The Third World in the Global 1960s

The Third World in the Global 1960s

Protest, Culture and Society

Editors:

Kathrin Fahlenbrach, Institute for Media and Communication, University of Hamburg

Martin Klimke, New York University Abu Dhabi

Joachim Scharloth, Technische Universität Dresden, Germany

Protest movements have been recognized as significant contributors to processes of political participation and transformations of culture and value systems, as well as to the development of both a national and transnational civil society.

This series brings together the various innovative approaches to phenomena of social change, protest and dissent which have emerged in recent years, from an interdisciplinary perspective. It contextualizes social protest and cultures of dissent in larger political processes and socio-cultural transformations by examining the influence of historical trajectories and the response of various segments of society, political and legal institutions on a national and international level. In doing so, the series offers a more comprehensive and multi-dimensional view of historical and cultural change in the twentieth and twenty-first century.

Volume 1

Voices of the Valley, Voices of the Straits: How Protest Creates Communities

Donatella della Porta and Gianni Piazza

Volume 2

Transformations and Crises: The Left and the Nation in Denmark and Sweden, 1956–1980

Thomas Ekman Jørgensen

Volume 3

Changing the World, Changing Oneself: Political Protest and Collective Identities in West Germany and the U.S. in the 1960s and 1970s

Edited by Belinda Davis, Wilfried Mausbach, Martin Klimke, and Carla MacDougall

Volume 4

The Transnational Condition: Protest Dynamics in an Entangled Europe

Edited by Simon Teune

Volume 5

Protest Beyond Borders: Revisiting Social Mobilization in Europe after 1945

Edited by Hara Kouki and Eduardo Romanos

Volume 6

Between the Avantgarde and the Everyday: Subversive Politics in Europe, 1958–2008

Edited by Timothy Brown and Lorena Anton

Volume 7

Between Prague Spring and French May: Opposition and Revolt in Europe 1960–1980

Edited by Martin Klimke, Jacco Pekelder, and Joachim Scharloth

Volume 8

The Third World in the Global 1960s

Edited by Samantha Christiansen and Zachary A. Scarlett

Volume 9

The German Student Movemnet and the Literary Imagination: Transnational Memories of Protest and Dissent

Susanne Rinner

Volume 10

Children of the Dictatorship: Student Resistance, Cultural Politics, and the ‘Long 1960s’ in Greece

Kostis Kornetis

Volume 11

Media and Revolt: Strategies and Performances from the 1960s to the Present

Edited by Kathrin Fahlenbrach, Erling Sivertsen, and Rolf Werenskjold

Volume 12

Europeanizing Contention: The Protest Against ‘Fortress Europe’ in France and Germany

Pierre Monforte

Volume 13

Militant around the Clock? Left-Wing Youth Politics, Leisure, and Sexuality in Post-Dictatorship Greece, 1974-1981

Nikolaos Papadogiannis

The Third World in the Global 1960s

Edited by

Samantha Christiansen and Zachary A. Scarlett

First published in 2013 by

Berghahn Books

www.berghahnbooks.com

© 2013, 2015 Samantha Christiansen, Zachary A. Scarlett

First paperback edition published in 2015

All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purposes of criticism and review, no part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system now known or to be invented, without written permission of the publisher.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

The Third World in the global 1960s / edited by Samantha Christiansen, Zachary A. Scarlett.

   p. cm. — (Protest, culture and society ; v. 8)

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-0-85745-573-4 (hardback) -- ISBN 978-1-78238-899-9 (paperback) -- ISBN 978-0-85745-574-1 (ebook)

1. Youth protest movements—Developing countries—History—20th century. 2. Youth—Political activity—Developing countries—History—20th century. 3. Student movements—Developing countries—History—20th century. 4. Students—Political activity—Developing countries—History—20th century. 5. Developing countries—Social conditions—History—20th century. I. Christiansen, Samantha. II. Scarlett, Zachary A.

HN19.T43 2012

305.23509172‘4—dc23

2012012569

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

Printed on acid-free paper

ISBN 978-0-85745-573-4 hardback

ISBN 978-1-78238-899-9 paperback

ISBN 978-0-85745-574-1 ebook

Contents

Preface to the Paperback Edition

Foreword: The Third World in 1968

Arif Dirlik

Introduction

Samantha Christiansen and Zachary A. Scarlett

Part I. Crossing Borders: The Idea of the Third World and the Global 1960s

CHAPTER 1. A Shared Space of Imagination, Communication, and Action: Perspectives on the History of the Third World

Christoph Kalter

CHAPTER 2. China’s Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution and the Imagination of the Third World

Zachary A. Scarlett

CHAPTER 3. Politics and Periodicals in 1960s: Readings around the Naxalite Movement

Avishek Ganguly

CHAPTER 4. Liberation Struggle and Humanitarian Aid: International Solidarity Movements and the Third World in the 1960s

Konrad J. Kuhn

Part II. Fresh Battles in Old Struggles: New Voices and Modes of Expression

CHAPTER 5. A More Systemic Fight for Reform: University Reform, Student Movements, Society, and the State in Brazil, 1957–1968

Colin Snider

CHAPTER 6. Speaking the Language of Protest: African Student Rebellions at the Catholic Major Seminary in Colonial Zimbabwe, 1965–1979

Nicholas Creary

CHAPTER 7. 1968 and Apartheid: Race and Politics in South Africa

Chris Saunders

CHAPTER 8. Brother Wally and De Burnin’ of Babylon: Walter Rodney’s Impact on the Reawakening of Black Power, the Birth of Reggae, and Resistance to Global Imperialism

James Bradford

Part III. Unfinished Business: Challenging the State’s Revolution

CHAPTER 9. The Destruction of the University: Violence, Political Imagination, and the Student Movement in Congo-Zaire, 1969–1971

Pedro Monaville

CHAPTER 10. Revolution on the National Stage: Mexico, the PRI, and the Student Movement in 1968

Julia Sloan

CHAPTER 11. Student Activism and Strategic Identity: The Anti-Communist Student Action Front (KAMI) in West Java, Indonesia, 1965–1966

Stephanie Sapiie

CHAPTER 12. Putting up a United Front: MAN in the Rebellious Sixties

Erwin S. Fernandez

Bibliography

Notes on Contributors

Index

Illustrations follow page 85.

Preface to the Paperback Edition

As editors of this volume, we are delighted to see the book released in a paperback edition. This project was imagined, even in its earliest iterations, as an attempt to expand ideas about the Global Sixties in new directions by adding fresh voices. This paperback volume will facilitate a broader conversation about how we understand the 1960s.

In the years since the volume’s original conception in 2008, the field of the Global Sixties has indeed grown in exciting ways—not only with greater attention paid to the Global South (or Third World, as appropriate to the time period), but in theoretical maturity as well. The Global Sixties as a realm of academic inquiry has undergone a substantive shift away from nostalgia and memoir to a complex and varied examination of a dynamic and often conflicted period. Eric Zolov, in the introduction to the special edition of the journal The Americas dedicated to Latin America in the sixties, explains the significance of this transition,

today’s shift is influenced by a new generation of historians unencumbered by the ideological baggage carried by those who witnessed and participated in the political struggles and artistic exuberance of the 1960s as they occurred. With this shift, we are finally reaching a point where more historia than memoria is being written. Without question, the numerous memoir-based narratives written by participants have helped to inform our understanding of the epoch, providing rich primary-source narratives of personal recollection and witness. The new historical investigations build on these memoirs, yet are firmly grounded in archival research. In turn, this archival research has fleshed out old historical questions and brought to the forefront many new ones. The results have often been fundamentally revisionist interpretations of the prevailing assumptions of the period.¹

Indeed, Zolov has astutely navigated the tension between popular or cultural memory and academic investigation, and the historiographical identity of the Global Sixties continues to be negotiated in a rich body of scholarship.

While it would be impossible to include a full acknowledgement of the great works that have been published since the volume’s first release, there are a number of studies that serve as good examples of the expansion of the Global Sixties as a field. The 2014 volume of The Americas provided a bounty of studies in Latin America that incorporated Uruguay, Argentina, Brazil, El Salvador, Mexico, and the Southern Cone region into a broad transnational examination of youth and politics.² Also in Latin America, Victoria Langland in Speaking of Flowers: Student Movements and the Making and Remembering of 1968 in Military Brazil³ provided a critical intervention in the historiography of the Global Sixties in methodology and geography. Her examination of student identity, memory, and gender in Brazil is a strong example of rigorous archival and analytical work that sheds many of the tropes of nostalgia and elevates interpretations of the era to new heights. Among many others, a particularly relevant contribution of Langland’s work is a deep and nuanced consideration of the changing relationship between students and the state in non-democratic, military dominated environments. This new arena both informs and unsettles ideas of student political mobilizations, which are frequently framed in European or American terms.

The impact of Maoism has also become a vibrant field of study that has provided for a dynamic framework of the Global Sixties. Richard Wolin’s The Wind from the East: French Intellectuals, the Cultural Revolution, and the Legacy of the 1960s documents the essential role that Maoism played in the formation of French radicalism.⁴ Alexander Cook’s Mao’s Little Red Book: A Global History brings together a diverse group of scholars who examine how Maoism was received and localized in a variety of settings.⁵ Cook’s volume makes clear that Mao’s little red book, one of the iconic artifacts of the 1960s, was not universal or static, but was appropriated to fit into various local revolutionary situations. This is also the case in Matthew Rothwell’s Transpacific Revolutionaries: The Chinese Revolution in Latin America.⁶ Rothwell explores how Maoism was applied in Latin America, as well as the transpacific connections that facilitated the spread of Maoism around the continent.

In addition to expanding into new geographical areas, scholars have adopted novel approaches that have helped shed the celebratory nostalgia of memory and offered a nuanced reconceptualization of the relationship between the First and Third World. For example, Quinn Slobodian’s Foreign Front: Third World Politics in Sixties West Germany⁷ places the origins of West German student protest in the hands of Third World students studying in Europe. His study reframes the West German movement from the common narrative in which students discovered the Third World, to one in which students from both the First and Third World collaborated in a true transnational spirit. Cynthia Young similarly challenges popular perceptions of the civil rights movement in the United States. In her book Soul Power: Culture, Radicalism, and the Making of a U.S. Third World Left, Young highlights the ways in which American activists drew solidarity with Third World revolutionaries by focusing on parallels between colonialism and America’s inner cities.⁸ Young also challenges popular assumptions about who Sixties activists were, and instead brings forth a coalition of filmmakers, activists, philosophers, and union organizers that used the Third World as a catalyst to criticize not just racial injustice, but misogyny and class inequality as well. Other works have scrutinized the gaze into the Third World in an attempt to overcome popular nostalgia. Judy Tzu-Chen Wu has produced a provocative and illuminating perspective on U.S. activists that visited Vietnam during the Global Sixties. In Radicals on the Road: Internationalism, Orientalism, and Feminism During the Vietnam Era, she deftly places the attempts to build identity based liberation movements and notions of international sisterhood into an analysis informed by Edward Said’s concept of orientalism, demonstrating the difficulty inherent in transnational solidarity.⁹ Her notion of radical orientalism informs not only considerations of anti-war activism, but of the internationalism present in the Global Sixties overall.

Finally, in addition to incorporating the Third World into the conceptual identity of the Global Sixties, scholars have begun to address the lacuna of the Second World. In particular, The Socialist Sixties: Crossing Borders in the Second World made a major contribution in unsettling the primacy of the First World definitions of the era.¹⁰ Consideration of life behind the Iron Curtain, as well as in the peripheries of the Soviet empire such as Yugoslavia and Cuba, make use of valuable frameworks of the Global Sixties, such as youth, popular culture, and memory.

This volume, and the work discussed above, all strive for what we believe should be the highest aspiration of the field: to obviate any distinction between First, Second, and Third World, and to create a framework for Sixties activism that is drawn from a global array of case studies. This volume was originally intended as a corrective to Western imbalance in the field; hence its primary focus on the Third World. But in its examination of the Third World we have attempted to offer up alternative versions of Sixties activism. Doing so will, we believe, go a long way to accomplishing Eric Zolov’s essential goal of incorporating historical analysis into interpretations of the decade. Despite popular memory, the Third World forces us to reconsider who activists were in the 1960s, the periodization of the decade, the role that culture played in shaping politics, and the relationship that activists had with postcolonial governments. It furthermore reminds us that 1968—often used as shorthand for the entire decade—was an important year, but not the only important year of radical activism. We believe it is therefore vital to embrace the sentiments of scholars like Eric Zolov, but also to amplify them: what is necessary is both critical historical engagement as well as a more global approach to the 1960s.