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This special issue of boundary 2 revisits the 1960s through a global and multidisciplinary lens. It treats the decade as a global historical event, comprising decolonization, liberation, revolution, and movements against various establishments. Engaging questions of history and temporality, this issue illustrates that continued exploration and consideration of the 1960s around the world are crucial to a critical engagement with the present.Contributors to this issue represent a wide range of disciplines, from Latin American studies and sociology to political theory and literary criticism. They bring a global perspective to the social and political legacy of the 1960s, touching on the Caribbean, Latin America, the former USSR, China, and France, as well as the United States. One contributor presents a reexamination of Latin American armed struggles in the 1960s that foregrounds the relatively positive influence of these struggles on present-day Latin American society and politics. Another contributor translates a seminal essay on Jos? Mart? written by one of Cuba’s foremost intellectuals in the mid-1960s, when the course of the Cuban revolution was still uncertain. Yet another contributor considers the forces that have sought to neutralize the struggles and negate the gains of the African American liberation movement in the 1960s American South.Contributors. John Beverley, Anthony Bogues, Christopher Connery, Roberto Fern?ndez Retamar, Wlad Godzich, Boris Kagarlitsky, Nina Power, Hortense Spillers, Silvia D. Spitta, Alberto Toscano
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Introduction: The Still Vacillating Equilibrium of the World Christopher Connery and Hortense J. Spillers Roberto Retamar began his work on Jose Martí—appearing here for the first time in English—in the middle of the revolutionary sixties, at a time when the course and character of the Cuban Revolution were still difficult to discern. Retamar, like Fidel Castro, turned to Martí to find language and meaning not only for the revolution, but for the evolving character of Cuban socialism and for Cuba’s place in the world revolutionary upheavals of that time. In turning to a poet, thinker, and revolutionary who had died in an 1895 battle, before Cuban independence had been won, Retamar and Castro were signaling the deeply rooted national-liberationist character of the Cuban Revolution, and the capacity of a national liberation movement to have universal political import—in “our America” and beyond. They were also reminding us that interventions into “the still vacillating equilibrium of the world”—Martí’s words—will demand new and distinctive temporalities, new histories. We would like to thank Paul Bové and the editors of boundary 2 for their encouragement and support. Special thanks go to John Beverley, sixties man, not only for his work as author, editor, translator, and facilitator for this issue, but for an exemplary and inspiring career of committed, critical, and self-critical scholarship. boundary 2 36:1 (2009) DOI 10.1215/01903659-2008-020 © 2009 by Duke University Press boundary 2 / Spring 2009 This as yet irresolvable problem of temporality and history is foregrounded in many of the essays here. Was there a world sixties? Christopher Connery’s essay follows from that premise, but also registers that the claim of a world sixties is a political, and not merely historiographical, act. This problem of period identity is registered most forcefully in Wlad Godzich’s essay, for the question of Poland puts us squarely within the historical problem of synchronicity. Where and when is Poland? The uprising of 1968 was, in addition to its political eventfulness, an act of historical sense making, giving narrative sense not only to the struggles of the midfifties, but to the solidarity movement as well. The sixties presents a challenge to a host of temporalities,