Introduction to a special issue of Intervetnions on May ’68

What is it about?

A good half-century after the events, May ’68 is still viewed as a generational countercultural revolt. Granted, this Cold-War notion was rejected after 1989 from positions as diverse as those of Braudelian world-systems analysis and Rancièrian theory of political subjectivation. Moreover, both of these approaches demythologized the Cold-War May by expanding the spatio-temporal perspective. Yet such a contextualization of the events enables us not only to replace the counterculture with economy or politics, but also to conceptualize it. With the counterculture no longer isolated in space from culture in general, no longer separated in time from the overall conjuncture condensed by May, we can look at the long sixties beyond 1968, and at 1968 beyond France; we can read the world movement with world literature; and we can resist the period’s obsession with the New (from the New Left to the New Philosophers) to see that the real aesthetic and conceptual innovations could only have come from anti- and postcolonial discourses. These are the main goals of this cluster of essays on May ’68.

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