ACLA 2015 - Compromised Radicals and Failed Revolutions: The Unfinished Politics of the '70s
Since the turn of the twenty-first century, American writers have begun to return to the political and aesthetic moment of the late 1960s and 1970s. This turn has taken both a domestic and a global perspective: from the recent revival of interest in the Weather Underground as the United States' own stillborn revolutionary moment—we can think of Bill Siegel's 2002 documentary, new novels from Russell Banks and Jay Cantor, and the recent memoirs of David Gilbert, Bill Ayers and Cathy Wilkerson, to name just a few—to a revisiting of 1970s global insurgencies in places such as Italy, India, and South Africa as in Rachel Kushner's The Flamethrowers, Jhumpa Lahiri's The Lowlands, and Chris Abani's The Secret History of Las Vegas respectively.