Anti-Disciplinary Protest

Book excerpt: The sixties were a time when anti-disciplinary politics blurred the boundaries between the political and the aesthetic, and, according to some critics, the time when the possibility for revolution died. In this book, first published in 1998, Stephens questions the frameworks which inform commonplace understandings of this period, arguing that the most distinctive forms of sixties protest are often marginalized or excluded from view. She looks at the problematic ways in which sixties radicalism has been narrativised, and critically evaluates the modernist and postmodern impulses that can be discerned in the anti-disciplinary protest of the time. Stephens develops a new theoretical framework for conceptualizing the relationship between the sixties and later political and theoretical developments. Drawing on broad-ranging, lively and often rare sources, this is a provocative contribution to contemporary social theory and cultural studies.