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The Sixties occupy a prominent place in popular culture and scholarship as an era of global upheavals, including the Civil Rights Movement, de-colonization, radical social movements, student and youth protests, and the Vietnam War. This pioneering book explores the seemingly isolated Eastern bloc and a non-capitalist context, demonstrating the impact of those global upheavals on young people in Poland in the form of international youth culture, protest movements, and counterculture.
List of contents
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction: Poland and the Global Sixties
- Chapter 1: The Polish Thaw: Youth Carnival, Domestic Revolution, and Cross-Border Encounters
- Chapter 2: Youth as Modernity: Envisioning Young People after the Thaw
- Chapter 3: Window to the World: Youth Magazines and the Politics of Apolitics
- Chapter 4: Bohemians and Discontents: The Making of a Student Community
- Chapter 5: Tensions of Transnationalism: Youth Rebellion, State Backlash, and 1968
- Chapter 6: Counterculture: Hippies, Artists, and Other Subversives
- Chapter 7: The World in the Village: Rural Rebels in Search of Modernity
- Chapter 8: Domesticating the Sixties: Youth Culture, Globalization, and Consumer Socialism in the 1970s
- Conclusion: Imagining the World After the Sixties
- Notes
- Selected Bibliography
- Index
About the author
Malgorzata Fidelis is Associate Professor of History at the University of Illinois at Chicago. She is the author of Women, Communism, and Industrialization in Postwar Poland.
Summary
The Global Sixties are well known as a period of non-conformist lifestyles, experimentation with consumer products and technology, counterculture, and leftist politics. While the period has been well studied in the West and increasingly researched for the Global South, young people in the "Second World" too were active participants in these movements. The Iron Curtain was hardly a barrier against outside influences, and young people from students and hippies to mainstream youth in miniskirts and blue jeans saw themselves as part of the global community of like-minded people as well as citizens of Eastern Bloc countries.
Drawing on Polish youth magazines, rural people's diaries, sex education manuals, and personal testimonies, Malgorzata Fidelis follows jazz lovers, university students, hippies, and young rural rebels. Fidelis colorfully narrates their everyday engagement with a dynamically changing world, from popular media and consumption to counterculture and protest movements. She delineates their anti-authoritarian solidarities and competing visions of transnationalism, with the West as well as the ruling communist regime. Even as youth demonstrations were violently suppressed, Fidelis shows, youth culture was not. By the early 1970s, the state incorporated elements of Sixties culture into their official vision of socialist modernity.
From the perspective of youth, Malgorzata Fidelis argues, the post-1989 transition in Poland from communism to liberal democracy, often dubbed as "the return to Europe," was less of a breakthrough and more of a continuation of trends in which they participated. Indeed, they had already created new modes of self-expression and cultural spaces in which ideas of alternative social and political organization became imaginable.
Additional text
The lessons provided by Fidelis's book are extremely important.
