The sixties were a time when anti-disciplinary politics blurred the boundaries between the political and the aesthetic, and, according to some critics, the time when the possibility for revolution died. In this book, first published in 1998, Stephens questions the frameworks which inform commonplace understandings of this period, arguing that the most distinctive forms of sixties protest are often marginalized or excluded from view. She looks at the problematic ways in which sixties radicalism has been narrativised, and critically evaluates the modernist and postmodern impulses that can be discerned in the anti-disciplinary protest of the time. Stephens develops a new theoretical framework for conceptualizing the relationship between the sixties and later political and theoretical developments. Drawing on broad-ranging, lively and often rare sources, this is a provocative contribution to contemporary social theory and cultural studies.

By outlining a novel concept of literary practice 'potentialism', this text shows how opening up literary possibilities enabled writers such as Allen Ginsberg, LeRoi Jones/Amiri Baraka, William S. Burroughs, Kathy Acker, and Lyn Hejinian to tackle matters of power and politics.

Recovering the art and lifestyle of the counterculture in the American West in the 1960s and '70s

'a provocative must-read text for an engaged public, offering a distinctive Australian take on corporate globalism, and grounding this in a robust theory of social change that emphasises material power and interests, along with symbolic power and ideology' James Goodman, University of Technology Sydney Social movements transformed Western societies in the 1960s and 1970s: feminism, black rights, the peace movement and gay liberation all radically altered how we think and how we live. What has happened to social movements since then? Can demonstrations and other forms of social activism still make a difference in Australia? Verity Burgmann argues that corporate globalisation has threatened or transformed established social movements, and sparked powerful new forms of social protest. She examines the impact of globalisation and neo-liberal government policies on the feminist and indigenous rights movements, showing how they have been affected by the politics of backlash after decades of success. She explores the way in which the environment movement, too, has been affected by rising corporate political influence. She also analyses the emergence of anti-capitalist and anti-corporate activism and the profound challenges posed by this newest of social movements to the state, to society in general and to the labour movement in particular. These important factors in a changing political landscape. This book reflects on the significant changes which has taken place since Power and Protest was published in 1993.

The non-violent protests of civil rights activists and anti-nuclear campaigners during the 1960s helped to redefine Western politics. But where did they come from? Sean Scalmer uncovers their history in an earlier generation's intense struggles to understand and emulate the activities of Mahatma Gandhi. He shows how Gandhi's non-violent protests were the subject of widespread discussion and debate in the USA and UK for several decades. Though at first misrepresented by Western newspapers, they were patiently described and clarified by a devoted group of cosmopolitan advocates. Small groups of Westerners experimented with Gandhian techniques in virtual anonymity and then, on the cusp of the 1960s, brought these methods to a wider audience. The swelling protests of later years increasingly abandoned the spirit of non-violence, and the central significance of Gandhi and his supporters has therefore been forgotten. This book recovers this tradition, charts its transformation, and ponders its abiding significance.

The essays in this collection make up the first study of “dropping out” of late state socialism in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union. From Leningrad intellectuals and Berlin squatters to Bosnian Muslim madrassa students and Romanian yogis, groups and individuals across the Eastern Bloc rejected mainstream socialist culture. In the process, multiple drop-out cultures were created, with their own spaces, music, values, style, slang, ideology and networks. Under socialism, this phenomenon was little-known outside the socialist sphere. Only very recently has it been possible to reconstruct it through archival work, oral histories and memoirs. Such a diverse set of subcultures demands a multi-disciplinary approach: the essays in this volume are written by historians, anthropologists and scholars of literature, cultural and gender studies. The history of these movements not only shows us a side of state socialist life that was barely known in the west. It also sheds new light on the demise and eventual collapse of late socialism, and raises important questions about the similarities and differences between Eastern and Western subcultures.

An exploration of the emergence of a new psychedelic spirituality in the work of Philip K. Dick, Terence McKenna, and Robert Anton Wilson. A study of the spiritual provocations to be found in the work of Philip K. Dick, Terence McKenna, and Robert Anton Wilson, High Weirdness charts the emergence of a new psychedelic spirituality that arose from the American counterculture of the 1970s. These three authors changed the way millions of readers thought, dreamed, and experienced reality—but how did their writings reflect, as well as shape, the seismic cultural shifts taking place in America? In High Weirdness, Erik Davis—America's leading scholar of high strangeness—examines the published and unpublished writings of these vital, iconoclastic thinkers, as well as their own life-changing mystical experiences. Davis explores the complex lattice of the strange that flowed through America's West Coast at a time of radical technological, political, and social upheaval to present a new theory of the weird as a viable mode for a renewed engagement with reality.