1968 in the Americas: Impact, Legacies and Memory - an international conference

June 21-22 2018

Focusing on the experience of the Americas, and in light of the fiftieth anniversary of 1968, this conference analyses the impact, legacies and memories of that exceptional year. 1968 witnessed a number of dramatic events in the Americas: militant student activism in Mexico City, Kingston, Montreal, Rio de Janeiro and New York; violent protests against the Vietnam war and racial discrimination in the US; the ‘Rodney riots’ in Jamaica and the emergence of a Caribbean Black Power movement; feminist protests and the rise of women’s liberation; the election of Pierre Trudeau and the growth of Québec separatism in Canada; the assassinations of Martin Luther King and Bobby Kennedy, and the election of Richard Nixon in the US; the installation of the Government of the Revolutionary Armed Forces in Peru; and the Tlatelolco massacre in Mexico City on the eve of the 1968 Olympics, where US athletes Tommy Smith and John Carlos took the Black Power salute. 1968 also produced a number of cultural landmarks in the Americas, from the emergence of tropicalismo in Brazil, to the Black Writers Congress in Montreal, and the Cultural Congress in Havana, the latter bringing together such intellectual luminaries as C.L.R. James, Aimé Césaire, and Julio Cortázar.

In line with recent scholarship on ‘the global 1960s’, which has begun to emphasise more international and transnational perspectives on this tumultuous era, the conference seeks to understand how global events were refracted locally in the Americas, and how events in the Americas reverberated outside and within the region. How, for example, were events in Paris, Prague or Berlin received in Latin America? How did West Indian student protests in Montreal affect events in the Caribbean? What political and cultural circuits connected the Americas’ 1968? In seeking to understand the local dynamics and long-term repercussions and legacies of this era, the conference also asks, what can the experience of the Americas contribute to an understanding of a ‘global 1968’? Does this moment of protest and reaction deserve its mythologization as a watershed year? How has 1968 been remembered and commemorated in the Americas?

Venue: UCL Institute of the Americas, 51 Gordon Square, London WC1H 0PN

Consult the conference programme here

For members of the public with an interest in these themes we have a limited number of free places. You are cordially invited to register here.

The organisers would like to acknowledge the generous support of their sponsors: UCL Institute of the Americas, the UCL Department of History (Commonwealth Fund),  Society for Latin American Studies (SLAS), the London Conference on Canadian Studies (LCCS - which provides the editorial board for the London Journal of Canadian Studies) and the Canada-UK Foundation.