scholarly journals The New Left. 1968 and Post Scriptum

Author(s):  
Michael Walzer

<p><strong>[La Nueva Izquierda. 1968 y post scriptum]</strong></p><p><strong>INTRODUCTORY NOTE</strong></p><p>The author, a well know theorist and activist of the civil rights movement and the movement against the Vietnam War, published the first part of this article from his own intervention and experience in 1968. There, he analyses the emergence of the New Left in the United States –and its global connection– through the social structure, the actors’ class background and their cultural configuration to account for the aspirations and limits that accompanied the middle class youth that lead this movement. The dilemmas that emerged between the racial, ethnic, social and economic axes that defined the actors framed the diverse social movements and throw light on the promises, scope and weaknesses that characterized them.<br />In the post scriptum, written explicitly for the Revista Mexicana de Ciencias Políticas y Sociales 50 years later with a great analytical and existential wisdom, the author inspects the way in which class profile, radicalization and separatism led to an isolation of the New Left from the natural support basis it should have reached. It evaluates the consequences of its integration either to the Old Left or to the system, as it manifests in the turn towards right that progressive and democratic sectors had in the United States. Furthermore, he underlines the way it influenced the inequality and vulnerability that prevails among the social class –the “precateriat”– the left should have represented, and projects itself in the current situation and in Trumpism. Without a doubt, the depth, realism and theoretical and practical vision of Michael Walzer have turned him into one of the representative figures of political theory. JBL</p><p><strong>NOTA INTRODUCTORIA</strong></p><p>El autor, teórico y activista del movimiento de los derechos civiles y de los movimientos contra la guerra en Vietnam, publicó la primera parte de este artículo a partir de su propia intervención y experiencia en 1968. En él, analiza la emergencia de la Nueva Izquierda en Estados Unidos –y su conexión global– a partir de la estructura social, la pertenencia de clase de los propios actores y su configuración cultural para dar cuenta de las aspiraciones y limitantes que acompañaron a la juventud de clase media que encabezó este movimiento. Los dilemas que emergieron entre la configuración étnico-racial, social y económica de los actores enmarcados en el movimiento por los derechos humanos arrojan luz sobre las promesas, alcances y debilidades que éste tuvo. En el post scriptum, escrito explícitamente para la Revista Mexicana de Ciencias Políticas y Sociales 50 años después, con una gran sabiduría analítica y existencial, el autor revisa el modo como el perfil de clase, la radicalización y el separatismo condujo a un aislamiento de la Nueva Izquierda de las naturales bases de apoyo que debió haber alcanzado. Evalúa las consecuencias ya sea de su integración a la Vieja Izquierda o bien al sistema, tal como se manifiestan en el viraje a la derecha que los sectores progresistas y democráticos tuvieron en Estados Unidos, y cómo se reflejó en la situación de desigualdad y vulnerabilidad prevaleciente en gran parte de las clases sociales que la izquierda debió representar, e incluso en el Trumpismo hoy. Sin duda, la profundidad, realismo y visión teórica y práctica de Michael Walzer lo han convertido en una de las figuras representativas de la teoría política. JBL</p><p> </p><p> </p>

Author(s):  
Elaine Allen Lechtreck

The introduction includes Bible verses cited by ministers to defend segregation and verses to oppose segregation. There are slices of the history of the United States, the Civil Rights Movement, and African American history. The southern states, where white ministers confronted segregation, are identified. The term “minister” is explained as well as the variety of labels given these ministers ranging from “Liberal,” Progressive,” “Neo-Orthodox,” “Evangelical Liberal,” “open conservative,” ‘Last Hurrah of the Social Gospel Movement” to “Trouble Maker,” “Traitor, “ “Atheist,” “Communist,” “N_____ Lover.” Rachel Henderlite, the only woman minister mentioned in the book, is identified. Synopses of the book’s seven chapters are included. Comments by historians David Chappell, Charles Reagan Wilson, Martin Luther King, Jr., Ernest Campbell, and Thomas Pettigrew are cited.


Author(s):  
Blake Scott Ball

Charles Schulz’s Peanuts was an unexpectedly political comic strip. While many people have come to identify Charlie Brown, Linus, Lucy, Peppermint Patty, and Snoopy with childhood and innocence, Peanuts regularly commented on the politics and social turmoil of Cold War America. From nuclear testing to the civil rights movement, from the Vietnam War to the feminist revolution, Peanuts was an unlikely medium for Americans of all stripes to debate the hopes and fears of the era. Charlie Brown’s America is the story of how the creation of one Midwestern man became one of the most influential pop-culture properties of the twentieth century and what its popularity reveals about the character of the United States.


2019 ◽  
Vol 11 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Philip Poe ◽  
Melody Fisher ◽  
Stephen Brandon ◽  
Darvelle Hutchins ◽  
Mark Goodman

In this article, we consider music as the praxis of ideology in the 1960s within the framework of Burke’s rhetoric of transformation. The 1960s were a period of cultural change in the United States and around the world—the civil rights movement, protests against the Vietnam War, challenges to communism in Eastern Europe, liberation politics around the world. The role of music as a unifying element among those people advocating change is well established in scholarship. We take that consideration of the role of music into a discussion of how music became the praxis of ideology, providing a place where millions of people could advocate for change and be part of the change by interacting with the music.


2009 ◽  
Vol 89 (4) ◽  
pp. 603-641 ◽  
Author(s):  
Karin Alejandra Rosemblatt

Abstract The anthropologist Oscar Lewis first used the term “culture of poverty” in a 1959 article on Mexico. Within months, the idea that the poor had a distinct culture became part of a passionate, decade-long, worldwide debate about poverty. Scholars, policy makers, and broader publics discussed what caused poverty and how to remedy it. How entrenched were the class and racial differences that led to poverty? How did those differences affect a country’s standing in the community of nations? This article tracks the concept of a culture of poverty as a way of probing the reciprocal, if unequal, connections between Mexico and the United States and their relation to national narratives and policy debates. It tracks how Lewis’s formulation of a culture of poverty drew on his training as an anthropologist in the United States, his extensive dialogue with Mexican intellectuals, and his fieldwork in Mexico. It also shows how Lewis and others reformulated the notion in response to intense public controversies in Mexico and Puerto Rico; the vehement U.S. discussions surrounding the War on Poverty and Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s report on the Negro family, and larger events such as the Cuban Revolution, the U.S. civil rights movement, decolonization, the Vietnam War, and second-wave feminism.


Author(s):  
Will Guzmán

This introductory chapter looks at the social and political contexts behind the intertwined histories of Dr. Lawrence Aaron Nixon and the American West. As a Black man in the United States, Lawrence Nixon was exposed to constant cultural conflict merely for being who he was: “unapologetically Black,” which in the minds of some was the antithesis of being an American. The chapter first shows how Nixon's life in El Paso, Texas, illustrates both the Black West's regional distinctiveness and its continuity with the legacy of African American history in the rest of the nation. Nixon's life is also an example of the diversity of the Black past and the existence of multiple African American historical traditions. Next, the chapter places Nixon's contributions to the civil rights movement in a broader context and demonstrates how it paved the way for future resistance.


Author(s):  
Jeffrey Scholes

Race, religion, and sports may seem like odd bedfellows, but, in fact, all three have been interacting with each other since the emergence of modern sports in the United States over a century ago. It was the sport of boxing that saw a black man become a champion at the height of the Jim Crow era and a baseball player who broke the color barrier two decades before the civil rights movement began. In this chapter, the role that religion has played in these and other instances where race (the African American race in particular) and sports have collided will be examined for its impact on the relationship between race and sports. The association of race, religion, and sports is not accidental. The chapter demonstrates that all three are co-constitutive of and dependent on each other for their meaning at these chosen junctures in American sports history.


Author(s):  
Yen Le Espiritu

Much of the early scholarship in Asian American studies sought to establish that Asian Americans have been crucial to the making of the US nation and thus deserve full inclusion into its polity. This emphasis on inclusion affirms the status of the United States as the ultimate protector and provider of human welfare, and narrates the Asian American subject by modern civil rights discourse. However, the comparative cases of Filipino immigrants and Vietnamese refugees show how Asian American racial formation has been determined not only by the social, economic, and political forces in the United States but also by US colonialism, imperialism, and wars in Asia.


Author(s):  
Natsu Taylor Saito

In the 1960s, global decolonization and the civil rights movement inspired hope for structural change in the United States, but more than fifty years later, racial disparities in income and wealth, education, employment, health, housing, and incarceration remain entrenched. In addition, we have seen a resurgence of overt White supremacy following the election of President Trump. This chapter considers the potential of movements like Black Lives Matter and the Standing Rock water protectors in light of the experiences of the Black Panther Party, the American Indian Movement, and other efforts at community empowerment in the “long sixties.”


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