1st Edition
Generations of Social Movements The Left and Historical Memory in the USA and France
French political culture has long been seen as a model of leftist militancy, while the left in the United States is often perceived in terms of organizational discontinuity. Yet, the crisis of social democracy today suggests that at a time when the archetypal European welfare state is in danger, critics and citizens interested in understanding or reviving progressive politics are invited to consider the United States, where modes of creative activism recurrently demonstrate potentialities for a renewed leftist culture. Using a transatlantic perspective, this volume identifies activist influence through the designation or rejection of specific intellectual and militant figures across generations, and it examines various narrative modes used by militants to write their own history.
Introduction
Ambre Ivol & Hélène Le Dantec-Lowry
Part I The End of History? From the Fall of Communism to the Resurgence of Militancy
Chapter 1 Blind Spots of the American Left. 1960s to the Present
Stanley Aronowitz with James Cohen
Chapter 2 Memory and Amnesia in the Occupy Wall Street Movement
Jean-Baptiste Velut
Chapter 3 The Decline of the Communist Idea in a French Union (the CGT), a Sociological Case Study, 1945-2000
Guy Groux
Part II. Reassessing Generations: Designated and Forgotten Heirs in Black and White
Chapter 4 Black Radical Thought Over Time: from Marxist Traditions to the Hip Hop Generation
Manning Marable
Chapter 5 Intellectual Origins of the New Left: the Legacy of the "Lyrical Left"
A. Ollivier-Melios
Chapter 6 Radical Voices of the Silent 1950s
Soraya Guenifi
Chapter 7 Rebel Apart: Saul Alinsky and the Troubled Memory of the New Left
Andrew Diamond
Part III Militant Narrative Modes: the Radical Edge of Leftist Memoirs
Chapter 8 Remembrances of Political Things Past: Memoirs of Gay Militancy as Militant Memoirs
Guillaume Marche
Chapter 9 The Sixties Revisited: Tom Hayden's Retrospective Eye
Hélène Christol
Chapter 10 From North to South in the Sixties: A Black Militant's Recollections
John Brown Childs
Chapter 11 Activist Writings: Public Memory and Militant History in Alternative libertaire, a French Anarchist Organization
Irène Pereira
Biography
A specialist of African American and women's history, HélèneLe Dantec-Lowry is Professor of American Civilization at the Université Sorbonne Nouvelle in Paris, where she directs the Center for Research on North America.
Ambre Ivol is Associate Professor of US Civilization at the University of Nantes. Her research interests include Afro-American history, political history, and the study of intellectual generations. She is currently editing a Howard Zinn Reader (Agone, 2014).
“This important work interrogates the history of the Left in vital ways, bringing an abundance of fresh insight into developments that have remained as mysterious to activists as to outsiders. The comparisons and contrasts of the US and French Left, one seemingly collapsed by 1960 and the other still dominated by an Old Left presence, offer new ways of seeing developments since. The crisis of Ferguson, Missouri, prompting protests across a nation but without any seeming coordination or means of continuity, alone suggests how badly this volume is needed.”
—Paul Buhle, author of Marxism in the United States, coeditor of the Encyclopedia of the
American Left