Reconsidering the 60s generation in the Arab world and beyond

Professor Yoav di Capua offers a comprehensive empirical, theoretical, and methodological reassessment of the Arab 60s as a global pursuit with lessons that transcend the geography of the Middle East - the fruit of a decade of research on Arab thought. A common understanding of the 1960s is that of an integrated global era marked by a revolutionary quest for self-liberation, transnational solidarity, sexual revolution, radical self-fashioning, anti-imperialism, a renewed understanding of gender and race relationships as well as an intellectual drive to articulate universal ethics of emancipation. But in the Arab world, with few exceptions, most narratives portray a radically different image: one of a failed revolutionary project marked by ideological bigotry, political messianism, personality cults, ethnocentric particularism, economic ruin, and an overall sense of a cultural defeat. Are these two images reconcilable?