Undergraduate Honors Seminar | The Lost Decade: Reading the Radicalism of the 1970s in a Global Context
The University of New Mexico | Spring 2013
Honors 402.004 | Tuesday/Thursday 12:30 p.m. – 1:45 p.m. | SHC 12
Instructor | Andrew Ascherl
Office Hours | Tuesday 9:30 a.m. - 12:00 p.m. and by appointment | SHC 17B email | aascherl@unm.edu
Seminar Description
Frequently overshadowed by the 1960s with its explosion of cultural experimentation and social movements, our collective memory of radicalism in the 1970s tends toward haziness or even outright oblivion. Even more frequently, reflections on the Seventies mark the decade as the time of the resurgence of conservatism and the end of the creativity and excesses of the 1960s. Examined from a different, more global perspective, however, this “forgotten” decade can be seen to have produced an intensification of numerous forms of political, social, and cultural innovation which began in the Sixties but continue to impact us today. This seminar proposes to read a variety of texts — ranging from memoirs and autobiographies to novels, from theoretical reflections to documentary and narrative films — with the intention of exploring the various ways radical thought, culture, and politics of the Seventies have been recorded and framed. Further, rather than focusing on the losses and limits of radical movements of the decade, the seminar will provide the opportunity to ask what contemporary culture and politics can learn from the “explosion of limits” effectuated by 1970s radicalism.
Seminar Requirements
Attendance
Participation (including provocations, email questions, contributions to the seminar blog, short response papers, and weekly participation in the seminar)
Mid-Semester Paper (7-8 pages)
Final Research Paper (15 pages)
10%
35%
20%
35%
Required Texts (available at UNM Bookstore unless otherwise noted):
Nanni Balestrini,
Jean Genet,
Assata Shakur,
Selected shorter texts available on the seminar blog.
Prisoner of Love
David Gilbert,
Leyla Khaled,
Rachel Kushner,
The Unseen
Press, 2012).
, trans. Liz Heron (London: Verso, 2012).
, trans. Barbara Bray (New York: NYRB Classics, 2003).
Love and Struggle: My Life in SDS, the Weather Underground, and Beyond
My People Shall Live: Autobiography of a Revolutionary
The Flamethrowers: A Novel
Assata: An Autobiography
(Toronto: NC Press, 1975).*
(New York: Scribner, 2013).
(Chicago: Lawrence Hill Books, 1987).
(Oakland: PM
* Khaled’s memoir is long out of print, so I will provide a scan of this text on the seminar blog.
Films (available to view on Netflix streaming, You Tube, or on reserve at the Fine Arts Library. NB: It may be necessary for you to subscribe to Netflix for this course, as two of the films are, to my knowledge only available there):
Carlos (dir. Olivier Assayas, 2010).
Crass: There is No Authority But Yourself (2006, dir. Alexander Oey).
Germany in Autumn (dir. Rainer Werner Fassbinder, et al., 1978).
Leila Khaled: Hijacker (dir. Lina Makboul, 2006).
Style Wars (dir. Henry Chalfant, 1983).
The Warriors (dir. Walter Hill, 1979).
The Weather Underground (dir. Sam Green and Bill Siegel, 2002).
United Red Army (dir. Kōji Wakamatsu, 2007).

Readings
Students must attend all classes and read all required readings. Readings will be assigned each week, according to the schedule of classes, from one or more of the course texts. The readings listed for each respective seminar meeting should be completed prior to the day for which it is assigned. Because many of the readings include themes we can think about critically and theoretically, we will spend a significant amount of each class period discussing the texts.
NB: I have made certain texts available on the seminar blog as pdfs, and they are denoted on the schedule below with an asterisk (*). It is your responsibility to download, print out, and read all required texts before the seminar meeting in which they are to be discussed.
> > Note on assigned films: Throughout the semester I have assigned some films for you to view. I have placed as many of the films as are available in hard copy on reserve to view in the Fine Arts Library (4 th floor of George Pearl Hall). The DVDs may not leave the library, but you can check them out for two hours at a time (if the films run a little over two hours, don’t worry) to watch in the Fine Arts Library, which has several viewing stations available. Other films are, to my knowledge, only available through You Tube, or
Netflix’s “Watch Instantly” streaming video service .
I will provide links to videos or embed the videos of these films themselves on the seminar blog.The main thing to remember is that these films are considered required texts, so please make sure you schedule a time to view each film in its entirety, making sure to take notes during the screening. It may be a good idea to view the film in groups of 2-4 (or more) students.
PROTIP: Organizing and hosting a BYOB movie party is a great way to endear yourself to your fellow students.
Seminar Participation, Provocations, and Seminar Blog
Classroom participation consists of lively and engaged, contentious but always learned familiarity with weekly course assignments. I cannot stress enough the need to do all the reading so that you are prepared to participate fully in each week’s discussion. Throughout the semester you will be required to complete weekly short response paper assignments which will form the basis of our discussions (see below).
At the end of the semester, students will present a twenty-to-thirty minute (minimum) oral provocation on a topic related to or based on the assigned readings or the general themes of the seminar. Provocations can take a variety of forms—dialogue, debate, class exercise, etc.—and students will be expected to collaborate and civil debate based on a
provoke. Posting a short bibliography or links to videos, music, texts, or websites relevant to your topic on the seminar blog can be very helpful. You will need to visit with me during my office hours to discuss your provocations. You should schedule this provocation planning meeting with me well in advance so that we can make sure you’re on the right track and help you develop a strong provocation. A more detailed description of my expectations for the provocations can be found on the “Provocations” handout (to be distributed later in the semester).
In addition, you should plan to regularly contribute content to the seminar blog. Some suggestions include supplementary quotes, references, and/or insights of relevance to the material. This can be anything
(references to other texts on the syllabus, snippets of relevant political news that week, a song lyric that resonates with the text, videos, images, etc). I have incorporated this blog into the seminar as a way to engage the whole group in each week’s readings and cultivate an intellectual community. We only meet twice a week, and it is very useful to have something like this to serve as a “connective tissue” between our meetings. I have already created this blog, and it can be found at http://theradical1970s.wordpress.com
. While I am the moderator of this blog, all enrolled seminar participants will be designated as blog authors, thus allowing you to generate your own posts and comment on each other’s posts. You will very shortly receive an invitation to be authors of this blog
(please do not decline this invitation!).

Weekly Response Papers
Every week you are required to email me a brief (1½-2 pages) written response to the required texts to help facilitate our discussions. You need to email your short response papers to me by 5pm every
Monday. These response papers are considered “low-stakes” writing assignments, which means that they need not incorporate the kind of scholarly erudition expected in your mid-term and final papers.
However, you should nonetheless take care to demonstrate in your reading responses that you have read and understood to the best of your abilities the texts we will be discussing in the coming week. Take the opportunity to bring up themes, ideas, and questions you’d like us to cover in seminar that week. Please understand that getting a response paper from everyone every week is crucial to the success of our discussions throughout the semester as they will help me know what has most interested you about the texts.
> > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > >
Class Schedule
21/23 January | Introduction > Origins: “1968”
Tuesday: Purchase textbooks; begin thinking of topics for provocations later in the semester.
Thursday: Alain Badiou, “The Communist Hypothesis,”
Fredric Jameson, “Periodizing the 60s,”in
New Left Review 49 (Jan.-Feb. 2008): 29-42.*
The Ideologies of Theory , Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988, 178-208.*
Fredric Jameson, Anders Stephanson, and Cornel West, “A Very Partial Chronology,” in
Social Text 9/10, The 60’s Without Apology , (Spring-Summer 1984): 210-215.*
Immanuel Wallerstein, “1968, Revolution in the World System: Theses and Queries,” in
Theory and Society 18 (1989): 431-449.*
29/31 January | Palestine > Leila Khaled’s Revolutionary Memoirs
Tuesday: Leila Khaled, My People Shall Live: Autobiography of a Revolutionary
Leila Khaled: Hijacker (2006, dir. Lina Makboul)
> Available to view on You Tube <
.
Thursday: Rabab Ibrahim Abdulhadi. “Gender, Resistance and Liberation in 1960s Palestine: Living
Under Occupation.” Against the Current 159 (July/August 2012): 15-20.*
Jaleh Mansoor. “A Spectral Universality: Mona Hatoum’s Biopolitics of Abstraction.”
133 (Summer 2010): 49-74.*
Film:
October
4/6 February | International Solidarity with Palestine > Genet’s Prisoner of Love
Tuesday: Jean Genet,
Film: Carlos
Prisoner of Love , pp. 3-143
(2010, dir. Olivier Assayas)
> Available to view on Netflix “Watch Instantly” <
Thursday: Jean Genet, Prisoner of Love , pp. 143-287
11/13 February | Anti-Colonialism and Intercommunalism > Genet from Palestine to The Black
Panther Party
Tuesday: Jean Genet, Prisoner of Love
Selections from Jean Genet,
, pp. 287-430.
The Declared Enemy: Texts and Interviews trans. Jeff Fort (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2004).*
Thursday: Selected texts by members of the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense.*
Selections from George Jackson, Blood In My Eye .*
, ed. Albert Dichy,

18/20 February | Resistance to U.S. Political Repression > Assata Shakur and Black Liberation
Tuesday: Assata Shakur,
Thursday; Assata Shakur,
Assata: An Autobiography , pp. vii-130.
Assata: An Autobiography , pp. 131-274.
25/27 February | Solidarity and Sacrifice > The Weather Underground and Anti-Imperialist Struggle
Tuesday: David Gilbert,
Thursday: David Gilbert,
Love and Struggle , pp. 1-152.
Love and Struggle , pp. 153-327.
Film: The Weather Underground (2002, dir. Sam Green and Bill Siegel).
> On reserve to view at the Fine Arts Library, or on Netflix, You Tube, etc. <
4/6 March | The Urban Guerrilla Movement > The Red Army Faction and the United Red Army
Tuesday: Selected texts by/about the Red Army Faction.*
Film:
Thursday: Film:
Germany in Autumn
> On reserve to view at the Fine Arts Library, or available to view on You Tube. <
United Red Army
(1978, dir. Rainer Werner Fassbinder, et al.)
(2007, dir. Kōji Wakamatsu).
> Available to view on Netflix “Watch Instantly” <
11/13 March | Extraparliamentary Politics > Italian Autonomia and “The Years of Lead”
Tuesday: Georgy Katsiaficas, “Italian Autonomia” from The Subversion of Politics: European
Autonomous Social Movements and the Decolonization of Everyday Life (Oakland: AK Press,
2006), pp. 17-57.*
Nanni Balestrini,
Thursday: Nanni Balestrini,
The Unseen
The Unseen
, pp. vii-122.
, pp. 122-242.
18/20 March | SPRING BREAK > We will not meet this week.
25/27 March | Feminism and Labor > Production, Reproduction, and the Politicization of Housework
Tuesday: > > > Mid-Semester Paper due in class today < < <
Mariarosa Dalla Costa and Selma James, “The Power of Women and the Subversion of the
Community.”*
Silvia Federici, “Wages Against Housework” and “Why Sexuality is Work,” from Revolution at
Point Zero: Housework, Reproduction, and Feminist Struggle (Oakland: PM Press, 2012), pp. 15-
27.*
Leopoldina Fortunati, selections from
1995).*
The Arcane of Reproduction
Thursday: Selections from Paola Bono and Sandra Kemp, eds.,
(Brooklyn: Autonomedia,
Italian Feminist Thought: A Reader
Kathi Weeks, “Working Demands: From Wages for Housework to Basic Income” from
.*
The
Problem With Work: Feminism, Marxism, Antiwork Politics and Postwork Imaginaries (Durham:
Duke University Press, 2011), pp 113-150.*

1/3 April | Labor Militancy and Anti-Racist Struggle > The Revolutionary Black Union Movement
Tuesday: Dan Georgakas and Marvin Surkin, Detroit: I Do Mind Dying: A Study in Urban Revolution
(Boston: South End Press, 1998), pp. 1-130.*
Thursday: Fredric Jameson, “Cognitive Mapping,” in Cary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg, eds.,
Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture (University of Illinois Press, 1988), pp. 347-360.*
In the Break: The Aesthetics of the Black Radical Tradition Excerpts from Fred Moten,
(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003).*
Film: Finally Got the News (1970, dir. Stewart Bird, Rene Lichtman, and Peter Gessner).
> Available to view on the seminar blog <
8/10 April | Literature, Voice, Art, and the Radical 1970s > The Flamethrowers
Tuesday: Rachel Kushner,
Thursday: Rachel Kushner,
The Flamethrowers: A Novel , pp. 1-183.
The Flamethrowers: A Novel , pp. 185-383.
15/17April | Subjugated Voices > The Emergence of Hip Hop and Punk Cultures
Tuesday: Excerpts from Dick Hebdige,
The Feeding of the 5000
The Warriors
Style Wars
Subculture: The Meaning of Style
(1979, dir. Walter Hill)
(1983, dir. Henry Chalfant)
(London: Routledge, 1979).*
(audio + lyrics available on seminar blog)
> Available to view on You Tube <
Thursday: Tricia Rose, “’All Aboard the Night Train’: Flow, Layering, and Rupture in Postindustrial New
York,” from
Wesleyan University Press, 1994), pp. 21-61.*
Films:
Crass,
Film: Crass: There is No Authority But Yourself (2006, dir. Alexander Oey)
Black Noise: Rap Music and Black Culture in Contemporary America
> Available to view on You Tube <
(Hanover:
22/24 April | TBA
29 April/1 May | Student Provocations I
6/8 May | Student Provocations II
> > > Final Papers due in my mailbox by 12:00 p.m. Wednesday 12 May 2014 < < <