1968 was a year that heralded revolution and revolt across the world. Whilst we have become accustomed to in-depth analysis and cultural nostalgia for these upheavals in relation to America and Western Europe, the radical mobilizations that emerged throughout Asia, Africa, the Middle East and Central America can often be forgotten. In this session we attempted to move some small way towards readdressing this. Focusing on Japan, we were joined by Gavin Walker to discuss the New Left political organization, thought and aesthetics that emerged in the late Sixties and early Seventies. Gavin Walker is the author of The Sublime Perversion of Capital: Marxist Theory and the Politics of History in Modern Japan(2016), and translator and editor of Kojin Karatani’s Marx: Towards the Centre of Possibility(2020). In this session, wediscussed his forthcoming edited volume The Red Years: Theory, Politics, and Aesthetics in the Japanese ’68(Verso). Drawing together questions of radicalism in politics, thought and art, we explore Japan’s role in the construction of sixties counterculture.
