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This book excavates forgotten histories of solidarity which were vital to radical political imaginaries during the ‘long sixties’. It decentres the conventional Western focus of this critical historical moment by foregrounding transnational solidarity with, and across, anticolonial and anti-imperialist liberation struggles. It traces the ways in which solidarity was conceived, imagined and enacted in the border-crossings – of nation, race and class identifications – of grassroots activists.
Exiled revolutionaries in Uruguay, postcolonial migrants in Britain, and Greek communist refugees in East Germany campaigned for their respective causes from afar while identifying and linking up with liberation struggles in Vietnam and the Gulf and with civil rights movements elsewhere. Meanwhile, Arab migrants in France, Pakistani volunteers and Iraqi artists found a myriad of ways to express solidarity with the Palestinian cause. Neglected archives also reveal Tricontinental Cuban-based genealogies of artistic militancy, as well as stories of anticolonial activist networks and meetings in North America, Italy, the Netherlands and Sudan, forging connections with those freedom fighters attempting to overthrow Portuguese colonial rule in Africa. These entwined routes of the 1960s chart a complex map of transnational political recognition and radical interconnections.
Bringing together original research with contributions from veteran activists and artists, this interdisciplinary volume explores how transnational solidarity was expressed in and carried through the itineraries of migrants and revolutionaries, film and print cultures, art and sport, political campaigns and armed struggle. It presents a novel perspective on radical politics of the global sixties which remains crucial to understanding anti-racist solidarity today.
Chapter 4 addresses the changing tenor of homosocial relationships within monastic and convent female homosocial spaces as a move from the formal to the relational. Women’s experiences of religious life are analysed to understand how relationships were understood and lived. The first section considers the ‘common life’, communal ways of inhabiting the social spaces of the convent that held religious life together. As the horarium that regulated the religious day was altered, the permission-centred model of religious life became one that allowed for personal responsibility. The formal structures of the ‘common life’ provided a unity that was now questioned and relationships grounded in formerly rigid structures were renegotiated. The second section addresses the complex, relational nature of these shifts and questions the language of generations used to identify those for and against change. The convent, often imagined as a conservative site of religious piety, became a place of radical activism and generational dissonance when a discourse of personal and shared responsibility challenged matriarchal social hierarchies.
The nun in the modern world and the modern world inside the convent is the subject of Chapter 5. Some considered adaptations to a secular age a dangerous move towards religious secularisation. Others saw this as a necessary antidote to the evils of modernity. This engagement with the world, faintly visible in archival sources from the 1940s, quickened with the publication of council documents Perfectae Caritatis (1965) and Lumen Gentium (1964), which emphasised (or so it seemed) a radical activism embedded in a secular world. The acceptability of engaging with the modern world on its own terms in its own language exemplifies this new relationship with modernity. By the 1960s and 1970s, the questioning of institutional barriers to ministry and bolstering of individual autonomy was reflective of the larger 1960s mentality that emphasised individual expression, links between people and the removal of boundaries. Becoming part of the world was a response to both religious and secular social movements. For many sisters and nuns, it was not a sudden thrust into the world; but a gradual shift. It was not always a welcome shift when it disrupted patterns of living and beliefs about the sacred/secular divide.
The success of the Stop the Seventy Tour Committee (STST) in halting the 1970 tour of England by a white South African cricket team represented a remarkable victory over racism in general and the apartheid nature of South African sport in particular.  The STST had formed in 1969 and was the catalyst helping to generate an inspiring mass grassroots movement of international solidarity which included mass non-violent civil disobedience and militant direct action on a scale in the world of sport previously unseen in Britain. Focused mainly on the protests against the South African rugby union tour, it was a campaign in defiance of police brutality and violent racist intimidation which involved over 50,000 people.  The question of apartheid South Africa had helped politicise and radicalise a generation of young activists in Britain. These young activists then, in turn, amid the wider revolutionary tumult of ’68 and workers and student protest internationally, helped transform a campaign based on a strategy of ‘respectability’ and appeals to ideas of ‘fair play’ by elite figures in the world of British politics, sport and civil society into a mass grassroots movement that inspired further anti-apartheid activism internationally. This chapter recovers some of what David Featherstone has called ‘the hidden histories and geographies of internationalism’ in relation to the campaigns around the politics of South African sport in 1960s Britain to situate the interconnections between these and wider radical activism in this tumultuous period.
English radicalism has been a deep-rooted but minority tradition in the political culture since at least the seventeenth century. The central aim of this book is to examine, in historical and political context, a range of key events and individuals that exemplify English radicalism in the twentieth century. This analysis is preceded by defining precisely what has constituted this tradition; and by the main outline of the development of the tradition from the Civil War to the end of the nineteenth century. Three of the main currents of English radicalism in the twentieth century have been the labour movement, the women’s movement and the peace movement. These are discussed in some detail, as a framework for the detailed consideration of ten key representative figures of the tradition in the twentieth century: Bertrand Russell, Sylvia Pankhurst, Ellen Wilkinson, George Orwell, E.P. Thompson, Michael Foot, Joan Maynard, Stuart Hall, Tony Benn and Nicolas Walter. The question of ‘agency’ – of how to bring about radical change in a predominantly conservative society and culture – has been a fundamental issue for English radicals. It is argued that, in the twentieth century, many of the important achievements in progressive politics have taken place in and through extra-parliamentary movements, as well as through formal political parties and organisations – the Labour Party and other socialist organisations – and on occasion, through libertarian and anarchist politics. The final chapter considers the continuing relevance of this political tradition in the early twenty-first century, and reviews its challenges and prospects.
The first collection of its kind, Chartist Drama makes available four plays written or performed by members of the Chartist movement of the 1840s. Emerging from the lively counter-culture of this protest campaign for democratic rights, these plays challenged cultural as well as political hierarchies by adapting such recognisable genres as melodrama, history plays, and tragedy for performance in radically new settings. A communal, public, and embodied art form, drama was linked for the Chartists with other kinds of political performance: the oratory of the mass platform, festival-like outdoor meetings, and the elaborate street theatre of protest marches. Plays that Chartists wrote or staged advanced new interpretations of British history and criticised aspects of the contemporary world. And Chartist drama intervened in fierce strategic arguments within the movement. Most notably, poet-activist John Watkins’s John Frost, which dramatises the gripping events of the Newport rising of 1839, in which twenty-two Chartists lost their lives, defends the rebellion and the Chartist recourse to violence as a means for the movement to achieve its aims. The volume’s appendices document over one hundred Chartist dramatic performances, staged by activists in local Chartist associations or at professional benefits at some of London’s largest working-class theatres. Gregory Vargo’s introduction and notes elucidate the previously unexplored world of Chartist dramatic culture, a context that promises to reshape what we know about early Victorian popular politics and theatre.
and political strategy. There was once a link between critical theory and radical activism. This needs to be rebuilt. As I have presented throughout Critical Theory and Social Pathology , contemporary critical theory has lost relevance as it now fails to offer a meaningful confrontation with organised power. I have argued that this stems from the monistic
this meaning. Throughout the war, members of the public, the press and military authorities drew frequent parallels between the pre-war suffrage campaign and the Corps, noting continuities in their leadership, objectives and strategies, and engaging in heated debates about the challenge which they posed to existing boundaries of gender and class.7 Despite contemporary opinions, historical scholarship has portrayed the actions of the Corps as the opposite of radical activism. In the last four decades, historians of women and gender have overturned previous
of soup, to avoid being arrested by the police. The water fight, laughter, and arrests that followed serve as a powerful reminder that people often engage in radical activism because they have fun doing so. This all said, the concept of personalism allows for these groups to provide respect and love for individuals while acknowledging and working against oppressive and destructive institutions. It also provides the foundation for a deep politics of solidarity and affinity to develop between the homeless and non-homeless activists in groups like Food Not Bombs. What
as the government attempted to remove the protestors. The Tent Embassy was a widely publicised and highly symbolic protest that crystallised the developing methods and goals of Indigenous activism and shaped its future.34 The more radical activism espoused by Foley and his colleagues represented growing dissatisfaction with methods of advocacy that politely sought a place for Indigenous peoples within broader Australian society.35 Demonstrating this, the embassy protestors emphasised the injustice of European colonisation, genocide and dispossession, arguing that