hamlat al-Taʿrib wa-Ihyaʾ al-Thaqafa al-ʿArabiyya fi’l-Jazaʾir,” al-Ittihad, July 31, 1964. 53 Michel Salman, “Tarikh al-Adab fi’l-Jazaʾir,” al-Jadid, 9, no. 3 (1962), 49–52.

272  Maha Nassar

54 Mahmoud Darwish, “Sawt al-Jazaʾir fi Muʾtamar al-Kuttab,” al-Jadid 9, nos. 4–5 (1962), 22–25. See also Darwish, “Zawiyat al-Adab: al-Thaqafa fi’l-Jazaʾir,” al-Ittihad, November 17, 1961. 55 Samih al-Qasim, “Min al-Thaʾir fi’l-Sharq,” al-Ittihad, December 18, 1964. 56 According to my count, between 1964 and 1967, al-Ittihad devoted 51 articles and editorials to the conflict in Vietnam. 57 See al-Ittihad, July 5, August 26, and November 18, 1966. 58 Sajjad Zaheer, “Tahiyya ila Fiyatnam” (Greetings to Vietnam), al-Ittihad, June 23, 1967, 3. 59 “Shuʿaraʾ min Fiyatnam” (Poets from Vietnam) al-Jadid 13, no. 11 (November 1966): 14–15. 60 Samih al-Qasim, “Burj Babil,” al-Jadid 14, no. 5 (1967), 26–27. For the English translation on which Qasim based his work, see Ho Chi Minh, Prison Diary (Hanoi: Foreign Language Publishing House, 1967). 61 See, for example, al-Ittihad December 18, 1964, May 25, 1965, March 22 and 29, 1966, August 26, 1966, and May 2, 1967. 62 See Suri, Power and Protest, especially pp. 130–160. 63 Tariq ʿAwnallah, “Al-wajh al-thani li-amrika” (The other face of America), al-Jadid 13, no. 11 (Nov. 1966): 16. 64 Ibid. 65 George N. Katsiaficas, The Imagination of the New Left: A Global Analysis of 1968 (Cambridge, MA: South End Press, 1987), 3. 66 Emile Tuma, “Haqiqat al-yasar al-jadid” (The reality of the New Left [1]), al-Jadid 15: 7 (July 1968): 3–6, 38–40, here 5. 67 Emile Tuma, “Haqiqat al-yasar al-jadid” (The reality of the New Left [2]), al-Jadid 15: 8 (August 1968): 4–5, 36–39. 68 Bertolt Brecht, “Ihtifal bi-dhikra Linin” (A celebration in memory of Lenin), al-Jadid 15: 4 (April 1968): 12; “Saʾiq al-qitar: qissa” (The train conductor: a story), al-Jadid 15: 5 (May 1968): 26–28.

Selected bibliography Barnhisel, Greg. Cold War Modernists: Art, Literature and American Cultural Diplomacy. New York: Columbia University Press, 2015. Barnhisel, Greg and Catherine Turner, eds, Pressing the Fight: Print, Propaganda, and the Cold War. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2010. Caute, David. The Dancer Defects:The Struggle for Cultural Supremacy during the Cold War. New York: Oxford University Press, 2003. Christiansen, Samantha and Zachary A. Scarlett, eds, The Third World in the Global 1960s. New York: Berghahn Books, 2013. Lubin, Alex. Geographies of Liberation: The Making of an Afro-Arab Political Imaginary. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2014. Nassar, Maha. Brothers Apart: Palestinian Citizens of Israel and the Arab World. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2017. Robinson, Shira. Citizen Strangers: Palestinians and the Making of Israel’s Liberal Settler State. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2013. Rouhana, Nadim N. and Areej Sabbagh-Khoury. “Settler-Colonial Citizenship: Conceptualizing the Relationship between Israel and its Palestinian Citizens.” Settler Colonial Studies 5, no. 3 (2015): 205–225. Slobodian, Quinn. Foreign Front:Third World Politics in Sixties West Germany. Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press, 2012. Westad, Odd Arne. The Global Cold War:Third World Intervention and the Making of Our Times. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005.

14 HERBERT MARCUSE Media and the making of a  cultural icon Marvin Menniken

Youth protest of the 1960s figures prominently in historical research. During these years, students, apprentices, artists, and dropouts came together under the banner of the New Left acting on their disaffection with streamlined postwar societies. While a wealth of insightful synopses on national protest cultures have been published, the delicate question of how all these movements were interconnected and intertwined remains understudied.1 It is no coincidence that in all edited volumes and many monographs on the topic, these national phenomena are neatly divided by chapters. Actors around the “Western world” and its fringes are shown or quietly assumed to have been connected in spirit rather than tangibly.2 When scholars attempt to establish a tangible link between different national protest phenomena, they increasingly focus their attention on international icons or in the case of the New Left on alleged intellectual leaders. One of these leaders—in the eyes of many contemporaries, the most influential—was Herbert Marcuse.This chapter traces the relationship between Marcuse and the New Left focusing on the contexts of West Germany, France, and the United States. It identifies media narratives and imagery as the key mechanisms enlarging Marcuse’s audience, while the journalistic claims made about the philosopher and his supposedly devout following also preconditioned his quickly decreasing popularity in the ensuing years. Born in 1898 to a wealthy Berlin merchant family, Marcuse received his education in Germany, but upon completing his second book in 1933 fled the country following the Nazis’ rise to power. As Jewish scholars like Marcuse were removed from academic positions, a mass exodus to the United States ensued. The neoMarxist philosopher and his peers from the world-renowned Frankfurt School arrived in 1934 and early on struggled to find their footing in American academia.3 After fixed-term contracts at Columbia University and Harvard University and a stint as a researcher at the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), Marcuse was finally appointed full professor of political science and philosophy at Brandeis in 1954,

274  Marvin Menniken

thanks to the post-GI Bill growth of the professorate. He stayed for 11 years and during this time produced a wealth of scholarly publications, the most noteworthy being Eros and Civilization (1955) and One-Dimensional Man (1964).4 Scholars generally agree that Marcuse’s interventions in academic philosophy, political science, and psychoanalysis resonated with protesting youth throughout the West, guiding their world-views, and inspiring their subversive practices.5 Wolfgang Kraushaar, for example, identifies Marcuse as “the most important theoretician of the student movement” and Jeremi Suri calls him “one of the most recognized philosophers of the counterculture.”6 And this acclaim is not just retrospective. During the 1960s the international press (in this case the Washington Post) labelled Marcuse the “godfather of student revolt.”7 When the FBI showed increasing concern about the philosopher’s seditious activities, assistant director William C. Sullivan ordered one of his agents to obtain copies of Marcuse’s most seminal works and write reviews of them.8 Even the FBI believed that a thorough reading of Marcuse’s work would explain his appeal. On the following pages I seek to complicate the aforementioned narrative. I argue that the protagonists of the New Left were less influenced by Marcuse’s opaque writings than intelligence agencies, journalists and scholars believed. In 1969, political scientist James Jupp articulated this viewpoint, when he wrote: “The Press tells us that Marcuse is the main influence on protesting youth and this is believed by Governor Reagan in Marcuse’s home state. Yet Marcuse is extremely difficult to read, combining Freud and Marx in his own even more opaque version of German-English. It seems unlikely that he converts any but a small minority of Arts and Social Science students.”9 Marcuse himself seemed to agree. In an interview with the French magazine L’Express he stated: “I believe that only a very small group of students has really read me.”10 Moreover, I argue that New Left protesters were more influenced by media coverage of Marcuse and personal encounters with him or hearsay about him, than they were by his actual intellectual work. Indeed, Marcuse travelled extensively during the latter half of the 1960s. In speeches, discussions, interviews or informal get-togethers he assured the insurgent youth of his support for their political aims. During the semester Marcuse lectured at student rallies and New Left gatherings from UC Berkeley to New York. In the summer, departing from his vacation home in southern France, the 70-year-old philosopher travelled to Frankfurt, West Berlin, Paris, London, Rome, Turin, Milan, Bari, Oslo, Amsterdam and Korčula to spread his interpretation of the uprisings infesting various societies. These personal encounters served as the starting point from where, inside the New Left, intimate knowledge about Marcuse was produced, disseminated, debated, and renegotiated. Finally, this chapter stakes out the limits of Marcuse’s influence and popularity. From a historical viewpoint, no single intellectual—be they Marcuse, Frantz Fanon, Jean-Paul Sartre, or C. Wright Mills—was universally cherished by New Left activists. In Paris, for example, the animators of the May 1968 protest and the nine million workers on wildcat strike thereafter were largely ignorant of the man and his work. Daniel Cohn-Bendit famously called the idea of Marcuse being an

Herbert Marcuse  275

inspiration to their struggle a “joke”, since—so he claimed—nobody knew Marcuse, let alone his writings.11 Overall, from the summer of 1967 to the summer of 1968 what we might call Marcuse’s “media activism” resulted in a stellar ascent in his popularity among the New Left. However, this rising visibility likewise became a principal condition of his downfall. Once journalists from Moscow to San Diego had targeted him as the inspiration behind global revolt, Marcuse’s popularity among his alleged disciples deteriorated quickly. Marcuse’s “mainstreaming” was also diametrically opposed to the New Left’s desire for exclusiveness, while his “father figure” image contradicted its antiauthoritarian stance. Adversaries within the movement began to denounce his elitist education and highbrow mentality, while others insinuated he was a CIA agent working undercover to disintegrate revolutionary political efforts. Ironically, the tumultuous trajectory of Marcuse’s popularity mirrored the downfall of the New Left. Just as Marcuse’s influence was almost universally rebuffed by 1970, so too the broad New Left coalition fell apart into separate groups promoting identity politics like women’s rights or fenced-in ideologies like Maoism.12 Grand visions of all-encompassing societal change unraveled as distaste for the public interventions of Herbert Marcuse (with his calls for a “new sensibility”) increased.13 In the 1970s Marcuse became an ardent supporter of second-wave feminism. However, his voice no longer had the same impact.

Reading Marcuse—opaque theories and concrete action Herbert Marcuse’s impact on 1960s protesters has thus far only been systematically historicized for the United States.14 In his seminal study The Frankfurt School in Exile Thomas Wheatland devotes one chapter to retracing Marcuse’s influence on members of Students for a Democratic Society (SDS). His results are unambiguous. Before the summer of 1968, when Marcuse rose to worldwide prominence through extensive news coverage, barely anyone had read Marcuse or was aware of his political activism in support of civil rights and the student movement.15 Wilfried Mausbach’s analysis of New Left student publications corroborates this thesis, showing that references to Marcuse’s works were rare.16 Douglas Kellner and Stephen Gennaro, however, consider Marcuse’s significance for the United States student movement to be much higher. They object to Wheatland’s findings, maintaining that Wheatland mostly interviewed SDS members, who had always disputed that Marcuse was an intellectual role model.Thus, they view his assessment as partly misinformed.17 Before 1968 Marcuse was known here and there for his political stances, particularly opposing the Vietnam War. This holds true for certain hotbeds of pacifist activism such as Ann Arbor, New York, and his home state of California, where beginning in 1965 Marcuse taught philosophy at UC San Diego.18 His academic writings and books, however, had not yet acquired broader popular appeal. When in 1968 the notion of Marcuse as the “father of the New Left” arose in popular discourse through various media outlets, many prominent members of the New

276  Marvin Menniken

Left were as surprised as the general public. At a December gathering in New York, Bernadine Dohrn snappishly introduced Marcuse as a “philosopher, writer, professor …, a man, ah, who the NEW YORK TIMES calls the ideological leader of the New Left.”19 In Germany and France, pre-1968 reception was not any more pronounced.The French edition of One-Dimensional Man was only published in the spring of 1968.20 In the mid-1960s, student book clubs at German universities neither had Marcuse nor anyone else from the Frankfurt School on their reading lists.21 But even if the inspirational significance of Marcuse’s writings on subversive student activism is overrated, his complex arguments nevertheless resonated within certain theoretically sophisticated student circles.The best examples are those of the German student activist Rudi Dutschke and his peers. Dutschke started reading bits and pieces of Marcuse’s work in 1965 as part of a sociology seminar.22 Against resistance in the West Berlin Sozialistischer Deutscher Studentenbund (SDS), Dutschke promoted Marcuse’s writings as a means to inspire political dissidence. Within a year Dutschke’s intellectual orientation became majoritarian, although in private he still doubted whether Marcuse’s utopian reflections were concrete enough to guide a political movement. His wife Gretchen writes in her memoirs, quoting from Dutschke’s diary: There was one thing that troubled Rudi, when it came to Marcuse: ‘His idea of the great refusal does not know the category of mediation. The abstract, deeply moral negation of the prevailing social conditions cannot provide a true, concrete anticipation.’ Rudi searched for philosophical grounds, on which despite all, he could hope for the possibility of a better society.23 In short: Dutschke acknowledged the theoretical merits of Marcuse’s work, but even he did not think that they lent themselves to transformative action. A brief analysis of Marcuse’s key writings renders Dutschke’s reservations more comprehensible and suggests that a desire for viable insights was prevalent among Marcuse’s readership within the New Left. Two of the writings that were deemed instructional to the New Left have already been mentioned, the monographs Eros and Civilization and One-Dimensional Man. A third was the 1965 essay Repressive Tolerance. Here Marcuse criticizes indiscriminate tolerance prevalent in American society as a perpetuation of existing power structures thwarting the chance for substantive change. He posits a tolerance that is applied in partisan fashion, based on a notion of what is good. The observable supposedly universal tolerance only caters to those in power. As a consequence, Marcuse declares “a natural right of resistance for oppressed and overpowered minorities to use extralegal means [exists], when the legal ones have proved to be inadequate.”24 Amongst civil rights and student activists, supporters of the black power movement, or advocates of decolonization, such ideas provided an alternative to the classical Marxist concept of revolution. A multiplicity of disenchanted minorities could coalesce as a revolutionary movement in the absence of Marx’s working class. Conversations about Repressive Tolerance revolved almost exclusively around this very aspect, making them inclusive to

Herbert Marcuse  277

readers and non-readers alike. Marcuse’s speeches and interviews further focused discourse on the praxeology of legitimate violence. By the time, in 1969, that antiauthoritarian Dieter Kunzelmann referenced Marcuse’s natural right of resistance to legitimize the foundation of his terrorist group Tupamaros West Berlin, Marcuse’s short paragraph had finally taken on a life of its own.25 In Eros and Civilization (Marcuse’s attempt to combine the thoughts of Karl Marx and Sigmund Freud into a framework for a new revolutionary theory), such concrete and memorable arguments are more difficult to discern. The fundamental idea, borrowed from Freud, is that in modern societies, libido is reined in by the disciplining forces of civilization. Marcuse postulates the liberation of libido, because its productive forces are needed to reimagine and thereby remake society in a utopian sense.Then, libido would become much more than sexuality, much more than impulse. It would become eros, a force that facilitates the reshaping of work, family, and community relations for the better. This change, writes Marcuse, would not be unmediated. It would naturally occur to those living in the repressive industrial society. Their ability to imagine a qualitative “leap”, to stage a “great refusal” is what his utopia hinges on.26 Once again, however, the New Left discussion of Eros and Civilization largely remained confined to these few catchwords. Their fluffiness made them an ideal container for a wide array of conceptions of political change. In this filtered form Marcuse’s proclamations could hardly be controversial, since all they premised was that political change in industrial society would be preceded by an inner-emigration of the individuals living in it. The rioting youth understood. They had emigrated a while ago. Apart from these catchwords, all Eros and Civilization could stand for was a diffuse notion of sexual liberation. Certainly, Marcuse’s recognition of erotic repression was well received in the New Left. Two Ann Arbor activists found it key to understand the “profound depth of the new revolt”, while Abbie Hoffman later celebrated sexual liberation à la Marcuse as “a return to the origins of health.”27 The FBI agent assigned to review Eros and Civilization found the New Left’s interest in the book unsurprising, given their preoccupation “with love, sex, and the senses.”28 Marcuse’s best sold monograph, One-Dimensional Man (1964), was essentially a postscript to Eros and Civilization and a prologue to Repressive Tolerance. It is a postscript in that it sees repressive industrial society (previously mentioned only in passing) as a prerequisite for liberation. In One-Dimensional Man Marcuse unveils the industrial society’s hidden mechanisms for asserting totalitarian authority, which in his mind ambiguously both impede resistance and plant the seeds of resistance in the minds of repressed individuals.29 And it is a prologue because it is here that the new revolutionary class of suppressed minorities to which Marcuse eventually concedes a natural right of resistance, are first introduced. They headlined discussions on One-Dimensional Man.This, again, was in large part due to the fact that Marcuse’s new revolutionary class related to many hot-button topics such as civil rights, decolonization movements, student protest, emerging counterculture, and the heartfelt necessity of reimagining Marxism after the disillusioning realities of Soviet socialism had penetrated the Iron Curtain and reached the minds of Western leftists.

278  Marvin Menniken

Importantly, the internationalization of Marcuse’s writings through translations developed in tandem with his growing media fame One-Dimensional-Man was translated into German, French, Italian, Spanish, Dutch, Danish, and Norwegian between 1967 and 1969.30 As Marcuse’s intellectual productivity waned during the latter part of the 1960s—not least because of his dedication to political activism— the Essay on Liberation, published in 1969, was his only larger publication during those years.31 In part a summary of earlier works and in part a reaction to New Left activism, Essay on Liberation seemed to be a publisher’s dream: the “father of the New Left” teaching his young admirers. The book was simultaneously published in seven languages, reaching readers on three continents. In Germany, the first edition alone was set at 25,000 copies.32 Since Marcuse’s popularity among protesting youth had already dwindled significantly, the reception of Essay on Liberation failed to arouse the anticipated interest. Indeed, from a historical perspective it is better seen as the afterword to a short and tumultuous love affair. Whether well-received or not, in a nutshell, the internationalization of both One-Dimensional Man and Essay on Liberation tell the same story: Marcuse’s monographs only mushroomed in book stores all over the Western world after the media publicized his extensive lecturing tours and encounters with New Left youth. One exception to this pattern can be observed in Yugoslavia, where Eros and Civilization appeared in Serbo-Croatian in 1965, just a year after its publication. Marcuse was personally acquainted with members of the so-called “Praxis-Group,” an association of intellectuals from Belgrade, Sarajevo, and Ljubljana postulating a humane socialism, which granted room for individual freedom to every citizen.33 As Marcuse likewise advocated the importance of turning away from the authoritarian socialism practiced in the Soviet Union, Gajo Petrović, the group’s founder, reports that members of “Praxis” took it upon themselves to translate and publish the philosopher’s work.34 For a time Herbert Marcuse’s books sold very well. Not surprisingly, however, both the New Left and the mainstream media appropriated his complex work, reducing it into similar sets of headings and catch phrases. Within the New Left Eros and Civilization was received as a rallying cry for societal and sexual liberation, not an academic attempt to dialectically dissolve contradictions between the thought of Marx and Freud, and thereby produce new insights on the subcutaneous disciplining forces of modern societies. In other words, what ultimately mattered was not Marcuse’s actual sophisticated thought, but rather the ways in which it could be translated into vague calls for change, flanked by a few concrete references to contemporary political dissidence. Ambiguity, equivocality, and careful consideration—which in my mind are fundamental characteristics of Marcuse’s books—were removed from the equation entirely.35 This, to be sure, is not unusual. It does however yield one inevitable consequence: a close reading of Marcuse’s books was not necessary and maybe not even helpful for participating in the discourse on his intellectual work. In order to adopt the right tone, one was better served by attending Marcuse’s lectures, reading news coverage about him, or discussing his ideas with friends.

Herbert Marcuse  279

Meeting Marcuse—personal encounters, networks, advocates, and soliciting of support Herbert Marcuse arrived in West Berlin on July 9, 1967. Upon the invitation of the Freie Universität Berlin, he was set to give a series of lectures, spanning from July 10 to July 12.36 He had been appointed an honorary professor there 2 years previously, and after rescheduling multiple times, his long anticipated visit was finally taking place.37 A couple of days beforehand, his good friend and colleague Theodor W. Adorno had also given a talk at the Freie Universität and had been rudely heckled when he proved unwilling to ignore his scheduled analysis of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s Iphigenie auf Tauris in favor of a discussion about current political events. A leaflet from the countercultural Kommune II critiqued Adorno, declaring: “He shall blab by himself, in an empty hall, shall ‘adorno’ himself to death.”38 Marcuse, who arrived with a suitcase full of talking points on civil disobedience and revolution, did not run into such problems.When he was welcomed with fanatical enthusiasm by students in the auditorium, West German and international journalists began construing Marcuse as the father of the emerging student movement.39 Almost every national newspaper had sent reporters. Major radio stations from West Berlin to Cologne broadcast the two panel discussions live. A TV team from Norddeutscher Rundfunk (NDR) attended, filming scenes for an upcoming documentary on student protest.40 But whether in print, or on radio or TV, all the media outlets were united in their framing of the events. What they saw was a revered intellectual, whose public deliberations could serve as a proxy for the views of the disgruntled youth. He was seemingly their champion, and likewise their hero. Marcuse himself appeared to agree with this reading of the events. On August 10 he wrote to his friend Leo Löwenthal: “Dear Leo, there is so much to talk about—too much to put it all in writing! A very exciting week in Berlin, where I was received like a Messiah, talked to 5,000 students.”41 There are at least two caveats to this univocal image. For one, the discussions between Marcuse and students at Freie Universität did not amount to blunt adoration, but rather proved the students’ seriousness with regard to Marcuse’s work. And the students noticeably appreciated the philosopher’s eagerness “to be concrete” not least by engaging in current political discussions.42 However, his audience relentlessly urged Marcuse for more details, particularly vis-à-vis the question of how his utopia would be realizable.43 Secondly, there are deviating recollections of the events. Bernd Rabehl claims: “The applause in the auditorium only set in scantily and did not exceed deference. Marcuse must have had doubts that his message was heard.”44 When summarizing Marcuse’s West Berlin visit, two conclusions present themselves. On the one hand, the media narrative of unbridled student enthusiasm was largely untouched by more complex realities on-site. After all, journalists were paid to make an argument. Therefore the message to the general public in West Germany (and to some extent internationally) revolved around a wise, old man inspiring a youth revolt. On the other hand, among New Left youth on-site, the interpretation of events was subject to individual predisposition, discussion, and

280  Marvin Menniken

dispute. Considered from a bird’s eye view, strong support for Marcuse’s positions came from an antiauthoritarian current within the New Left of West Berlin, which claimed hegemony at the time. Soon after the political unrest on the campus of Freie Universät had settled, the talks, round-tables, and discussions between Marcuse and the students were transcribed and published as Das Ende der Utopie.45 Marcuse relinquished all royalties to the West Berlin SDS to support their activities.46 Das Ende der Utopie was translated into multiple languages and even published in a Mexican and a Japanese edition, reaching both countries at the height of student demonstrations.47 To protesters the book conveyed an impression of how Marcuse positioned himself towards specific New Left concerns, detailing his stance on “Third World revolutionaries”, competing forms of political action, the Vietnam War, and hippie culture. Overall, Marcuse’s July 1967 trip to West Berlin was just one of many encounters with New Left youth all over the Western world. Clearly, Marcuse’s impact did not end at the US border. He was fluent in three languages, travelled extensively, and his influence spanned beyond the “West” sensu stricto as well. When retracing references to Marcuse and his ideas, the sight widens to include at a minimum Yugoslavia, Japan, Mexico, and Brazil. A global historical analysis covering this terrain has yet to be attempted. By May of 1968 Herbert Marcuse had been engaging with New Left protagonists in the United States and Europe for quite some time. Since the Freie Universität lectures journalists had occasionally produced stories on Marcuse’s intellectual appeal; these gave readers some inside perspective on an enigmatic generation of youth, which consciously and confidently disassociated itself from the norms and practices of mainstream society.48 However, the reports did not yet combine to form a global phenomenon, but played out in rather confined spaces such as the West German media landscape. Only during May 1968 did a truly international discourse on Marcuse and the New Left unfold. When Herbert Marcuse arrived in Paris during the May 1968 events he was on a scholarly mission. From May 6 to May 13, he attended a conference organized by UNESCO on the occasion of what would have been Karl Marx’s 150th birthday. The conference was conceived as a forum to exchange novel perspectives and trends in Marxist study.49 Days earlier a controversy surrounding disciplinary action against Nanterre student Daniel Cohn-Bendit had spurred an actual youth rebellion, which was broadcast internationally. Skirmishes with police had spilled over from the campus of the Sorbonne to the entire Latin Quarter, where cobblestones were thrown, cars set on fire, and barricades built.50 Not only did these images make for eye-catching television and magazine covers, among many postwar middle-class families they mobilized fears that had already seethed for years.51 The youth rebellion threatened the bourgeois framework of a Western world that was allegedly the best possible: free, wealthy, and sound. Marcuse embraced the spontaneous demonstration of dissatisfaction with the status quo. He gave Le Monde an interview, in which he proclaimed his support for the protests.52 Thereafter the international press began to identify him as a source of inspiration for Parisian student unrest, a

Herbert Marcuse  281

daring assessment that, at the time, was not rebutted by Marcuse. Meanwhile, 5,700 miles away, in Marcuse’s adopted home town of San Diego, the events did not go unnoticed. War veteran Harry L. Foster, vice-commander of American Legion Post 6 in San Diego, apparently was outraged, when he heard about the inspirer of youth riots in Paris teaching undergraduates at UC San Diego. After the American Legion initiated a campaign—supported by the conservative Copley News Chain as well as several Republican state congressmen—that aimed to terminate Marcuse’s university contract, Foster gave an interview to a local TV station. He proclaimed: Recently, they had riots in Europe, they had the riots in Rome and Marcuse showed up, they had the riots in Paris, when the French had to bring out the troops and the tanks, Marcuse was there. When they had the riots with the students in Berlin, Marcuse was there. It seems to me that wherever the radicals in this New Left, the so-called New Left, appear, Marcuse is somewhere in the background. We are convinced that he has to convey some of his ideas and thoughts directly to the students and in this lies the danger of Marcuse to the University of California.53 In Paris Marcuse did convey his thoughts directly to the students, but in a rather atypical fashion. He never publically addressed the protesters since the Paris May was a spontaneous eruption of discontent, not an organized event. In addition, protesters’ actions were meant to communicate autonomy from the “father-generation” and its institutions, not adoration of a 70-year-old philosophy professor. Marcuse, thus, only met his supposed disciples by chance, walking the streets of Paris, and it was from there that he was corralled into speaking to them.Then doctoral candidate Andrew Feenberg gives an account of the sensation Parisian students experienced upon meeting Marcuse: Returning to his hotel in the Latin Quarter [Marcuse] was accosted by a group of students who had just occupied the Ecole des Beaux Arts. They recognized him from his picture in the newspapers where he was celebrated as the “Guru of the Students in Revolt”. We entered the Ecole and Marcuse addressed the hundred or more young artists gathered in the main assembly hall. … He was warmly received. French students celebrated the grandfather of the revolution in preference to their fathers whom they blamed for social ills. Marcuse made a short speech in French, greeting the students in the name of the American student movement and congratulating them on challenging “consumer society”.54 If we trust Feenberg’s narration, Marcuse’s presence as a man on the spot was thus highly appreciated. Certainly Feenberg is not alone in noting that Marcuse resonated with students when they met him. Accounts of how charismatic and personable he was are numerous. Also, notwithstanding his strong opinions, many viewed Marcuse as antiauthoritarian since he interacted with New Left youth eye to eye.

282  Marvin Menniken

A testimonial to Marcuse’s personal appeal comes from Brandeis student Marshall Berman. Published in 1964, Berman’s account is free from the post-1968 nostalgia that often shaped later descriptions of the man. Berman writes: I was standing in the midst of a noisy, happy crowd of students in an auditorium at Brandeis [University], waiting for a concert to begin, when word suddenly came up the line: Marcuse’s here! At once there was a hush, and people divided themselves up to clear a path. A tall, erect, vividly forceful man passed down the aisle, smiling here and there to friends, radiant yet curiously aloof, rather like an aristocrat who was a popular hero as well. The students held their breaths and gazed at him with awe. After he had got to his seat, they relaxed again, flux and chaos returned, but only for a moment, till everyone could find his place; it was as if Marcuse’s very presence had given a structure to events.55 Berman to some extent mirrors a sentiment that became quite prevalent within the New Left: A desire for guidance. Even within the antiauthoritarian wing, subversive youth looked for direction. Unsurprisingly, journalists began referring to Marcuse as a father figure, pointing ironically to the fact that those revolting against the way of life and authority of “papa’s generation” had apparently found a surrogate father. On the one hand, Marcuse was the right match for many in the New Left since venerating him fit many of their intrinsic norms. Like them, he also selfidentified as Marxist, but he condemned Soviet Russia’s oppressive regime.56 He had been persecuted as a Jewish scholar in Nazi Germany and therefore represented a brand of suppressed, pre-fascist German knowledge that could now be rediscovered. He offered a societal vision so broad and airy that it was easy to feel comfortable under the intellectual umbrella of his theories. On the other hand, Marcuse’s appeal, dare I suggest, derived in part from the very norms of the capitalist societies that the New Left youth sought to destroy. Marcuse’s combination of rhetoric, charisma, and accessibility equaled that of a politician or a salesman. In tightly packed auditoriums his calls for revolutionary action constituted must-see events. Indeed, we could think of Marcuse’s lectures as examples of the ritualized event culture that increasingly restructured the modes of reception in postwar capitalist societies.57 This cultural imprint accompanied all collective attempts at social disintegration from alternative conceptions of community such as Kommune I to the ongoing renegotiation of attitudes towards consumerism.58 Transcending the horizon of society “tout court” was impossible, thus attempts at radical emancipation inevitably also drew from the available toolbox for social and political mobilization. Another key notion referenced in multiple accounts of Marcuse lectures is that of charisma. In large part, New Left audiences credited Marcuse’s appeal to his charismatic appearance. Marcuse’s charisma is best understood via the categories proffered by Weberian sociologist Martin E. Spencer. On a general level, Spencer identifies the charismatic leader as a “magnetic political personality”, whose “presence inspires awe.”59 Marcuse fits what Spencer calls “the sage,” an intellectual

Herbert Marcuse  283

leader who “has the power to create order from chaos in the conceptualization of the world … [and thereby] acquires a nimbus of the sacred.”60 This point is significant in order to understand the exact appeal of Marcuse in person. It was not only that he had an impressive appearance or stylized a demonstrative openness for conversation. Marcuse’s broad conceptualization of the world provided spiritual guidance and orientation, and these in turn advanced his general charisma. Charisma, then, only unfolded in the combination of an appealing message and a convincing performance. The exercise was both mental and physical. As with Herbert Marcuse’s books, his personal popularity was contingent on the context in which he was received.These milieus rallied around inspirational leaders, many of whom quickly became public figures. As a result, the agency to effectively endorse a theoretician lay with a small group of individuals. Daniel Cohn-Bendit, Roel van Duijn, Alain Geismar, Serge July, Mario Capanna, Rudi Dutschke, Tariq Ali, Tom Hayden, Jerry Rubin, and Abbie Hoffman are some of the names that come to mind. Marcuse had a good rapport with many of them. His personal friendships with Rudi Dutschke, Angela Davis, and Abbie Hoffman definitely advanced his appeal in different circles. A former New Left activist from West Berlin told me: “Marcuse was a very important theoretician for the antiauthoritarian current [within the New Left]. Notably Rudi Dutschke, whom I knew rather well, was very impressed by him and his thought.”61 Dutschke, thus, became an advocate for Marcuse, putting his writings and public commentary on the agenda. After meeting in West Berlin in July 1967, Dutschke and Marcuse corresponded regularly until both died in quick succession in 1979.62 Angela Davis and Abbie Hoffman studied under Marcuse, initially at Brandeis University and then at UC San Diego.63 Hoffman calls Marcuse “with the exception of [Abraham] Maslow, the teacher who had the greatest impact on me.”64 As the founding figure of the Yippies, Hoffman became synonymous with the countercultural movement, organizing public action to theatrically expose the hypocrisies of American society. The New Left sought support from Marcuse in many different ways. Among other things he received letters asking for financial advice and assistance. It has already been mentioned that, in order to improve their capacities for political mobilization, the royalties from Das Ende der Utopie benefited the SDS in West Berlin. Similarly, in the United States in 1967 Stuart Dowty sent a letter to Marcuse soliciting support for the Radical Education Project at the University of Michigan, which was to serve as an internal education program for the student movement.65 He writes: Let us emphasize that this letter is not just a pitch for money (although we would certainly appreciate any help in this form). What we are asking is, in the long run, more important: (1) We want your advice on ways to begin building the financial stability we so badly need. To date, we have existed almost entirely on small contributions received from direct mail solicitations. This means of financial support doesn’t provide the long-term stability we need. What are your suggestions for REP’s long-range financial planning?

284  Marvin Menniken

(2) We would like your aid in fundraising. Personal contacts are always much better than any other way of raising money, particularly for movement causes. Could you approach people you know and, as a sponsor of REP, either put them in touch with us, or solicit support directly? (3) We would like your suggestions in programmatic areas. A copy of our program outline for this year is enclosed, and while it is impossible to say everything that should be said either in this letter or in the outline, we hope that you can get a general idea of what we are trying to do. Also, there might be possibilities for fundraising around particular programs, and if you have any suggestions in this regard, it would be extremely helpful.66 Multiple aspects are of significance here. First, while much of the scholarly conversation on Herbert Marcuse and the New Left concerns the extent to which his writings informed New Left ideology, this letter shows that something else was just as important: practicality. How could one solicit financial support to render certain projects possible? How could a renowned scholar like Marcuse concretely facilitate certain causes? Secondly, Dowty does not simply ask for money, his inquiry is aimed at building up a network of supporters. In other words, he attempts to institutionalize and professionalize fundraising structures, enabling the activists in the Radical Education Project. Finally, in this letter the relationship between Marcuse and the New Left materializes as a tangible interactive structure. The philosopher was a point of reference in a network and a potential connector to further supporters. After all, profound discontent with life in an arid and conservative society could not be addressed merely through the introverted reading of scholarly literature, but required concerted political action, which outright challenged the status quo.

Moving on from Marcuse: adversaries, media, and the thirst for action Even at the height of Marcuse’s popularity within the New Left and Western society more broadly, opposition to his personal activism and ideological convictions was ever-present. In Eastern Europe those in power considered Marcuse to be dangerous since he had vigorously criticized Marxism-Leninism and questioned the working classes’ revolutionary potential for many years. Eastern European newspapers largely ignored his surge in global fame and only commented sporadically on the German philosopher. The GDR newspaper Neues Deutschland in long and tiresome articles on “true Marxism” referred to him as a “pseudo-left theoretician of anarchism” and a “rabble-rouser.”67 His actual views remain unexplained; their fundamentals were apparently assumed to be known. In Pravda, the official newspaper of the Communist Party in the Soviet Union, Marcuse’s ideological wrongdoings were dissected more diligently. On May 30, 1968, Jurij Shukow gave a thorough account of Marcuse’s philosophical work, citing it as the reason why at the UNESCO conference on Karl Marx, all “truly Marxist” conference participants rebutted this false prophet’s abject and unsubstantial

Herbert Marcuse  285

attempt to indoctrinate them. He concludes: “This Californian, who has planned to refute Marxism, they [the Western media] praise like a movie star. His books they advertise like the newest toothpaste or razor blades. Someone also came up with a smart publicity-slogan: ‘Three M’s- Marx—god, Marcuse—his prophet, Mao—his sword’.”68 Among New Left youth as well, many opposed Marcuse’s suggestions to reform Marxist theory. His notion that suppressed minorities such as African Americans or the unemployed bore more revolutionary potential than the working class was particularly contested. In many ways being or becoming a part of the working class was still the gold standard for making legitimate revolutionary claims. Many within the New Left exchanged the auditorium for the assembly line at Renault, Fiat, Opel, or Ford factories.69 An Old Left fascination for the tough living conditions of the working class, its anti-intellectualism, and the physicality of its everyday life pervaded the New Left. In addition, it was young workers and apprentices who had joined the New Left in large numbers and gave its ideals broader social relevance.70 Labor activist Milton Rosen, who was influential with the American SDS, campaigned against Marcuse on the grounds of the latter’s lack of consideration for the working class.71 In West Germany Marcuse had trouble resonating with the editors of Kursbuch, one of the most important publications for the student movement. In 1970, he faced editor-in-chief Hans Magnus Enzensberger in a verbal exchange that was published soon thereafter. Enzensberger, posing as the champion of working-class concerns, attacked Marcuse on his supposed elitist vilification of worker activism. Marcuse, who sensed Enzensberger was making an apologetic argument for the growing anti-intellectualism within the movement stood by his convictions. When Enzensberger asserted that literature such as Hermann Hesse’s Steppenwolf would not resonate with workers, Marcuse replied: “Whose fault is that? Hesse’s or the worker’s? Do you want to tell me that Faust or Don Carlos are just bourgeois bullshit? Or should they also mean something to the worker?”72 Marcuse’s standpoint regarding the question of workers’ revolutionary potency provided adversaries with a segue into a second fundamental critique: his elitism. As the former assistant of Martin Heidegger, a protégé of Frankfurt School founder Max Horkheimer, and a scholar at elite institutions such as Harvard University, Marcuse was vulnerable to this type of criticism. On occasion his attitude reinforced the view that he was disconnected from the revolting masses. Both the allegations of marginalizing workers’ activism and entertaining elitist views melded into one when a conspiracy theory arose: Marcuse, so the story went, was an agent hired by the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) to infiltrate and undermine New Left initiatives. In the summer of 1969 Daniel Cohn-Bendit famously heckled Marcuse during a speech at the Teatro Eliseo in Rome. CohnBendit had just two questions to ask: “Marcuse, why did you come to the theater of the bourgeoisie?” And: “Herbert, tell us, why does the CIA pay you?”73 German journalist Leo Matthias had originally spread the rumor concerning Marcuse’s CIA service through an article in Fränkischer Kreis.74 In Germany the story gained

286  Marvin Menniken

traction, when shortly thereafter on June 4, 1969, Berliner Extra-Dienst, one of the most read publications within the West German New Left, cited Matthias’ findings.75 Matthias argued that Marcuse’s time with the OSS during World War II and his subsequent employment at the State Department until 1951 had established a lasting government relationship, which once again flourished following his involvement with the New Left. Matthias insinuated that Marcuse “stayed in the business” without providing any evidence.76 While there were no actual grounds for this assessment, the CIA-allegation spread rapidly and poisoned Marcuse’s reputation within a New Left that—in the middle of an identity crisis—was growing increasingly wary of its alleged ideological leader. The Los Angeles Times picked up on the story on July 27, publishing a caricature of Herbert Marcuse reading from a book in the dizzying heights of an ivory tower. All the while a counterculture activist, holding a torch, places explosives at the tower’s foundation. He states: “G-Man Marcuse is really a CIA agent in Marxist clothing who is trying to subvert student activism.”77 Marcuse was furious. He questioned why none of his colleagues and friends came to his defense, particularly those from the Frankfurt School, who had intimate knowledge regarding his professional occupation since immigrating to the United States in 1934. In an open letter to the German magazine Der Spiegel Marcuse vented his anger and declared: “Despite these shabby tricks I will continue to write and say what I consider to be true, regardless against which vested interests on the left or the right.”78 Soon after, it wasn’t Theodor Adorno or Max Horkheimer who publicly defended Marcuse, but prominent members of the West German student movement. Seventeen of them sent another open letter to Der Spiegel, trying to vindicate the philosopher. Signed by Rudi Dutschke, Reimut Reiche, Claus Behncke, and Brigitte Granzow among others, the letter contends: Whoever refers to Herbert Marcuse as an agent of the CIA or an agent of the bourgeoisie and thereby tries to muzzle him, has left the grounds on which the New Left operates politically. These denunciations do not have anything to do with legitimate means of factional struggles. They are rather meant to create an atmosphere in which in the end nobody is safe from suspicion, personal disparagement and moral obliteration.79 Clearly, even as of 1969 the support for Marcuse remained strong in certain circles despite growing criticism concerning his positions and supposed ulterior motives. However, Dutschke, Reiche, and the others could not rally the critics from within. Overall, the student movement suffered from a secession of Marxist-Leninist and Maoist groups, who not only disapproved of Marcuse, but also ended up causing an irreversible fragmentation of transformative forces. On March 21, 1970, the German SDS, for one, was dissolved via acclamation, marking the end of a broad New Left coalition in West Germany.80 When criticism of the New Left and the media narrative of Marcuse as its ideological leader gained traction simultaneously, other supporters of Marcuse pushed

Herbert Marcuse  287

back against the notion that his thoughts promoted revolutionary action. In a 1969 interview Marcuse-devotee Abbie Hoffman told The Humanist: When I was young I had a course from Marcuse on Soviet Marxism. I can’t understand his latest book [Essay on Liberation]. It’s six dollars for 70 pages. … Men like Marcuse . . . I respect them, but I don’t love them. They have good minds, and they see certain things. I respect them because they have a way of looking at society that might be correct and there may be something to learn from that. But dammit, I don’t love them; they are not participating in the struggle, and they are not going to build a new society.81 On May 13, 1968, Herbert Marcuse returned to the Freie Universität Berlin. In front of 4,000 students he gave a talk on “history, transcendence, and social change.” This time, unlike 10 months earlier, when most of the students in attendance had been enthused by Marcuse’s remarks, he struggled to connect with his audience. While Marcuse’s talking points had not changed significantly, the overall situation surrounding this encounter had.West Germany, France, and the United States were in a state of disarray.82 Protest had erupted in the United States following the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. in Memphis and the occupation of Columbia University in New York. Paris had been ravaged by student protesters, with the biggest general strike in the history of France, scheduled to begin the next day, on the horizon. Daniel Cohn-Bendit, who would give a talk at Freie Universität a week later, spitefully informed students about how misguided Marcuse’s thoughts concerning the mobilization of workers for a revolutionary cause were.83 The New Left in West Germany was distraught from the near assassination of Rudi Dutschke on April 11. In response, rage had prevailed among German supporters of the New Left, who disrupted the distribution of newspapers by the Axel Springer publishing group and stormed its headquarters, maintaining that Springer’s campaign against Dutschke’s activism had motivated the assassination attempt by the unemployed painter Josef Bachmann. In addition, protests against the introduction of emergency law into the West German constitution, which many saw as a return to antidemocratic principles, reached their summit. 84 Marcuse’s analysis of “history, transcendence, and social change” on the night of May 13, 1968, now intervened into this panorama of international protest and disarray. But, unfortunately, Marcuse’s remarks combined to nothing more than a “greatest hits” of his philosophy: modern industrial societies are oppressive, a coalition of revolutionary minorities might be able to change this, and either the “Third World” or the disenfranchised peoples within the West should be the sources from which to seek inspiration.85 After finishing his hour-long speech without much reference to current events in the world, the overall atmosphere was tense. Students started the discussion by quizzing Marcuse on current events and requesting advice for revolutionary action. After some back and forth Marcuse made abundantly clear that he would not give any concrete counsel. His call was for the serious consideration of events guided by a theory-based approach. West German media

288  Marvin Menniken

would later describe this watershed moment in the love affair between Marcuse and the New Left as “Katerstimmung” (hangover mood) and “Entfremdung” (estrangement).86 Following a heated exchange, Marcuse abruptly left the auditorium. In a metaphor reflecting the deterioration of this intellectual romance, after Marcuse’s unanticipated exit, a group of some 50 students disassembled the 10-foot tall wooden emblem of Freie Universität and burned it in front of the dean’s office. Two weeks later the student union executive committee announced another event. Its title: “Is philosophy resignation?”87 By the fall of 1969, Herbert Marcuse also disappeared from the newspaper pages. In his adopted home of San Diego, where conservative citizens had been outraged about Marcuse’s alleged seduction of American youth, the dust settled. UC San Diego chancellor William McGill, who had once received hundreds of letters on the topic, now had to reply to these communications much less frequently. As he wrote to a concerned citizen in October of 1969 with regard to Marcuse, there was no need to be worried anymore: “He is a paper revolutionary, not a threat to our survival.”88

Notes   1 For a few synopses among others see Jeremi Suri, The Global Revolutions of 1968 (New York:W.W. Norton, 2007). Gerald J. De Groot, The Sixties Unplugged: A Kaleidoscopic History of a Disorderly Decade (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008). Wolfgang Kraushaar, Achtundsechzig. Eine Bilanz (Berlin: Propyläen, 2008). Jens Kastner and David Meyer (eds), Weltwende 1968? Ein Jahr aus globalgeschichtlicher Perspektive (Vienna: Mandelbaum Verlag, 2008). Ingrid Gilcher-Holtey, 1968. Eine Zeitreise (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 2008). Jeremi Suri, “The Rise and Fall of an International Counterculture, 1960–1975,” American Historical Review 114 (2009): 45–68. On the difficulty of writing a global history of 1960s protest: Timothy S. Brown, “1968: Transnational and Global Perspectives,” Docupedia-Zeitgeschichte, accessed November 2, 2015.   2 Generally, historiography on protest in the global sixties has proven dependent upon notions of global consciousness, imagined communities, and “projection screens.” An explicit focus on concrete manifestations of interaction has thus far most ambitiously been taken up in research on student exchanges. Martin Klimke, The Other Alliance: Student Protest in West Germany and the United States in the Global Sixties (Princeton: Princeton University, 2011). Quinn Slobodian, Foreign Front:Third World Politics in Sixties West Germany (Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press, 2012). Paul Kramer, “Is the World our Campus? International Students and U.S. Global Power in the Long Twentieth Century,” Diplomatic History 33 (2009): 775–806.   3 Thomas Wheatland, The Frankfurt School in Exile (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2009). Emil Walter-Busch, Geschichte der Frankfurter Schule: Kritische Theorie und Politik (Munich: Wilhelm Fink, 2010). Rolf Wiggershaus, Die Frankfurter Schule: Geschichte, theoretische Entwicklung, Bedeutung (Munich: Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag, 2001).   4 Herbert Marcuse, Eros and Civilization. A Philosophical Inquiry into Freud (Boston: Beacon Press, 1955). Herbert Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man: Studies in the Ideology of Advanced Industrial Society (Boston: Beacon Press, 1964).  5 Douglas Kellner, “Introduction: Radical Politics, Marcuse, and the New Left,” in Herbert Marcuse: The New Left and the 1960s. Collected Papers of Herbert Marcuse, volume 3, ed. Douglas Kellner (New York and London: Routledge, 2005). Douglas Kellner, Herbert Marcuse and the Crisis of Marxism (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1984). Hendrik Theiler, Systemkritik und Widerstand: Herbert Marcuse und die Studentenbewegung (Marburg: Tectum Verlag, 2013). Jean-Michel Palmier, Herbert Marcuse et la Nouvelle Gauche (Paris: Belfond, 1973). Hans

Herbert Marcuse  289

Heinz Holz, Die abenteurliche Rebellion. Bürgerliche Protestbewegungen in der Philosophie: Stirner, Nietzsche, Sartre, Marcuse, Neue Linke (Darmstadt and Neuwied: Luchterhand, 1976). Roland Roth, Rebellische Subjektivität. Herbert Marcuse und die Neuen Protestbewegungen (Frankfurt: Campus Verlag, 1988). Michael Frey, “Shifting to Confrontation: Herbert Marcuse and the Transformation of the American Student Movement,” GHI Bulletin 34 (2004): 99–111.  6 Kraushaar, Achtundsechzig, B12. Translated by the author. Suri, “Rise,” 57.   7 Drew Pearson and Jack Andersen,“Marcuse: Godfather of Student Revolt,” The Washington Post, July 6, 1968, D7.   8 William C. Sullivan Memorandum to R.W. Smith, April 16, 1968. FBI-File Herbert Marcuse, 4–750(2–7-79). And a second order 2 months later. William C. Sullivan Memorandum to R.W. Smith, June 18, 1968.   9 James Jupp, “The Discontents of Youth,” Political Quarterly 40 (1969): 411–418, here 415. 10 [W.A.], “Entretien avec Marcuse”, L’Express, September 23, 1968. Translated by the author. Archivzentrum Universität Frankfurt, Na3, 2120.6. 11 Jacques Sauvageot, Alain Geismar, Daniel Cohn-Bendit and Jean-Pierre Duteuil. La Révolte Étudiante. Les Animateurs Parlent (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1968), 70. 12 This split is masterfully depicted for the West German context in Kraushaar, Achtundsechzig, 180–233. 13 Herbert Marcuse, An Essay on Liberation (Boston: Beacon Press, 1969), 23. 14 For West Germany the state of research is also rather positive, even though explicitly historical studies such as Wheatland’s are lacking. Wiggershaus, Frankfurter Schule, 676–705. Clemens Albrecht, Günther C. Behrmann, Michael Bock, Harald Homann, and Friedrich H. Tenbruck (eds), Die intellektuelle Gründung der Bundesrepublik. Eine Wirkungsgeschichte der Frankfurter Schule (Frankfurt: Campus Verlag, 1999). Ingrid Gilcher-Holtey, Eingreifendes Denken. Die Wirkungschancen von Intellektuellen (Weilerswist: Vellbrück Wissenschaft, 2007), 163–183. Emil Walter-Busch, Geschichte der Frankfurter Schule. Kritische Theorie und Politik (Munich: Wilhelm Fink, 2010), 190–231. Alex Demirović, Der nonkonformistische Intellektuelle. Die Entwicklung der Kritischen Theorie zur Frankfurter Schule (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1999), 856–951. An invaluable source collection for research on Marcuse and the New Left in Germany is: Wolfgang Kraushaar (ed.), Frankfurter Schule und Studentenbewegung: Von der Flaschenpost zum Molotowcocktail, 1945–1995, three volumes (Hamburg: Hamburger Editionen, 1998). 15 Wheatland, Frankfurt School, 296–334. 16 Wilfried Mausbach, “Das europäische Exil und die kollektive Identität der 68er-­ Bewegung in den USA,” in Exil, Entwurzelung, Hybridität, ed. Claus-Dieter Krohn (Munich: Edition Text + Kritik, 2009), 115–132, here 127. 17 Stephen Gennaro and Douglas Kellner, “Under Surveillance. Herbert Marcuse and the FBI,” Current Perspectives in Social Theory 26 (2009): 283–313, here 311. 18 [W.A.], “Philosophy Prof Will Join UCSD Faculty,” San Diego Union, November 8, 1964, A-37. 19 Christopher Swift,“Herbert Marcuse on the New Left. Dialectic and Rhetoric,” Rhetoric Society Quarterly 40 (2010): 146–171, here 160. 20 Kristin Ross, May ’68 and its Afterlives. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002), 193. Hélène Miard-Delacroix, Im Zeichen der europäischen Einigung, 1963 bis in die Gegenwart. WBG Deutsch-Französische Geschichte, volume 11 (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 2011), 139–157, here 146–147. 21 Albrecht et al., Gründung, 334. 22 Dutschke-Klotz, Leben, 63. 23 Ibid., 74. 24 Herbert Marcuse, “Repressive Tolerance,” in A Critique of Pure Tolerance, eds. Herbert Marcuse, Barrington Moore Jr. and Robert Paul Wolff (Boston: Beacon Press, 1965), 81–117, here 116. 25 Kraushaar, Achtundsechzig, 126; Wolfgang Kraushaar, Die Bombe im jüdischen Gemeindehaus. (Hamburg: Hamburger Editionen, 2005). 26 Marcuse, Eros, 149 and 192.

290  Marvin Menniken

27 Greg Calvert and Carol Neiman, “The New Left. Students for a Democratic Society,” Ann Arbor, Michigan, Alexander Street Online Collection, accessed November 21, 2015, 1. Abbie Hoffman, The Autobiography of Abbie Hoffman (New York: Four Walls Eight Windows, 2000), 85. 28 R.W. Smith Memorandum to William C. Sullivan. Book Review “Eros and Civilization”, June 26, 1968. FBI-File Herbert Marcuse, 4–750(2–7-79). 29 Marcuse, Man, xv. 30 Albrecht et al., Gründung, 380. 31 Marcuse, Essay. 32 Kraushaar, Frankfurter Schule, volume 1, 445. 33 Douglas Kellner and Clayton Pierce (eds), Marxism, Revolution and Utopia. Herbert Marcuse Collected Papers Volume 6 (New York and London: Routledge, 2014), 169. Boris Kanzleiter, Rote Universität. Studentenbewegung und Linksopposition in Belgrad 1964–1975 (Hamburg:VSA, 2011). 34 Kanzleiter, Universität, 110. 35 This assessment can be tested by consulting Alexander Street’s collection “The Sixties— Primary Documents and Personal Narratives, 1960–1974.” 36 FU Berlin, UA, APO-Archiv, AStA-Nachlass, “Herbert Marcuse”, July 2, 1967. 37 Siegward Lönnendonker and Tilman Fichter (eds). Freie Universität Berlin, 1948–1973. Hochschule im Umbruch. Documentation. Six volumes, here volume 4, 30 and 46. 38 Lönnendonker and Fichter, Freie Universität Berlin, volume 5, 219. Translated by the author. 39 See newspaper articles on Marcuse’s West Berlin trip: [W.A.], “Revolte um jeden Preis? Die studentische Opposition und ihre Hintergründe,“ Berliner Morgenpost, July 16, 1967, 12; [W.A.], “Macht des Negativen,” Der Spiegel, July 17, 1967, 97;Wolf Lepenies, “Reden an die Neue Linke,“ Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, July 19, 1967, 2; Kai Hermann, “Das Idol der Berliner Studenten”, Die Zeit, July 21, 1967, 2; [W.A.], “American Idol of German Leftists Cheered in Berlin,” The New York Times, July 30, 1967, 14. 40 Albrecht et al., 327. 41 Peter-Erwin Jansen, Herbert Marcuse. Nachgelassene Schriften. 6 volumes, here volume 4 (Lüneburg: zu Klampen, 1999–2009), 185. Translated by the author. 42 Marcuse, Ende, 59. 43 Ibid., 59. 44 Bernd Rabehl, Am Ende der Utopie. Die politische Geschichte der Freien Universität Berlin (Berlin: Argon Verlag, 1988), 241. Translated by the author. 45 Herbert Marcuse, Das Ende der Utopie (West Berlin:Verlag von Maikowski, 1967). English translations of Marcuse’s lectures at Freie Universität in Herbert Marcuse, Five Lectures (Boston: Beacon Press, 1970). 46 Letter from Horst Kurnitzky to Herbert Marcuse, January 22, 1968. Archivzentrum Universität Frankfurt, Na3, 1256.1. 47 On Mexico: Eric Zolov, “Showcasing the ‘Land of Tomorrow’. Mexico and the 1968 Olympics,” The Americas 61 (2004): 159–188. On Japan: Takemasa Ando, Japan’s New Left Movements. Legacies for Civil Society (New York and London: Routledge, 2013). Frei, 1968, 154–163. 48 Erich Hoepfner,“Stoßtrupp des Linksradikalismus. Der SDS zwischen Utopie und Krawall,” Hamburger Abendblatt, January 18, 1968, 9; David Hotham, “German Youth Rebels against Past and Present,” The Times, February 14, 1968, 10; Jean Améry, “Der Neinsager. Aber ist Herbert Marcuse auch die revolutionäre geistige Führergestalt,” Die Zeit, February 23, 1968, 36; [W.A.], “Two Versions of Democracy,” The Economist, April 20, 1968, 31–33. 49 Kraushaar, Frankfurter Schule, volume 1, 316–317. 50 On Paris May: Ingrid Gilcher-Holtey, ‘Die Phantasie an die Macht’. Mai 68 in Frankreich (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1995); Kristin Ross, May ’68; Miard-Delacroix, Zeichen, 139–157. 51 An example of such a TV broadcast is Les Actualités Françaises, “La Contestation. La Terrible Semaine qu’a Vécue Le Quartier Latin,” May 15, 1968.

Herbert Marcuse  291

52 [W.A.], “Le philosophe Herbert Marcuse,” Le Monde, May 11, 1968, 1 and 3. 53 Paul Alexander Juutilainen, Herbert’s Hippopotamus. Revolution in Paradise. Documentary Film, 1996. 7:40–7:56 and 8:14–8:35. 54 Andrew Feenberg, Heidegger and Marcuse.The Catastrophe and Redemption of History (New York and London: Routledge, 2005), x–xi. 55 Marshall Berman, “Review of One-Dimensional Man,” Partisan Review 31 (1964): 617– 621, here 617. 56 Herbert Marcuse, Soviet Marxism: A Critical Analysis (New York: Columbia University Press, 1958). 57 Contemporary diagnoses of this reconfiguration primarily came out of Situationism. Guy Debord, The Society of Spectacle (Detroit: Black & Red, 2000); Jean Baudrillard, The Consumer Society: Myths and Structures (London: Sage, 1998). 58 Alexander Sedlmaier and Stephan Malinowski, “1968—A Catalyst of Consumer Society,” Cultural and Social History 8 (2011): 255–274. For the long-term view see Luc Boltanski and Eve Chiapello, The New Spirit of Capitalism (London:Verso, 2005). 59 Martin E. Spencer, “What is Charisma,” The British Journal of Sociology 24 (1973): 341– 354, here 342. 60 Ibid., 345. 61 Mail exchange with the author, May 13, 2014. 62 Jansen, Herbert Marcuse, volume 4, 185–252. 63 Angela Davis, An Autobiography (New York: Random House, 1974). Hoffman, Autobiography, 84. 64 Hofman, Autobiography, 84. 65 Pertaining to the Radical Education Project and its aims: Letter Stuart Dowty to Herbert Marcuse, October 26, 1967. Archivzentrum Universität Frankfurt, Na3, 1458.13. 66 Letter Stuart Dowty to Herbert Marcuse, October 27, 1967. Archivzentrum Universität Frankfurt, Na3, 1458.14. 67 Peter Hausmann and Gotthard Neumann, “Arbeiterklasse und Kultur in Westdeutschland,” Neues Deutschland, January 7, 1970, 4; Klaus Ulrich, Klaus Steiniger and Burkhard Lange, “Begeisternde Manifestation der Solidarität mit Angela,” Neues Deutschland, January 27, 1971, 5. 68 Kraushaar, Frankfurter Schule, volume 2, 397. Translated by the author. 69 Daniel Cohn-Bendit, Wir haben sie so geliebt die Revolution (Frankfurt: Athenäum Verlag, 1998), 243–252. 70 Gerd-Rainer Horn, “The Working-Class Dimension of 1968,” in Transnational Moments of Change: Europe 1945, 1968, 1989, eds. Gerd-Rainer Horn and Padraic Kenney (Lanham: Rowman & Littleflied Publishers, 2004), 95–118. David Templin, “Zwischen APO und Gewerkschaft. Die Lehrlingsbewegung in Hamburg, 1968–1972,” Soziale Geschichte Online 10 (2013): 26–70. 71 Milton Rosen, “Uncovering Old Facts. Marcuse: Cop-Out or Cop,” Progressive Labor 6 (1969): 61–65. 72 Herbert Marcuse, “USA: Organisationsfrage und revolutionäres Subjekt. Fragen an Herbert Marcuse,” Kursbuch, December 22, 1970, 184. Translated by the author. 73 [W.A.], “Obszöne Welt,” Der Spiegel, June 30, 1969, 108. Cohn-Bendit later disputed that he had been the heckler, promulgating a connection between Marcuse and the CIA. Kraushaar, Frankfurter Schule, volume 1, 439. 74 Kraushaar, Frankfurter Schule, volume 1, 433. 75 [W.A.], “Schwere Vorwürfe gegen Herbert Marcuse,” Berliner Extra Dienst, June 4, 1969, 10–11. 76 Ibid. In reality it was Marcuse, who was spied on by the FBI. Gennaro and Kellner, “Surveillance.” 77 Roger Rapoport, “Herbert Marcuse. Accentuating the Negative,” Los Angeles Times, July 27, 1969, N12. 78 Quoted from Peter-Erwin Jansen (ed.), Zwischen Hoffnung und Notwendigkeit. Texte zu Herbert Marcuse (Frankfurt: Neue Kritik, 1999), 58. Translated by the author. 79 Quoted from Kraushaar, Frankfurter Schule, volume 2, 661. Translated by the author.

292  Marvin Menniken

80 Lönnendonker and Fichter, Geschichte, 140–143. 81 Abbie Hoffman FBI file. HQ 100–449923–170p 2342, NY 100–161445: 2. 82 See Gilcher-Holtey, 1968, 49–64. 83 Lönnendonker and Fichter, Freie Universität Berlin, volume 5, 96. 84 Kraushaar, Frankfurter Schule, volume 1, 304–340. 85 About the emerging concept of a “Third World” see Alfred Sauvy, “Trois Mondes, une Planète,” Vingtième Siècle. Revue d’histoire 3 (1986): 81–83. 86 [W.A.], “Entfremdung versprüht,” Der Spiegel, May 20, 1968, 54. 87 FU Berlin, UA, APO-Archiv, AStA-Nachlass, “Ist Philosophie Resignation,” May 27, 1968. 88 Letter William McGill to Lowell Sutherland, October 1, 1969. UC San Diego Mandeville Special Collections Library, RSS 1.249.2.

Selected bibliography Brown, Timothy S. “1968. Transnational and Global Perspectives.” Docupedia-Zeitgeschichte, , accessed October 3, 2016. Gennaro, Stephen and Douglas Kellner, “Under Surveillance. Herbert Marcuse and the FBI.” Current Perspectives in Social Theory 26 (2009): 283–313. Jansen, Peter-Erwin. Herbert Marcuse. Nachgelassene Schriften. Six volumes. Lüneburg: zu Klampen, 1999–2009. Katz, Barry. Herbert Marcuse and the Art of Liberation. An Intellectual Biography. London: Verso, 1982. Klimke, Martin. “1968. Europe in Technicolour.” In The Oxford Handbook of Postwar European History, edited by Dan Stone, 243–261. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012. Kraushaar, Wolfgang (ed.). Frankfurter Schule und Studentenbewegung. Von der Flaschenpost zum Molotowcocktail, 1945–1995. Three volumes. Hamburg: Hamburger Editionen, 1998. Kraushaar, Wolfgang. Achtundsechzig. Eine Bilanz. Berlin: Propyläen, 2008. Marwick, Artur. The Sixties: Cultural Transformation in Britain, France, Italy and the United States, c. 1958–c. 1974. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998. Slobodian, Quinn. Foreign Front: Third World Politics in Sixties West Germany. Durham, N.C. and London: Duke University Press, 2012. Suri, Jeremy. The Global Revolutions of 1968. New York: W.W. Norton, 2007. Walter-Busch, Emil. Geschichte der Frankfurter Schule: Kritische Theorie und Politik. Munich: Wilhelm Fink, 2010. Wheatland, Thomas. The Frankfurt School in Exile. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2009.

INDEX

Locators in italics refer to figures and those in bold to tables. abortion 130, 151 acclamation, Naxalite movement 64–5 activism: Asian American 219–20, 225–32; Burntollet Bridge, Northern Ireland 73–6; French colonial history 15, 19–22, 24; Irish civil rights movement 77–86; Japanese New Left 142–50; Palestinians 268–9; radical left 7, 23–4, 53;Vietnam War protests 223–6; see also feminism; student movements Adams, Gerry 78, 87 Adams, Michael 244–5 Africa: colonialism 5; independence 268–9; socialism 34, 36–7, 39–45; see also individually named countries e.g. Algeria; Senegal; Tunisia African-American civil rights movement 79 Africanization, Dakar University 25–6 Afro-Asian People’s Solidarity Organization (AAPSO) 36, 44–5, 46 agriculture, Naxalite movement 55–6 Algeria: French colonial history 22–3; national liberation 5, 42; revolution 118–21; sexual revolution 121–33; War of Independence 263–5 al-Jadid 256, 259, 264–5, 266, 268 Allen, Gwen 198, 199, 209, 211 All-Student Joint Struggle Councils 144–7, 150 Althusser, Louis 13–14 anti-colonialism: French colonies 26, 27–8; Hong Kong 178–9, 180–1; Palestinians

262–5; sexual revolution 117, 119; see also anti-imperialism anti-communism: Latin America 6, 104, 105; world communist movement 33–4 anti-imperialism: French colonial history 18, 27–8; Nigeria 36; Palestinians 267–8; Vietnam War 227–8; see also anti-colonialism antisemitism 242–3 anti-Zionism 242–3 Anzaldua, Gloria 230 Aoyama Michiko 149 Aportes (magazine) 107–8 Appy, Christian 221 ‘Arab men’, sexual revolution 116, 118–21, 119–27, 124 Arab world: antisemitism 242–3; cultural production 255–6; Israel 245–8; see also Palestinians Arrabal, Fernando 210 art, cultural production 102–4, 255–6, 266–7 artists’ networks 196–9; alternative gallery spaces 206–11; El Corno Emplumado 196–7, 198–203; letters’ sections 203–6 Asian American identity 217–20; Gidra 217–21, 218, 223–9; global perspective 230–2; internationalism 229–30;Vietnam War 221–30 Aspen:The Magazine in a Box 198–9, 209 avant-garde 198 ‘Awnallah, Tariq 266–7

294 Index

Baez, Joan 266–7 Banerjee, Sumanta 52–3 Batista, Fulgencio 101 Beau Geste Press (BGP) 211 Bell, Duncan 55 Ben Jennet, Mohamed 15 Bengal, colonial history 52; see also Naxalite movement Berkeley Barb (newspaper) 220 Berlinguer, Enrico 47 Bird, Jon 207–8 Black Panther (newspaper) 225 Black Panther Party (BPP) 23, 81–2 Blondin Diop, Omar 23 ‘Bloody Friday’ 87 ‘Bloody Sunday’ 83, 86 Bogside, Battle of 80–1 Bourguiba, Habib, President of Tunisia 14, 23–7 Bowering, George 202–3, 204 Britain: anti-colonialism in Hong Kong 178–9, 180–1; fashion 168; Irish Troubles 6, 75, 81, 83–6; Six Day War reporting 244–5 Brzezinski, Zbigniew 33, 34, 39, 41 Buddhism 205 Bundy, McGeorge 102 Burntollet Bridge, Northern Ireland 73–6, 74 Cantonese cinema 182, 184 capitalism: Cold War 5; Latin America 98, 101, 106; Naxalite movement 56–7, 58, 66; Zenkyōtō movement 145–7; see also consumerism Cardenal, Ernesto 205 Castro, Fidel 101 Castro, Raúl 96, 97, 107 Catholicism: Irish Troubles 75–6, 79, 89; Spanish fashion 159, 161 censorship: art work 209; Tunisia 19 Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) 96–7, 99–105, 107, 285–6 Centro de Estudios para el Desarrollo Económico y Social para América Latina (DESAL) 104 Chang Cheh 176, 183, 184, 185–6, 190 Chichester-Clark, James, Prime Minister of Northern Ireland 75, 81, 87 China: Maoism 6, 52, 54, 61, 65; nationalism 179–80, 182, 191; Naxalite movement 6, 53, 54, 56, 58, 60–2, 66; socialism in Africa 37, 39;Vietnam War 221–2

Chinese cinema 176, 178, 182; see also Hong Kong cinema Christianity: immortality 64–5; Irish Troubles 75–6, 79, 89; and Israel 238, 249; Spanish fashion 159, 161 CIA (United States) 96–7, 99–105, 107, 285–6 cinema 10; Cantonese 182, 184; Chinese 176, 178, 182; Exodus 239; global influence 236; Japanese 182; One-Armed Swordsman 177–8, 183, 187–92, 188–9; see also Hong Kong cinema civil rights: African-American 79; Northern Ireland 74, 76–86 Coca Cola brand 208–9 Cohn-Bendit, Daniel 19, 23, 285 Cold War 5; Hong Kong cinema 178–81, 185; Palestinians 259–62 colonial history: Bengal 52; Bourguiba, President of Tunisia 14, 18–23; Dakar 13–16; French 13–14, 16–18, 27–8; neoimperialism 16, 23–7; Palestine 257–8; Senegal 13, 16–18, 23–7; Senghor, President of Senegal 14, 16–18, 23–7; Tunis 13–16, 18–23 colonialism 5–6; El Corno Emplumado magazine 206; Irish Troubles 6, 72; see also anti-colonialism Comecon 39–40 Cominform 33 Comintern 33, 35, 45–7 commodification 9–10 communism: Cold War 5; Israeli Communist Party 256, 258–60, 261, 263, 268; Japan Communist Party 142–3; the Kibbutz 240–1; multilateral institutions 34–9; Naxalite movement 56–7; Palestinians 268; world communist movement 34–5; see also Soviet bloc Communist Party of India (CPI (M-L)) 52, 56, 57, 59–61, 63–5 Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU) 46–7 community, importance of in Israel 240–1 conferences, Stalinist 34–5 conformity, Spanish fashion 162–7 the Congo 263 Congress for Cultural Freedom (CCF) 100–2 congresses, Stalin 34–5 Conner, Bruce 209 consumerism 4; Spanish fashion 160, 162 contraceptive pill 1, 7 Cook, Alexander C. 5

Index  295

countercultural movements: Asian American identity 221; Marcuse, Herbert 279, 282–4; Mexican magazines 197, 198, 206 CPI (M-L) (Communist Party of India) 52, 56, 57, 59–61, 63–5 Cuba 101–4, 106–7, 200 Cuban Revolution 7, 98 Cultural Cold War 259–62 cultural imperialism 6, 96–8, 108–9; climate of suspicion 106–8; modernization theory 98–101; Mundo Nuevo 101–7 cultural production: Arab world 255–6; art 102–4, 255–6, 266–7; artists’ networks 197–8; Hong Kong cinema 9, 176–8; Palestinians 255–6, 266–7; television 10; United States 260–1, 266–7 culture: Asian American identity 217, 219–21, 228; trans-cultural negotiations 5 culture of poverty 98, 104, 106–7 Currie, Austin 86 Czechoslovakia, socialism 37–8, 40–1, 42, 44–5 Dakar, colonial history 13–16 Dakar Student Union (UED) 15 Dakar University 17, 23, 24, 24–5 Darwich, Mahmoud 250–1, 255, 261, 262, 263–5 Davidoff, Leonore 164 Davis, Angela 283 Davison, Alan 197, 204 de Haan, Francisca 35 de Molina, María Pilar 163 decolonization 3; Cold War 178; French colonial history 115–19, 132, 134; Palestinian vocabularies 262–5; Six Day War 250; see also anti-colonialism DeGroot, Gerald 2–3 Democratic Union of Senegalese Students (UDES) 15 Desarrollo Social para América Latina (DESAL) 104 Destourian Socialist Party (PSD) 15, 19–20 Devlin, Bernadette 78–9, 82, 86, 87 Dickstein, Morris 221 discrimination, civil rights movements 81–2; see also gender; racism dissent, vocabularies of 9–11, 256–7 Dohrn, Bernardine 219 Dowty, Stuart 283–4 Dutschke, Rudi 276, 283

Eastern Europe: socialism 40–1; world communist movement 33, 34; see also individually named countries e.g. Czechoslovakia, Hungary ecologies of knowledge 198 economism 57 Ehrenberg, Felipe 210–11 Eichmann trial 241–2 El Corno Emplumado/The Plumed Horn (magazine): alternative gallery spaces 206–11; historical context 196–7, 198–203; letters’ sections 203–6 elites, Naxalite movement 59–61 equality see civil rights; gender; racism Eros and Civilization (Marcuse) 274, 276, 277, 278 erotics 115–16; see also sexual revolution Essay on Liberation (Marcuse) 278 ethics, One-Armed Swordsman 187–92 Eurocentricism, artists’ networks 208–9 Eurocentrism, artists’ networks 206–7 Eurocommunism 47 Europe see individually named countries e.g. Britain, France European fashion 168–9 everyday life, Japanese New Left 8, 144–5, 147–8 Exodus (film) 239–40 far left, sexual revolution 117, 129, 132 far right, sexual revolution 8, 117, 121–33 farming, Naxalite movement 55–6 Farrell, Michael 78 fashion see European fashion; Spanish fashion Feenberg, Andrew 281 feminism: abortion rights 130; Devlin, Bernadette 70; Hong Kong cinema 190; Japan 142, 145, 147, 150–2, 153; Spanish fashion 167 Ferlinghetti, Lawrence 207 film see cinema FLN (Front de la libération nationale) 5, 42, 120, 124, 126, 129 Fluxus (art movement) 207–8 folk songs 266–7 Ford Foundation 6, 98, 100–2, 104–6, 107–8 Foucault, Michel 23 France: colonial history 13–14, 16–18, 27–8; May 1968 revolutionary moment 11, 13, 23–4; May 1968 sexual revolution 117, 121–7; sexual revolution 115–18, 121–33

296 Index

Francoism, Spanish fashion 159–67 Francophonie 17–18, 25, 26 Frank, Andre Gunder 99–100 Fraser, Kathleen 203 ‘free sex’ 149–50 freedom of expression 9 Freud, Lucian 277, 278 front humanitaire anti-raciste (FHAR) 128–34, 129, 130 Furutani, Warren 224 Gall, Xavier 115 Gandhi, Mahatma 65 gender: Dakar University 24, 24–5; French sexual revolution 117, 118–20, 124, 126, 131, 132; Hong Kong cinema 9, 176, 178, 183–4, 187–92; Irish civil rights movement 79; Israel 238–9; Japan 141–2, 144, 150–3; sexual revolution 7–9; Spanish fashion 159–67; subordination of women 8, 148; traditional expectations 4, 159–62; see also women Gennaro, Stephen 275 Germany, Soviet bloc relations 42, 43, 44 ‘Gewalt’, Japanese New Left 148, 151 Ghana, socialism 43–4 Gidra (magazine) 217–21, 218, 223–9 global perspective 2–3, 4–5; art 255–6; Asian American identity 230–2; Hong Kong cinema 181, 183–7; Irish Troubles 83; Naxalite movement 53–63, 65–6; Palestinians 256–8; sexual revolution 116–18; Zionism 245–6 Godzilla (monster) 220–1 Goeritz, Mathias 208–9 ‘gook’ 217, 222–3, 229 Gorky, Maxim 257 grass-roots political resistance 4 Grinberg, Miguel 205 guerrilla warfare: Cold War 5–6; Irish Troubles 89; Naxalite movement 59–61 Guyotat, Pierre 115 Habibi, Emile 259 Haddad, Michel 255 Hayden, Tom 219 Hellion, Martha 210–11 heroic leadership, Naxalite movement 62–5 heuristic concept, global 1960s 3 histories of the sixties 2–3, 4–5 Ho Chi Minh, President of Vietnam 57–8, 266 Hoffman, Abbie 283, 287 the Holocaust 241–2, 250

Homosexual Front for Revolutionary Action see front humanitaire anti-raciste homosexual revolution 8, 117 homosexuality, French perception of Algerians 117, 127–34 Hong Kong cinema 9, 176–8, 192; Cold War 178–81, 185; global perspective 181, 183–7; identity 176–7, 180–1, 186; One-Armed Swordsman 177–8, 183, 187–92, 188–9; Shaw Brothers 181–3 housing, Irish civil rights movement 77 Hungary, socialism 43 iconoclastic approach, artwork 207 ICP (Israeli Communist Party) 256, 258–60, 261, 263, 268 identity: Hong Kong cinema 176–7, 180–1, 186; Israel 10, 246, 258; Oriental 219–20; Palestinians 258–9, 264–5; see also Asian American identity; cultural production immigrants/immigration: Asian-Americans 219, 222, 231; French colonial history 23, 118, 120–8, 131–4; Israel 239, 248 imperialism: Asian American identity 229–30; French neo-imperialism 16–18, 23–7; multilateral institutions 35; sexual revolution 119; United States 99–100 India: global perspective 59; Israel 245; nationalism 52; see also Naxalite movement institutions see multilateral institutions Instituto Latinoamericano de Relaciones Internacionales (ILARI) 102 international relations: Africa 39–45; French colonial history 16–17; Soviet bloc 6, 33–4 International Student Conferences (ISC) 36 International Union of Students (IUS) 35–6 international youth movements 35–8 internationalism 36, 229–30; see also global perspective intersectionality, sexual revolution 8 Irish Republican Army (IRA) 6, 78, 83–8, 84–5, 89 Irish Troubles 6, 72–3, 89–91; civil rights 74, 76–86; direct rule 86–9; legal framework 73–6 Islam: migrants 120–1; perception in Europe 248; Six Day War 245–6; ‘The Battle of the Veil’ 119 Islamic State (ISIS) 134 Israel: identity 10, 246, 258; media portrayal 236–8; Palestinian Citizens 258–9; see also Zionism

Index  297

Israeli Communist Party (ICP) 256, 258–60, 261, 263, 268 Israelophilia 10 Al-Ittihad (newspaper) 258, 259, 262, 263, 264–5, 266 Iwasaki, Bruce 229–30 Al-Jadid (newspaper) 259, 264–5, 266, 268 James Bond films 168, 184, 185, 187 Japan: cinema 182; gender issues 140–2, 150–3; New Left 8, 142–6; student movements 140, 141, 142–50; Thought Group S.E.X. 150–2 Japan Communist Party (JCP) 142–3 Jersild, Austin 34 Jews: Israeli conflict perceptions 248–9, 250–1; perceptions of old and new 238–9; see also Zionism Jodorowsky, Alejandro 210 Johnson, Lyndon B., President of USA 18, 200 Joint Committee on Latin American Studies (JCLAS) 98–100 journalism, Middle-East 246; see also media Jun, Helen H. 219 Jupp, James 274 Kaiserfeld, Thomas 161 Kanba Michiko 143 Kantorowicz, Ernst 64–5 Kapila, Shruti 58–9 Katsiaficus, George 4 Kellner, Douglas 275 khatam see Naxalite movement the Kibbutz 240–1 Kim, Elaine 219–20, 226 King, Martin Luther 79–80 Korean War 180 Koselleck, Reinhart 55 labor unions 15 Lamantia, Philip 199 language of dissent 9–11, 256–7 languages: Chinese 182; Cultural Cold War 260–1; El Corno Emplumado 197; English in Palestine 257–8; French colonial history 18–19; Marcuse’s work 274 Latin America: antisemitism 242–3; Cuba 101–4, 106–7; cultural imperialism 6, 97–8; cultural production 198; magazines 196–7; marginality project 104–6; modernization theory 98–101; socialism 96–7

leadership: Irish civil rights movement 77; Marcuse, Herbert 282–3; Naxalite movement 62–5 Lee, Bruce 176 legal framework, Irish Troubles 73–6 Lenin’s parallelism 41 Leong, Russell 230–1 Lewis, Oscar 106–7 liberalization, Spanish fashion 167–9 lifestyle choices 1–2 Lippard, Lucy 206 local perspective: Hong Kong cinema 181–3; Naxalite movement 54–5, 61 Los Hartos art collective 208 Lubin, Alex 263 Lundin, Per 161 Macinuas, George 208 magazines 9–10; alternative gallery spaces 206–11; Asian American identity 217–21, 218, 223–9; Aspen:The Magazine in a Box 198–9, 209; French sexual revolution 128; Hong Kong cinema 182–3; Latin America 100, 102–4, 107–8; letters’ sections 203–6; Spanish fashion 159–60, 162–9; Tout! 128, 129, 129, 130, 131–2; see also El Corno Emplumado Maoism: Naxalite movement 6, 52, 54, 61, 65; New Left 7; Tunisia 19–20 Marcuse, Herbert 10, 273–5; adversaries 284–8; media 275–6, 278, 279–81, 284–8; opaque theories and concrete action 275–8; personal encounters 279–84 marginality project 104–6 martial arts films 176–7, 183 martyrdom, Naxalite movement 62–5 Marwick, Arthur 4, 217 Marxism: Latin America 104–5; Marcuse, Herbert 273–4, 276–7, 280–1, 282, 284–5; Palestine 258 masculinity: Hong Kong cinema 176, 178, 183–4, 187–92; James Bond films 184, 185, 187; sexual revolution 119–20, 120–1; Spanish fashion 162–5 mass media see media mass production, Hong Kong cinema 181 Mateos, López 204 Matthias, Leo 285–6 Mausbach, Wilfried 275 Mazumdar, Charu, Communist Party of India 55, 59, 62–4 McCann, Eamonn 82

298 Index

McGill, William 288 media 4; alternative access to art work 209; anti-communism 35–6; discontent 9–10; global influence 236–7; intermedia 196; Irish civil rights movement 77; Marcuse, Herbert 275–6, 278, 279–81, 284–8; Naxalite movement 53; student movements 273; Zionism 237–9, 241, 246, 247–52 Medina, Cuauhtémoc 210 melodrama 190 memory 10, 14, 96, 230; Israeli/Jewish collective 241–2 Mexican government 201, 202, 204, 209 Mexico City: artists’ networks 208–11; El Corno Emplumado 197; political perspective 201–2 middle class: Hong Kong cinema 184–5; Irish Troubles 90; Japanese New Left 144; Naxalite movement 53–4; Spanish fashion 162 Middle-East journalism 246 migrants, sexual revolution 120–1, 127 Ministry for Information and Tourism (MIT), Spain 161, 164–5 modernity, Naxalite movement 54 modernization, socialism 34 modernization theory 98–101 Mondragón, Sergio 196–7, 199–203, 207–8 Monegal, Rodríguez 103–4 Montalbán, Manuel Vázquez 159 Moraga, Cherrie 230 movies see cinema multilateral institutions: Africa 39–45; communist-sponsored 34–9; reconception of 45–7; world communist movement 33–4 Mundo Nuevo 101–7 music, American folk 266–7 My Lai massacre 224, 227 Nakamura, Norman 217 national fronts 35 national liberation 3; Algeria 5, 42; Czechoslovakia 40, 44–5; Irish Troubles 90; Naxalite movement 57–8; see also decolonization National Liberation Front see FLN (front de la libération nationale) National Peace Action Council (NPAC) 228 nationalism: China 179–80, 182, 191; India 52; Irish Troubles 89; Senegal 17–18, 27; Tunisia 27

Naxalite movement 6, 52–5, 65–6; in global intellectual history 55–9; leadership 62–5; martyrdom 62–5; New Left 7; new man 59–61; violence 59–62 Negritude 17–18, 25, 26 neo-colonialism: El Corno Emplumado magazine 206; French colonial history 24; Naxalite movement 56–7 neo-imperialism, France 16–18, 23–7 neo-Marxism 273–4 The New (newspaper’s cultural journal) 256; see also al-Jadid New Left 7; Althusser, Louis 13–14; French colonial history 20–1; Japan 8, 142–6; Marcuse, Herbert 10, 274–84, 285–8; Palestinians 265–9 new man, Naxalite movement 55, 58, 59–61 new world: Latin America 101–7; Naxalite movement 55, 63 Newman, Michael 207–8 Newman, Paul 239 news see media Nigeria, anti-imperialism 36 Northern Ireland see Irish Troubles Northern Ireland Civil Rights Association (NICRA) 77–80 nostalgeria 124, 126 Nun, José 104–6 O’Donnell, Guillermo 108 One-Armed Swordsman (film) 177–8, 183, 187–92, 188–9 One-Dimensional Man (Marcuse) 274, 276, 277–8 O’Neill, Terenace 76 O’Neill, Terence 75 Orange Order 75–6 Oriental identity 219–20 orientalism, sexual revolution 117–20, 126, 131–2, 134 Othmani, Ahmed Ben 22 Othmani, Simone Lellouche 19, 21–2 pacifism 266–7, 275 Pakistan 52; see also Naxalite movement Palestinians: Cultural Cold War 259–62; cultural production 255–6; decolonization vocabularies 262–5; global vocabularies 256–8; in Israel 258–9; media 246–8, 250–1; New Left 265–9;Vietnam War 265–9 parallelism 41, 43–4, 46 party congresses, Stalin 34–5 Passerini, Luisa 5

Index  299

peasants: Mexican magazines 201; Naxalite movement 52–3, 55–6, 59–61, 65 People’s Democracy (PD) 78 personal politics 7–8 Perspectives 15, 19–22, 24 ‘perversion’, sexual revolution 121–7 Petrovic, Gajo 278 the Pill 1, 7 political language 11 political projects 4, 5–6 Pompidou, Georges, President of France 26 popular fronts 35 post-decolonization, sexual revolution 116–17, 132 poverty, culture of 98, 104, 106–7 power 5–6; Irish Troubles 72–6, 86–9, 90–1; Marcuse, Herbert 277 Prebisch, Raúl 98 ‘Project Camelot’ 99 propaganda: Hong Kong cinema 177, 179; Islam 119; Israel 245; Latin America 96, 107, 108–9; Naxalite movement 53, 60; Spanish fashion 168 publishing, Cultural Cold War 260–2 publishing houses, Mexico 211 al-Qasim, Samih 255, 265 race revolutions 7–9 racism: antisemitism 242–3; and Asian American identity 217, 221–3, 226; Black Panther Party 23, 81–2; Tunisia 23 Radical Education Project 283–4 radical left: France 23–4; Naxalite movement 53; sixties 2, 7 radicalism: French colonial history 21–2; Marcuse, Herbert 10 radio media 236 Rama, Angel 100–1 Randall, Margaret 196–7, 199–203, 207–8 Ravel, Jean-Louis 26–7 Ray, Rabindra 60 realism 259–62, 264, 268 Red Army 33 remembering see memory Repressive Tolerance (Marcuse) 276 ‘revolutionary moment’, May 1968 11, 13, 23–4 Reyna, Orfila 203 Rockefeller Foundation 98 Romania, socialism 44 Ross, Kristin 11, 118 Rostagno, Irene 197 Rostow, Walt 98 rural areas, Naxalite movement 52, 53, 57

Said, Edward 248 Sartori, Andrew 55, 62 sartorial masculinity 163–5 scale, Naxalite movement 54–5 Seeger, Pete 266–7 Sejourne, Laurette 206 Senegal, student movements 6, 14–18, 23–7 Senegalese Progressive Union (UPS) 25 Senegalese Revolution 17–18 Senghor, Léopold Sédar, President of Senegal 16–18, 23–7 separation, Orange Order 75–6 sexual revolution 7–9, 115–16, 133–4; Algerian revolution 118–21; far right 121–33; global perspective 116–18; Marcuse, Herbert 277, 278 Shaw Brothers cinema 181–3 Shimabukuro, Scott 217 Silvert, Kalman 104 Sino-Soviet conflict 6, 34, 37, 38–9, 46 Six Day War 10, 243–6, 250–1 social actors, media 4 social system, Spanish fashion 161, 163–7 socialism: Africa 34, 36–7, 39–45; Latin America 96–7; modernization 34; multilateral institutions 34–9; world communist movement 33 socialist division of labor 44 socialist realism 259–62, 264, 268 sociology, modernization theory 100–1 Solari, Aldo 100–1 solidarity: Afro-Asian People’s Solidarity Organization 36, 44–5, 46; Palestinians 263–5; world communist movement 33 songs, American folk 266–7 Soviet bloc: antisemitism 242–3; international relations 6, 33–4; socialism 34–5, 39–45; socialist realism 259–62; Zionism 245 Spanish Civil War 161 Spanish fashion 8–9, 159–61, 169–70; conformity 162–7; Francoism 159–67; gender hierarchy 159–67; liberalization 167–9 spectacular violence, Naxalite movement 59–62 Stalin, Joseph 34–5, 36, 41 state power, Irish Troubles 72–6, 86–9, 90–1 state welfare, student protests 15 student movements 6, 13–14; Dakar 13–16; Irish civil rights movement 76; Japan 140, 141, 142–50; Marcuse, Herbert 274–5, 279–83, 285; media prominence

300 Index

273; Senegal 6, 13–16, 23–7; Tunisia 6, 13–15, 13–16, 18–23, 24 student unions 15, 35–6 Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) 275, 276, 286 subordination of women 8, 148 Subrahmanyam, Sanjay 54 Suez conflict 142–3, 236, 238, 244, 246 Sumi, Pat 227 Takemoto, Alan 217 Tanaka Mitsuko 149–50 Tanzania, socialism 43 television, cultural production 10; global influence 236; Israel 241; Marcuse, Herbert 279, 281 terrorism, Islamic State 134 Third World: Algerian War of Independence 263, 264–5; anti-communism 36; Asian American identity 219, 225, 230; Israel’s media portrayal 237, 240, 248, 250–1; Japanese New Left 143; Marcuse, Herbert 280, 287; Palestinians 268–9 Thought Group S.E.X. 150–2 Tianyi company 181 Togliatti, Palmiro 45–7 Tokoro Mitsuko 145–6 Tolstoy, Leo 257 Topor, Roland 210 Tout! (magazine) 128, 129, 129, 130, 131–2 traditional expectations: gender 4; sixties protests 11; Spanish fashion 159–67 trans-cultural negotiations 5 transnationalism: discontent 5–6; Irish civil rights movement 6, 76–86; media 9–10; Naxalite movement 6; see also global perspective the Troubles see Irish Troubles Tunisian Democratic Mass Movement (MDMT) 22 Tunisian student movements 6, 13–15, 18–23, 24 turnkey enterprises 43–4 UK see Britain Ulster conflict 72, 76; see also Irish Troubles Ulster Defence Association (UDA) 87 Ulster Unionist Party (UUP) 75, 78, 87–8 Ulster Volunteer Force (UVF) 86 The Union (newspaper) 256 unions see labor unions; student unions unisex clothing 166–7 United Kingdom see Britain

United States: African-American civil rights movement 79; CIA 96–7, 99–105, 107; Cold War 5; Cuba 101–5; cultural imperialism 99–100, 107–8; cultural production 260–1, 266–7; Vietnam War 57–8, 223–8, 265–6; Zionism 248–9, 250–1; see also Asian American identity universities see student movements US see United States Vekemans, Roger 104, 105 Verdú,Vicente 159, 160, 166–7 Vietnam War: Asian American identity 221–30; Irish civil rights movement 76, 86; Mexican artists’ networks 200, 205; Naxalite movement 54, 57–8; Palestinians 265–9; protests 223–8; United States 57–8, 223–8, 265–6 violence: Hong Kong cinema 186; Irish Troubles 87–8; Japanese New Left 148; Naxalite movement 59–62; sexual revolution 115–16, 124–5 welfare, student protests 15 Westernization 1–2; see also Eurocentrism; imperialism Wheatland, Thomas 275 Wilder, Gary 16–17 Winzer, Otto 40 Wolin, Harvey 196, 197, 199 women: Dakar University 24, 24–5; Devlin, Bernadette 78–9; French sexual revolution 118, 119, 120, 124, 126, 131, 132; Hong Kong cinema 184, 187, 190–1; Israel 238–9; Japan 140–2, 144, 150–2; the Pill 1, 7; Spanish fashion 159–67; subordination of 8, 148; ‘The Battle of the Veil’ 119; traditional expectations 4, 159–62 Women’s International Democratic Federation’s (WIDF) 35 world communist movement 33–4, 39, 45 world democratic federations 34–5 World Federation of Democratic Youth (WFDY) 35, 36, 37, 38, 39, 47 World Federation of Trade Unions (WFTU) 37 world youth 35–8 Yonezu Tomoko 147 Yoshimura, Evelyn 223

Index  301

youth: Hong Kong cinema 186; Spanish fashion 159, 166–7; world movements 35–8; see also student movements youth federation (WFDY) 35, 36, 37, 38, 39, 47 youth movements 35–8, 41 Zanzibar, socialism 43 Zenkyōtō (All-Student Joint Struggle Councils) 144–7, 150 Zhou Enlai 39–40

Zionism 10, 236–7; antisemitism 242–3; anti-Zionism 242–3; Exodus film 239–40; French colonial history 19–20; global perspective 245–6; the Holocaust 241–2, 250; the Kibbutz 240–1; media 237–9, 241, 246, 247–52; methodological precautions 237–8; Middle-East journalism 246; Palestinians 246–8, 250–1; perceptions of old and new Jews 238–9; political parties 258–9; Six Day War 243–6, 250–1; US exceptionalism 248–9