Book contents
- Frontmatter
- CONTENTS
- Acknowledgements
- List of Abbreviations
- List of Figures
- Map
- Introduction: The Culture and Politics of Space
- 1 The Culture Wars and the Sixties
- 2 Go West!
- 3 Free Space, Free Speech
- 4 SDS Goes West
- 5 Genesis of a Counterculture
- 6 The Contradictions of Cultural Radicalism
- 7 Liberated Territory
- 8 Revolutionary Dreams, Provincial Politics
- 9 Soulful Socialism and Felicitous Space
- Notes
- Works Cited
- Index
Introduction: The Culture and Politics of Space
- Frontmatter
- CONTENTS
- Acknowledgements
- List of Abbreviations
- List of Figures
- Map
- Introduction: The Culture and Politics of Space
- 1 The Culture Wars and the Sixties
- 2 Go West!
- 3 Free Space, Free Speech
- 4 SDS Goes West
- 5 Genesis of a Counterculture
- 6 The Contradictions of Cultural Radicalism
- 7 Liberated Territory
- 8 Revolutionary Dreams, Provincial Politics
- 9 Soulful Socialism and Felicitous Space
- Notes
- Works Cited
- Index
Summary
In 2011, a movement exploded on the American and international scene that resonated with some of the values, ideas and practices of 1960s radicalism. Occupy Wall Street began life as a dramatic advertisement in the magazine Adbusters, then the space of a private park near Wall Street was occupied and a movement was born. The connections between People's Park in Berkeley, 1969, and Zuccotti or Liberty Park, New York, 2012, are intriguing. Both developed into battles over public space and as Jeff Ferrell has argued ‘public space always becomes cultural space’. In Berkeley, People's Park spoke of the need for a new type of society and represented the culmination of a series of struggles that established the San Francisco Bay Area as the epicentre of dissent in the 1960s. It particularly highlighted the way that cultural radicalism had shaped political radicalism in the region. In New York, Liberty Park also reflected utopian dreams and democratic possibilities. Yet, at the time of writing, the Occupy movement seems to have lost momentum and one of its leading advocates has developed an interesting analysis of this. Arun Gupta argues that Occupy has lost that sense of space with which it began:
The real stumbling block for the Occupy movement is also the reason for its success: space, or now, the lack thereof. Understanding the significance of political space and Occupy's inability to recapture it reveals why the movement is having difficulty regaining traction.
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- Information
- Publisher: Pickering & ChattoFirst published in: 2014