Rethinking Radical Scotland

Ewan Gibbs (Organiser)

Activity: Participating in or organising an event › Participation in workshop, seminar, course

Description

Period	23 May 2018
Event type	Conference
Location	Paisley, United KingdomShow on map
Degree of Recognition	National

Keywords

May 68
1968
heritage
radicalism
activism
culture
scotland
narrative

Documents & Links

An event hosted by the Scottish Critical Heritage collective at UWS Paisley. In May 1968, student protests in Paris escalated into an explosion of unrest. Strikes, marches and occupations spread quickly throughout France. Across the world, similar upheavals preceded and followed the Parisian events. These took different forms and trajectories but each posed a radical and left-wing challenge to the established order. In most accounts of the era, ‘1968’, ‘Paris 1968’ or ‘May 1968’ are not only discussed as a specific year, place or month in history. Avishek Ganguly describes ’68 as “a synecdoche, a rhetorical figure that may be understood as a placeholder for all the diverse social and political movements taking place at that time around the world.”Recent interpretations have made this synecdochal quality more explicit, referring to ‘les années 68’ (‘the ‘68 years’) and seeking to “de-centre” their significance. From this vantage point of historical and geographical de-centring, we can see that the ‘68 years were not simply a set of political events, but a pivotal historical moment in which a far broader set of social and cultural transformations took political form. Scotland has its own version of the ‘68 myth: it didn’t happen here. Despite the equally powerful story of ‘radical Scotland,’ the country seems to have little claim to a place in the global pantheon of the ‘68 years. “Europe has forgotten you. What are you? You are a silence,” wrote Iain Crichton Smith in his poem ‘Scotland’, published in August that year. Yet in the fifty years since May ‘68, historians, literary scholars and social scientists have since shown Scotland to have undergone the same extraordinary set of transformations during the 1960s and ‘70s, in politics, religion, economics, social structure and culture, which underpinned political radicalism elsewhere. This one-day workshop, organised by Scottish Critical Heritage, will bring together a range of scholars and cultural practitioners to explore how, five decades on, we can reinterpret Scotland’s experience of the ‘68 years in the context of the broader social and cultural transformations which have given ‘68 its mythic, memorialised quality.