Rethinking 1968 and the Global 1960s, JAm It! (Journal of American Studies in Italy) #2 Special issue

This special issue aims to reflect on the significance of 1968 and the Global Sixties. In 2018 and 2019, many international scientific journals have dealt with the legacy of such transformative years through critical accounts and forums. The contribution to the debate of this special issue goes together with the awareness of being part of a “third generation” of scholars approaching the Sixties and its heritage’s multiple meanings in history, literature, and studies of cultural and social movements. But this special issue of JAm It! is also the result of putting into practice the famous second-wave-feminism slogan “the personal is political.” Indeed, our collaboration as editors fostered a fruitful interdisciplinary dialogue between two different but connected approaches to American Studies, one of us being a historian and the other one being a literary scholar. Moreover, this special issue is the product of a wider network of early-career scholars working in the field of American Studies that allowed the two of us to meet (back in 2016), to organize a conference at the Centro Studi Americani in Rome on September 28th, 2018, and to extend this model of networking further. For this special issue, we mapped out some of the research directions of these early-career scholars and put them in dialogue with more established researchers. This has been, and still is, an ongoing process, as our aim is to present some of the most compelling research areas to make “Rethinking 1968 and the Global Sixties” a living pattern. From: "On Rethinking 1968 Now: Movements, Practices, Forms", Marta Gara and Virginia Pignagnoli, op. cit., pp. 5-12