[Commlist] [IJoC] International Journal of Communication Publishes a Special Section on Unsettled Debts: 1968 and the Problem of Historical Memory

International Journal of Communication Publishes a Special Section on
Unsettled Debts: 1968 and the Problem of Historical Memory

How might scholars of communication orient to the contested past in order to
foster decisive action in the present?

Back in 2018, the 50th anniversary of 1968 gave rise to a small industry
devoted to commemoration. Scholars and journalists revisited that year's
insurgencies in dozens of essays and books, activists paid tribute to its
emancipatory legacy in the streets, and companies exploited it on our
screens. In one egregious display, Dodge Ram used an excerpt from a 1968
speech by Martin Luther King, Jr., to narrate a Super Bowl truck commercial.
Within hours, a hijacked version of the ad began circulating online,
featuring the same speech but using an alternate excerpt, in which King
denounced consumer society. Such correctives defend the radicalism of an era
that is distant yet reverberant.
With each correction, however, we are reminded that history is more than a
record for us to set straight. It is a process of production in which we
participate, where even our principled longings in the present can become
obstacles to confronting our co-implication with the past.
Guest-edited by Clare O'Connor and featuring a Foreword by Robin D.G.
Kelley, this Special Section on Unsettled Debts: 1968 and the Problem of
Historical Memory considers how we might revisit the "spirit of '68" without
succumbing to distorted forms of memory such as nostalgia and myth. Based on
the proceedings of a 2018 conference dedicated to this theme, the essays in
this Section analyze media objects and moments from 1968 that have been
activated in the service of contemporary social movements, obscured through
superficial citation, or omitted from the dominant record altogether. We 
invite you to read these articles that published in the International
Journal of Communication on October 5, 2022. Please log into ijoc.org to
read the papers of interest. We look forward to your feedback! 
_________________________________________________
Unsettled Debts: 1968 and the Problem of Historical Memory—Foreword 
Robin D. G. Kelley

Unsettled Debts: 1968 and the Problem of Historical Memory—Introduction 
Clare O’Connor
“Thái Bình Means Peace”: (Re)positioning South Vietnamese Exchange
Students’ Activism in the Asian American Movement  Ly Thúy Nguyễn
Con Che? The Specter of Communism in the 1968 Chicano Blowouts  Magally 
Miranda, Efren Michael Lopez

The American Indian Movement and the Politics of Nostalgia: Indigenous
Representation From Wounded Knee to Standing Rock  Clementine Bordeaux

Reborn as Fida’i: The Palestinian Revolution and the (Re)Making of an Icon
 Loubna Qutami
Lost in Citation: Afterlives of the 1968 Memphis Sanitation Strike Clare 
O’Connor
The Limits of Smooth Legacies: 1968, Feminist History, and the Tradition of
Athlete Activism: An Interview With Amira Rose Davis  Courtney M. Cox
Afterlives of Tlatelolco: Memory, Contested Space, and Collective
Imagination  Paulina Lanz

Once Lost, Painfully Present: Maya Angelou’s Blacks, Blues, Black! 
(1968) Adrien Sebro
The Sociotechnical Imaginaries of 1968  Andrea Alarcon, Soledad Altrudi, 
Frances Corry, MC Forelle _________________________________________________
Larry Gross, Editor
Arlene Luck, Founding Managing Editor  Kady Bell-Garcia, Managing Editor
Chi Zhang, Managing Editor, Special Sections
Clare O'Connor, Guest Editor
 Please note that according to the latest Google Scholar statistics, IJoC
ranks 9th among all Humanities journals and 9th among all Communications
journals in the world — demonstrating the viability of open access
scholarly publication at the highest level.
___________________________________________________
International Journal of Communication (IJoC)
USC Annenberg Press
University of Southern California
http://ijoc.org/
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