Overview

During May 1968, students and workers in France united in the biggest strike and the largest mass movement in French history. Protesting capitalism, American imperialism and Gaullism, nine million people from all walks of life, from shipbuilders to department store clerks, stopped working. The nation was paralyzed - no sector of the workplace was unaffected; no region, city or village was untouched. Yet, just thirty years later, the mainstream image of May '68 in France has become that of a mellow youth revolt, a cultural transformation stripped of its violence and profound sociopolitical implications. Kristin Ross shows how the current memory of May '68 came to serve a political agenda antithetical to the movement's aspirations. She examines the roles played by sociologists, repentant ex-student leaders, and the mainstream media in giving what was a political event a predominantly cultural and ethical meaning. Recovering the political language of May '68 through the tracts, pamphlets and documentary film footage of the era, Ross reveals how the original movement, concerned above all with the question of equality, gained a new and counterfeit history, one that erased police violence and the deaths of participants, removed workers from the picture, and eliminated all traces of anti-Americanism, anti-imperialism and the influences of Algeria and Vietnam. ""May '68 and Its Afterlives"" is especially timely given the rise of a new mass political movement opposing global capitalism, from labour strikes and anti-McDonald's protests in France to the demonstrations against the World Trade Organization in Seattle.

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9780226727974

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Reviews

May '68 and Its Afterlives dismantles every cliche we have about the uprisings in Paris. But in a deeper sense, it is about what has been made of May. Kristin Ross is, to my knowledge, the first person working either here or in France to take on the complexity of thirty years of ideological discourse about May '68. We can't underestimate the importance of this book, not just for studying France, but for understanding political experience anywhere in the world. - Alice Kaplan, author of The Collaborator: The Trial and Execution of Robert Brasillach

"""May '68 and Its Afterlives dismantles every cliche we have about the uprisings in Paris. But in a deeper sense, it is about what has been made of May. Kristin Ross is, to my knowledge, the first person working either here or in France to take on the complexity of thirty years of ideological discourse about May '68. We can't underestimate the importance of this book, not just for studying France, but for understanding political experience anywhere in the world."" - Alice Kaplan, author of The Collaborator: The Trial and Execution of Robert Brasillach"

Author Information

Kristin Ross is professor of comparative literature at New York University. She is the author of The Emergence of Social Space: Rimbaud and the Paris Commune and Fast Cars, Clean Bodies: Decolonization and the Reordering of French Culture, the latter of which received a Critic's Choice Award and the Laurence Wylie Prize in French Cultural Studies from the Association for French Cultural Studies.

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