If you are organizing, participating in, fomenting or critiquing events in the coming year that are inspired by 1968 or relate in some way to its legacies, AREA Chicago wants to know about it.
AREA’s fall 2008 issue is on the theme of 1968/2008. We want to intervene critically in the discourse of 1968: to excavate forgotten histories, but also interrogate intergenerationality and the inheritance of political strategy, frameworks and imagination. To get a sense of where we might be going with this, visit the AREA 68 blog at: http://1968.areachicago.org/
“1968/2008 will be a hybrid cultural project gradually unfolding for one year on the occasion of 40 years passing since the “signpost” year of international political turmoil, social upheavel and the dramatic transformation of what we know as the left. Sponsored by the local research and culture publication AREA Chicago in order to explore the legacy of the late 1960s/early 1970s on contemporary cultural and political organizations in their city, the project also have other nodes outside of Chicago. It will take place in numerous places including events, publications, reading groups and a website. This will be a time for “critical commemoration” examining the legacy of the late 1960s on contemporary social movements, particularly in the United States.
This project will attempt to engage with social movement historians, liberals who went to college in the 1960s, old leftists that are still alive, those who organize and those who are organized, frothing and non-frothing leftists, self-identified revolutionaries, oral historians, the educators/parents/mentors of radical activists, new leftists who rejected the old left, new leftists who embraced the old left, baby boomers who are disappointed in today’s youth, youth who blame the baby boomers for everything, people who thought there was going to be a revolution, youngsters who want to learn from people with experiences, politicians who used to hate politicians, the children of liberal baby boomers, the children of militants, the artists who want to revisit counterculture, the people who made the 1960s counterculture cooler than the political ideas of the times, CEOs who were in the SDS, new Black Panthers and new SDSers, people who like what they know about the 1960s but didn’t live in them, people who were born in 1968, people who lost loved ones in political violence in the 1960s/70s, people who want to know where they are going after they know where they are from.”
As always, AREA’s focus will be Chicago, but we’d like to create a network of people in other places working on projects in a similar spirit. The AREA 68 blog will serve as a clearinghouse to circulate announcements, reflections, links, debates, and documentation. Based on proposals sent to AREA at areachicago@gmail.com by Feb. 15, we will invite a limited number of participants to co-author the blog. Others will be invited to send us links and other content for posting. Other forms of participation are possible: if you have something else in mind, please let us know. If you will be in Chicago in 2008, please let us know that too.
Proposals should be no more than 300 words including brief bio and description of projects(s). They can include documentation (image files, etc.) but the proposal should be comprehensible on its own.
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AREA Chicago Art/Research/Education/Activism is a publication and event series dedicated to researching, supporting and networking local social, political and cultural movements. For more information visit http://www.areachicago.org/
Please circulate to interested parties
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