“This Quiet Revolution”

2019 ◽  
Vol 15 (3) ◽  
pp. 315-330
Author(s):  
Eli Meyerhoff
Keyword(s):  
San Francisco ◽  
Third World ◽  
Black Studies ◽  
Student Union ◽  
The Third ◽  
State College ◽  
Experimental College ◽  
History Of ◽  
Revolutionary Movements ◽  
The Third World

One of the most revolutionary movements in the history of US universities—the Third World students’ strike that shut down San Francisco (SF) State College for five months in 1968–69—had a key precursor in the Experimental College (EC), which supported student-organized courses, including the first Black studies courses, at SF State. The EC offers inspiration for creating infrastructures of radical imagination and study. The EC appropriated resources—including spaces, money, teachers, credits, and technologies—for studying within, against, and beyond the normal university. The EC facilitated courses with revolutionary content, and they fostered modes of study in these courses that were radically alternative to the education-based mode of study. Contributing my concept of “modes of study,” I offer guidance for revolutionary movements on the terrain of universities today. Through analysis of archival materials and interviews with organizers of the EC and Black Student Union, I found that the EC organizers’ potentials for supporting revolutionary study were limited by their romanticizing of education, which was coconstituted with subscriptions to modernist imaginaries. Rejecting the education-based mode of study as bound up with liberal-capitalist modernity/coloniality, organizers today can appropriate their universities’ resources for alternative modes of study and world-making.

Teaching and Researching the History of Sexual Politics at San Francisco State, 1969–1970

2021 ◽  
Vol 98 (4) ◽  
pp. 2-29
Author(s):  
Marc Stein
Keyword(s):  
San Francisco ◽  
Third World ◽  
Sexual Politics ◽  
History Teachers ◽  
Lgbt History ◽  
The Third ◽  
Collaborative Authorship ◽  
Lgbt Activism ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Third World

This essay summarizes the methods and results of a collaborative student-faculty research project on the history of sexual politics at San Francisco State University. The collaborators collected and analyzed 160 mainstream, alternative, student, and LGBT (lesbian, gay, bisexual, and trans) media stories. After describing the project parameters and process, the essay discusses six themes: (1) LGBT history; (2) the Third World Liberation Front strike; (3) feminist sexual politics; (4) the history of heterosexuality; (5) sex businesses, commerce, and entrepreneurship; and (6) sexual arts and culture. The conclusion discusses project ethics and collaborative authorship. The essay’s most significant contributions are pedagogical, providing a model for history teachers interested in working with their students on research skills, digital methodologies, and collaborative projects. The essay also makes original contributions to historical scholarship, most notably in relation to the Third World Liberation Front strike. More generally, the essay provides examples of the growing visibility of LGBT activism, the intersectional character of race, gender, and sexual politics, the complicated nature of gender and sexual politics in the “movement of movements,” the commercialization of sex, and the construction of normative and transgressive heterosexualities in this period.

“Solidarity is Something you can Hold in your Hand”

2022 ◽  
pp. 1-25
Author(s):  
Torkil Lauesen
Keyword(s):  
Third World ◽  
Detailed Account ◽  
Popular Front ◽  
Global Context ◽  
The Third ◽  
The Past ◽  
The Future ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Third World ◽  
Support Work

Abstract This article tells the story of an organization based in Copenhagen, Denmark, which supported the Liberation struggle in the Third World from 1969 until April 1989. It focus on the support to the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (pflp). The story is told in a historical and global context. The text explains the strategy and tactic behind the support-work. It explains how the different forms of solidarity work developed over two decades (for a more detailed account of the history of the group, see Kuhn, 2014). Finally, the article offers an evaluation of the past and a perspective on the future struggle for a socialist Palestine.

Revolutions Betrayed

2020 ◽  
pp. 105-117
Author(s):  
Daniel Chirot
Keyword(s):  
Soviet Union ◽  
Third World ◽  
Socialist Society ◽  
French Colonialism ◽  
The Third ◽  
Revolutionary Movements ◽  
The Third World

This chapter discusses Third Worldism and its failures. It presents the case of Algeria—a country central to Third Worldism. Its long, successful struggle against French colonialism and its aspiration to create a more just, economically developed socialist society were at the heart of what the Third World movement stood for. The country later fell to widespread corruption and later, violence, which is a case mirrored by other Third World nations discussed in this chapter. In one way or another, the Algerian story has been repeated for most of the Third World socialist or semisocialist revolutionary regimes, though these characteristics are not only limited to such regimes. The chapter shows that what began as truly reformist, idealistic revolutionary movements ultimately degenerated badly, and what is most disturbing about this is that they once held out real promise of something cleaner. To conclude, the chapter presents a final case as a warning: the story of Russia after the collapse of the Communist Soviet Union.

Wanted: A Comparative History of the Modern Mediterranean

2012 ◽  
Vol 46 (1) ◽  
pp. 47-53
Author(s):  
Edmund Burke
Keyword(s):  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Third World ◽  
Dominant Role ◽  
The West ◽  
The Third ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Mediterranean ◽  
The Third World

There is something seriously flawed about models of social change that posit the dominant role of in-built civilizational motors. While “the rise of the West” makes great ideology, it is poor history. Like Jared Diamond, I believe that we need to situate the fate of nations in a long-term ecohistorical context. Unlike Diamond, I believe that the ways (and the sequences) in which things happened mattered deeply to what came next. The Mediterranean is a particularly useful case in this light. No longer a center of progress after the sixteenth century, the decline of the Mediterranean is usually ascribed to its inherent cultural deficiencies. While the specific cultural infirmity varies with the historian (amoral familism, patron/clientalism, and religion are some of the favorites) its civilizationalist presuppositions are clear. In this respect the search for “what went wrong” typifies national histories across the region and prefigures the fate of the Third World.

Memories of a U.S. Political Prisoner

2016 ◽  
Vol 68 (6) ◽  
pp. 53
Author(s):  
David Gilbert
Keyword(s):  
Third World ◽  
World History ◽  
Political Prisoner ◽  
History Of ◽  
Revolutionary Movements ◽  
1960S And 1970S ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
The Third World ◽  
Che Guevara ◽  
The U.S

"We will fight from one generation to the next." In the 1960s and 1970s we anti-imperialists in the U.S. were inspired not only by that slogan from Vietnam but even more by how they lived it with their 2000-year history of defeating a series of mighty invaders. At the same time we felt that we just might be on the cusp of world revolution in our lifetimes. Vietnam's ability to stand up to and eventually defeat the most lethal military machine in world history was the spearhead. Dozens of revolutionary national liberation struggles were sweeping what was then called the "Third World," today referred to as the "global South." There was a strategy to win, as articulated by Che Guevara: to overextend and defeat the powerful imperial beast by creating "two, three, many Vietnams." A range of radical and even revolutionary movements erupted within the U.S. and also in Europe and Japan.… Tragically, the revolutionary potential that felt so palpable then has not been realized.… Today, fighting from one generation to the next takes on new relevance and intense urgency.Click here to purchase a PDF version of this article at the Monthly Review website.

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