Building the Radical Identity

«Building the Radical Identity meticulously weaves a tapestry portraying the mutual impact of magazines, publishing houses and movements on three continents during the Global Sixties. By focusing on transnational relationships of theory and practice, the authors demonstrate that the New Left was much more than spontaneously generated popular insurgencies, that the international revolutionary movement had well developed theoretical roots and visions, and that its impact went far beyond temporal boundaries. The authors transform the New Left's quest to radically reconstruct all aspects of social and political life from historical fact to future promise. Unafraid neither to reexamine violent opposition to reactionary regimes nor to subject the1960s corpus of ideas to critical analysis, this book is must reading for revolutionaries today.» (George Katsiaficas, author of The Global Imagination of 1968, Asia’s Unknown Uprisings, and coeditor with Kathleen Cleaver of Liberation, Imagination and the Black Panther Party.)

«At a time when, across the world, economic and political crises are driving new generations to seek out new radical ideas, but also even to reconsider some older radicalisms, this book’s appearance is highly pertinent, reminding us of the global impact of the New Left in the 1960s and 1970s, i.e., a new way of thinking which posed an intellectual and ideological challenge to the sterile interpretations offered by both social democracy and Soviet-style communism. The collection brings us several eloquent examples of the force of that challenge, in particular in the Third World, where it contributed profoundly to shaping new definitions and self-definitions of the postcolonial world, including the genesis of today’s notion of the Global South. The several authors, experts in their particular fields, combine to give us a rich and revealing picture of the wide range of thinking characterising what was then a complex phenomenon.» (Antoni Kapcia, Emeritus Professor at the University of Nottingham and author of Cuba: Island of Dreams and Cuba in Revolution: A History Since the Fifties.)

«For those seeking to understand the complex history of the Global Sixties, this collection will be indispensable. Radical journals with Tricontinental and North/South readerships were the main transmission belts of the New Left, and they are examined here with great assiduity.» (Van Gosse, Professor of History at Franklin & Marshall College and author of Rethinking the New Left. An Interpretative History.)