Studio 1 & 2: Pressure Drop? What did the protests of ’68 achieve?

Professor Bush offers a critical reassessment of the events of 1968 and their aftermath.  He will look at May ’68 in Paris in a broader context of global protest and changing narratives of political analysis and authentic action.

He will give a brief account of his own experiences of the summer of 1968 at the Democratic Convention in Chicago, in the wake of the assassinations of Martin Luther King, Bobby Kennedy and Malcolm X.

Thirdly, Professor Bush will examine a late echo of the sixties in the early seventies sit-ins at Warwick University and the production of E.P. Thompson’s Warwick University Ltd.  Finally he will offer a few thoughts on the British radical poetry scene of the 1960’s and his organisation of poetry readings at Warwick University, which combined radical new British poets with distinguished younger and older American poets, including Muriel Rukeyser, whose life of radical protest was exemplary from the 1930’s to Vietnam.

He offers perhaps more questions than answers, but the aim will be neither to characterise the sixties as total political failure nor the cultural changes as a bourgeois carnival.

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