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SoSe 22: A Global History of Leftist Disenchantment in the 1970s and 1980s

Joseph Prestel

Kommentar

Historians have described the late 1970s and early 1980s as a time of leftist disenchantment in various contexts. Portrayals of the crisis of Arab Marxism with the outbreak of the Lebanese Civil War, the turn away from revolutionary Third Worldism in the French left during the 1970s, or the death of Mao Zedong in 1976, all these events and developments share associations with a retreat of a leftist politics that had been flourishing since the late 1960s. In this course, students will be familiarized with a number of such individual cases that play a prominent role in the histories of the left in Western Europe, the Middle East, and Asia. Beyond individual cases, we will also probe questions of comparison and connections between these histories. How was the Lebanese Civil War connected to the waning of international solidarity movements in Western Europe? How did the death of Mao resonate in Palestinian politics? Does the narrative of a leftist decline even prove true once we consider it globally and take newly emerging transnational allegiance, like the global appeal of the Iranian Revolution, into account? The aim of this course, therefore, is to not only to provide a transregional history of leftist politics, but also to develop a critical perspective on accounts of the rise and demise of the left around the world during the second half of the twentieth century. Schließen

Literaturhinweise

Julia Lovell, Maoism: A Global History (London: The Bodley Head, 2019); Fadi A. Bardawil, Revolution and Disenchantment: Arab Marxism and the Binds of Emancipation (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2020); Eleanor Davey, Idealism beyond Borders: The French Revolutionary Left and the Rise of Humanitarianism, 1954-1988 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015). Schließen