From Cuba to Vietnam: Anti-Imperialist Poetics and Global Solidarity in the Long Sixties

Abstract

The political poets treated in the previous chapter were able to tackle the Cold War liberal consensus only indirectly, mostly with little visibility outside literary institutions. Their counterparts of the 1960s had come of age precisely in this era of consensus only to be thrust into a world where poetic communities, social movements, and world politics once again intersected. Although poetry’s socioinstitutional landscape changed in the 1960s, these poets confronted social, political, and economic issues that had their origin much earlier. In fact, historians and cultural critics often speak of the time period from the mid-1950s to the mid-1970s as the “long Sixties” to capture the global economic, social, and political continuities that cannot be consigned to neat periods but rather span the decades. Such continuities show in Cold War politics, but also in the social movements of the 1960s that emerged from the Civil Rights movement, adopting its strategies and methods for social change, as well as in the history of Third World liberation movements from their rise in the mid-1950s until their disintegration in the mid-1970s.¹ There is, then, no stark contrast between an age of quiet and an age of turmoil, the “tranquillized Fifties,” as Robert Lowell’s famous phrase has it, and the “Years of Hope, Days of Rage” as which Todd Gitlin has characterized the 1960s (cf. Gitlin).² The 1960s were not simply the rebellious inversion of the consensual 1950s but rather acted out the earlier decade’s inherent tensions; and yet, these poets wrote in a repoliticized cultural climate that produced influential social movements with which engaged poets could affiliate themselves.