The Global Sixties in Sound and Vision ― Media, Counterculture, Revolt

Despite the recent explosion of scholarly interest in the "global 1968" phenomenon, the seminal influence of the arts - in both their popular and avant-garde iterations - has too often been neglected. Student activism in the space of the university and the street made up only a part of the broad anti-authoritarian conjuncture of 1968, and not necessarily the most important one. Arguably more fundamental was a broad democratization of cultural production in which avant-garde artists and youthful appropriators and creators alike played a leading role. These cultural actors were no mere adjuncts to the student left, but agents of cultural-political change in their own right, and the anti-authoritarian (and in many cases explicitly anarchist) impulse that animated them much more closely resembled the ecumenical "spirit of '68" than the ideological rigidity of their Trotskyite and Maoist contemporaries. Likewise, cultural forms such as art, "happenings," style and fashion, comics, movies, and music were critically important to expressing the new youth sensibility of 1968 and disseminating it within society more broadly. Popular music and visual culture were among the most important of these categories, opening up new vistas of emancipatory possibility and fueling the development of the stylistic codes characteristic of sixties counterculture. This wide-ranging, interdisciplinary collection brings together scholars in history, cultural studies, art history, musicology and other disciplines to consider the symbiosis of the sonic and the visual in the counterculture of the 1960s.

Timothy Scott Brown is Associate Professor of History at Northeastern University. His previous books include West Germany in the Global Sixties: The Anti-Authoritarian Revolt, 1962-1978 (2013), Between the Avant-Garde and the Everyday: Subversive Politics in Europe, 1957 to the Present (2011), and Weimar Radicals: Nazis and Communists between Authenticity and Performance (2009).

Andrew Lison is an Andrew W. Mellon Graduate Fellow in the Department of Modern Culture and Media at Brown University.