New World Coming: The Sixties and Global Consciousness (review)

All of a sudden the 1960s have become a hot topic among Canadian historians. New World Coming joins other recent books on the sixties by Bryan Palmer, M. Athena Palaeologue (ed.), Dimitry Anastakis (ed.), James Pitslua, Sean Mills, and Dominique Clément, Lara Campbell, and Gregory Kealey (eds.). All seven books will have emerged within a three-year period. But this book is unlike the others. At 512 pages containing forty-three original articles, New World Coming is an immense project that attempts to engage with, well, everything. The editors promise the reader a book that explores the emergence of a ‘global consciousness’ in the 1960s. They suggest that challenges to dominant power structures during this period were conceptualized in a global context, and that political and cultural movements during this period were motivated by a common transnational purpose.

The book has impressive breadth. It includes articles from over a dozen countries around the world and emerging research from new scholars alongside autobiographical accounts. Scarcely a major theme is overlooked, gender and race being especially prominent themes. Instead of providing an in-depth account of any one topic (each article is approximately ten pages in length), the collection offers a taste of lived experiences from around the globe. The scope of the book is a testament to the editors’ success in drawing together a truly diverse array of scholars, from Marilisa Merolla’s account on rock ’n’ roll in Italy to John S. Saul’s piece on anti-apartheid struggles in South Africa. There is no reason why this book should be restricted to academics. It will undoubtedly appeal to a broad readership.

Still, something is missing. The editors’ brief introduction tells us little about how to conceptualize the ‘sixties,’ and far too many authors simply approach the concept as a chronological reference point. Only Gary Kinsmen (gay rights in Canada), Van Gosse (Black power in the United States), and Tity de Vries (Dutch politics) make an effort in the book to consider this question, and only briefly in each case. Alice Echols has written in the past about the ‘long sixties’ but says almost nothing about this concept in her article. Koyoko Sato claims that we cannot understand the Tokyo Olympiad and Japanese nationalism in the 1960s without exploring developments in the 1950s, but the idea is raised only in passing in the introduction. Moreover, the editors have done little to contextualize the collection or to link the articles together; in fact, none of the authors makes reference to any other contribution in this voluminous collection. The book thus suffers from a lack of coherence and unity. Most importantly, although as a whole the book hints at what the editors call a ‘global consciousness,’ it is inferred rather than demonstrated in the book. Molly Geidel’s piece on the American Peace Corps in Latin America, Edwin Martini’s essay on Agent Orange’s legacy in the United States and Vietnam, and Tobias Wofford’s contribution on the first World Festival of Negro Arts are among a dozen articles that genuinely place their study in a global context. Otherwise, the most of the articles focus on a specific country. The American contributors, in particular, are guilty of failing to look beyond their own borders.

The book is an excellent reader for anyone interested in modern history from a global perspective. However, it is unlikely to be a useful resource for specialists or students. The contributions are simply too thin. Several of them read more like editorials than genuine historical accounts and are so broad as to tell us nothing of any real substance. Sheila Rowbotham, for instance, promises to explore why a women’s movement appeared in Great Britain in 1969, yet she tells us little about the movement beyond her own lived experience. None of the articles provides a comparative or transnational account of women’s liberation, despite the fact that the movement...