May '68 and Its Afterlives

During May 1968 students and workers in France united in the biggest strike and the largest mass movement in French history. Kristin Ross reveals how the offical memory of the event came to serve a political agenda completely antithetical to the movements aspirations.

Recovering the political language of May '68 through the tracts, pamphlets and documentary film footage of the era, Ross reveals how the original movement, concerned above all with the question of equality, gained a new and counterfeit history, one that erased police violence and the deaths of participants, removed workers from the picture, and eliminated all traces of anti-Americanism, anti-imperialism and the influences of Algeria and Vietnam. "May '68 and Its Afterlives" is especially timely given the rise of a new mass political movement opposing global capitalism, from labour strikes and anti-McDonald's protests in France to the demonstrations against the World Trade Organization in Seattle.