Kerouac’s On the Road had a profound impact on the 1960s’ counterculture. This chapter shows how the ethos of On the Road joined with the ethos of the rock movement that was ushered in shortly after the assassination of President John F. Kennedy in November 1963 by the appearance of The Beatles on The Ed Sullivan Show in February 1964. In addition, the psychedelic rock movement, also inspired by The Beatles, and led by Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters, pointed to Kerouac’s On the Road as a clarion call of the 1960s’ countercultural zeitgeist. With unprecedented influence over the youth culture of their times, such rock artists as Bob Dylan, Janis Joplin, Jerry Garcia of The Grateful Dead, Jim Morrison of The Doors, among others pointed to On the Road as a seminal influence on their lives and art. Furthermore, the political wing of the counterculture, including Abbie Hoffman, also viewed On the Road as an inspiring text. This chapter explores the impact of On the Road on the counterculture, despite the novel’s often conservative message, and views it as a bookend to the 1960s’ counterculture.

This chapter outlines how the 1970s brought radical expression, new explorations of poetic persona, and increasing belief in the poet’s role to advocate for rights and freedoms. It argues that anthologies seeking to capture the zeitgeist failed to do so, sometimes due to using frameworks borrowed from North America that elided local diversity. The chapter asserts that small press culture constituted a provisional, heterogeneous commons that undid traditional definitions of authorship and form, and offered a space to air the previously taboo. It traces the turn to America as well as to popular culture, other media, and documentary. Through an examination of Michael Dransfield’s reception, it demonstrates how umbrella terms delimit complex individual poetics while demonstrating affiliations in Dransfield’s self-examination with contemporaries like Pam Brown, Nigel Roberts, and Vicki Viidkikas. The chapter also considers the impact of the first anthology of women’s poetry, Mother, I’m Rooted. It redresses the elision of its editor, Kate Jennings, from other anthologies and critical framings of the period, as well as the marginalisation of Kevin Gilbert.

Chapter 7 focuses on the 1970s, when anti-colonial movements sought to turn global hierarchies upside down. Their efforts moved from the US civil rights movement to expose the racism and sexism embedded in professional work, as in education, social work, and medicine. Teachers observed their ‘hidden curriculum’, which excluded those they long claimed to help. Lawyers noted their close alliance to capital and sought, for the less-powerful, alternative routes to legal service. Engineers, who up to this point claimed that they had literally built civilization, began to ask whether they had in fact condemned society to live in concrete boxes and breathe polluted air. Even accountants were not immune. The high and fluctuating inflation that characterized the end of the moral-economic order established after the Second World War produced a legitimation crisis that required, in Britain, a Royal Commission on something as fundamental to capitalism as the calculation of profit.

In North Korea, Latin American leftist intellectuals and political leaders were forced to come to grips with an extravagant personality cult centred around Kim Il Sung. Part of what made the North Korean model of socialism palatable to some in the 1960s, is that the Cuban Revolution had given new credence to the concept of the “maximum leader.” The New Left often romanticized charismatic leaders from the global South like Fidel, Kim, Mao, and Ho Chi Minh, even while being critical of the autocracy they perceived in the Soviet Union. Admirers of North Korea’s political system argued it reflected the needs of a society in rapid transition from colonial-feudal backwardness to socialist modernity, and that ideas such as “freedom” were subjective and culturally determined. Such narratives of historical and cultural relativism were, ironically, also common among those critical of the North Korean model. This chapter looks at the different ways the North Korean political system could be interpreted within the Latin American Left, with examples from the Dominican Republic, Costa Rica, Venezuela, and Chile.

Despite coordinated international protest, the United States continued to increase its involvement in Vietnam. The escalating war, an increasingly militant global political landscape, and a new conception of anti-imperialist struggle pushed thousands of radicals to escalate their activism beyond the ideological terrain. Black radicals in the United States argued that the best way to support national liberation struggles was to wage war inside the “belly of the beast.” Latin American revolutions like Che Guevara exhorted radicals across the globe to create “two, three, many Vietnams.” And Vietnamese revolutionaries publicly welcomed this sharp radicalization of antiwar engagement. Frustrated with the limits of earlier activism, radicals in France leapt at the opportunity. Coordinating with other anti-imperialists in the North Atlantic, they tried to translate the Vietnamese struggle into their own particular contexts, and their efforts eventually lit the fuse that set off the explosive events of May 1968. In this way, the Vietnam War made May ’68 possible. May itself, radicals thought, was nothing other than another front in the revolutionary wave led by Vietnam. And just as Vietnamese revolutionaries inspired the French, the events of May ’68 inspired radicals elsewhere, who in turn tried to translate May ’68 into their own political vernacular. By the end of the year, thousands of radicals across North America and Western Europe believed it was their internationalist duty to make war at home.

Chapter 2 reviews the hippie movement’s history and ideology. Using the flower children metaphor often used to describe the hippies, the review relates to four periods labeled as seeding (1945–1964), sprouting (1965–1966), growing (1967–1969), and blossoming and withering (1970–1973). The hippie ideology is described according to five dominant ethics: dope, sex, rock, community, and cultural opposition. This chapter also summarizes the literature exploring where all the hippies went and what legacy they contributed to the world.

The chapter positions the revolutionary African theorist Amílcar Cabral as part of a Tricontinental generation that believed coordinated, parallel liberation struggles would erase inequalities between Global North and South. A dedicated nationalist, he viewed socialism as a toolkit for evaluating and challenging the international system. His party, the African Party for the Independence of Guiné and Cabo Verde (PAIGC), combined armed revolt and social reconstruction in an attempt to erase the economic inequalities and racism central to Euro-American imperialism. As the PAIGC became enmeshed in diverse solidarity networks that sustained its war, Cabral refined his ideology to better explain his party’s position at the intersection of Third World anti-imperial traditions, international socialism, and Pan-Africanism. Identarian and ideological frictions hampered the movement, but PAIGC philosophy legitimized the creation of an inclusive revolutionary coalition and proved effective at building solidarity in North and South. As a result, Cabral became a leading political theorist of revolution and anti-imperialism, placing him in the foundational canon of the Tricontinental movement.

This essay sketches Brecht’s impact on the development of German Studies as a discipline in the United States, and then briefly comments on the contemporary understanding of what German Studies is and does in the US academy and what Brecht might have to do with that. In other words, this essay is intended neither as an overview of Brecht scholarship in the North American or German (East and West) academic contexts nor as review of Brecht in performance or performance studies. Rather, the essay questions what kind of notion of academic work the various incarnations and evocations of Brecht and Brechtian practice have authorized in the US.

Chapter 8 focuses on Wang Yuanhua, a Party scholar and celebrated initiator of the intellectual liberation and New Enlightenment movements of the 1980s. In the 1990s Wang was active in Party ideological debates as intellectuals rebounded from the repression after Tiananmen. Wang’s assessment of intellectual life in the Party comes out in his discussion of historical figures:

Du Yachuan (a conservative during the May Fourth era) and the famous late Qing reformers Kang Youwei and Liang Qichao. Writing inside China and under Party rule, Wang holds these historical examples up as contrasting models for intellectual integrity under authoritarian regimes. Wang’s own path from Christian schoolboy to Marxist revolutionary to moderate liberal offers a characteristic example of the winding path of Chinese intellectuals over the course of the 20th century. Wang’s formative years were at Tsinghua University in Peking, where his Japanese-educated father taught English. Having joined the Party in the 1930s, Wang fell from grace during the anti-Hu Feng campaign in 1955, and his refusal to implicate the disgraced writer as counterrevolutionary put Wang in the political doghouse for two decades. Yet he returned to Party service after Mao’s death, but became an advocate for thought liberation in the 1980s and for Chinese liberalism in the 1990s.

“The Ecological Alternative” examines the intersection of appeals to ecology and authenticity among the American New Left and its environmentalist affiliates. The chapter also considers how literary representations of this alliance dramatize its contradictions. Many student radicals, especially those receptive to Murray Bookchin’s philosophy of social ecology, sought to structure alternative social arrangements that would liberate the individual psyche, the institutions that repressed it, and the environment itself. However, Bookchin’s writing, like that of the New Left’s primary theoretical influences, drew substantially on a psychoanalytic narrative that, when grafted to ecology, framed the self prized so highly by student radicals as yet another repression – one that obscured the reality of ecological interconnection. Edward Abbey, especially, documented this subjective confusion in Desert Solitaire (1968). Far from uncritically celebrating nature’s purity, Abbey and other nature writers of the decade established a representational tension between self and ecosystem that would characterize postwar literary treatment of ecology.

“Cold Wars and Hot” situates the 1960s in Europe in the twin contexts of Third World decolonization struggles and the global Cold War, tracing its roots in the anti-fascist struggles of the postwar period and the anti-Stalinist rebellions of the 1950s. The latter, in Hungary and Poland especially, sought not a return to capitalism but a path forward to socialist workers’ democracy that, even if stillborn in the East, placed key items on the agenda for the European 1960s. Even in the face of the post-1945 persistence of fascist structures and ideas, meanwhile, key moments in European revolutionary history—above all the Spanish Civil War of the 1930s—continued to reverberate in the radical imagination of the 1960s. The chapter concludes with an examination of the emergence of an anti-Stalinist New Left, in Great Britain and elsewhere, which in the late 1950s and early 1960s laid the indispensable foundation for the student and countercultural rebellions of later in the decade.

This concluding chapter, which focuses on the work of Thomas Pynchon, returns us to the history of credit across the long twentieth century told in the book’s opening chapter. It argues that Dorothy from The Wizard of Oz functions as a recurring trope for the futility of the quest to discover what lies behind the money form in Pynchon’s work. The first section reads Gravity’s Rainbow and argues that it uses Dorothy from Victor Fleming’s 1939 film as a symbol of a compensatory fantasy. She embodies the false hope that one can return home, a hope that is associated in the novel with Tyrone Slothrop’s discovery that home is itself connected to the state’s violent complicity with the privatisation of money. Against the Day reprises this narrative but turns, instead, to the Dorothy of Baum’s 1900 novella as it seeks to uncover the alternative histories that Fleming’s cinematic adaptation obscures. Dorothy reappears as the daughters of the Traverse and Webb families in a complex narrative that allows Pynchon, finally, to critically explore the gendered language of both money and the gift that run throughout this work as a whole.