Anti-Disciplinary Protest: Sixties Radicalism and Postmodernism - Hardcover

by Julie Stephens (Author)

This original analysis of sixties radicalism draws on a wide range of rare and lively sources. Stephens critiques conventional narratives of the era, arguing that the most distinctive forms of sixties protest are often marginalized. She locates postmodern impulses in the protest of the sixties, and challenges the connection often made between the failure of sixties radicalism and contemporary political disengagement. Stephens offers new interpretations of the relationship between the sixties and the current political and theoretical landscape.

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The sixties was a time when the boundaries between the political and the aesthetic were deliberately blurred and, according to some critics, the time when the possibility for grand social transformation died. Stephens questions the frameworks that inform commonplace understandings of this period, arguing that the most distinctive forms of sixties protest are often marginalized or excluded from view. She looks at the problematic contemporary and retrospective accounts of sixties radicalism, and traces the modernist and postmodern impulses that can be discerned in the anti-disciplinary protest of the time. Stephens develops a new theoretical framework for conceptualizing the relationship between the sixties and later political and theoretical developments.