Jerry L. Avorn
1969
307 pages
Up Against the Ivy Wall is a detailed account of the April-May 1968 student uprising at Columbia University. This brief and highly concentrated event involved, most dramatically, the occupation of administration offices and other campus spaces by dissident students led by Mark Rudd and his chapter of Students for a Democratic Society, a national organization for leftist students. The uprising had many different dimensions to it, but it largely stemmed from student opposition to Columbia’s contributions to military research, and the expansion of the wealthy university’s campus into impoverished Harlem by dispossessing poor nearby residents of their homes for the purpose of building a new gymnasium.
The main thing that interests me about this book is that it appears to be an example of a book that’s no longer published. Up Against the Ivy Wall is a scholarly and densely detailed account of a brief moment in time, 307 pages describing four weeks of life in a tiny section of New York City. This was published in 1969, months after the events themselves, which almost indicates an urgency in publishing a clear account of the events in question. This book, in the density and quality of the detail it provides of a short period of time in the life of a social movement, is similar to Donn Teal’s The Gay Militants, which, in similar depth tells the story of year one of the gay liberation movement in America shortly after it concluded. I know that other such events, including the Occupy Movement and the 1999 Seattle WTO protests inspired books which were published quickly, but I haven’t read any such book that reaches the level of detail found in the two older texts.
Acadia Acadia?!?Michel Brault & Pierre PerraultNational Film Board of Canada197175 MinutesThis
is the first film that I've watched from the National Film Board of
Canada website which has recently made hundreds of its documentaries and
animations available for streaming or download. I intend to gradually
go through the NFB website's content and write about any films that I
deem appropriate for this blog. As I'm moving through the NFB content
alphabetically, Acadia Acadia?!? is the first such film, although
there's a couple more in the A’s about the Oka standoff and the October
Crisis of 1970 Quebec.Acadia
Acadia?!? is a black and white documentary that captures the short life
of the Ralliement de la Jeunesse Acadienne, the student movement that
called for the recognition of Acadian identity by the English political
establishment in New Brunswick. This documentary was mostly shot at the
University of Moncton,
the first and only French language university in New Brunswich. The
film's directors, Michel Brault and Pierre Perrault, have worked in
collaboration on a number of projects for the NFB and many of them
focused on aspects of Francophone culture in Canada. With this film,
Brault and Perrault focus on a small student activist movement centered
on the campus of a small university in a small Canadian city, but their
film opens up a discussion about the status of French Canadians outside
of Quebec during the 1960s.Acadia
was once a French Colony that once existed east of New France (modern
Quebec) where New Brunswick, mainland Nova Scotia, and eastern Quebec
currently is. The Acadians were expelled from the region in the
mid-18th century, settling in places like Louisiana following the French
defeat to the English in their Colonial war for Canada. Many of the
Acadians returned to eastern Canada, following their expulsion, and they
established French speaking communities throughout their former colony.
At the time of the events Brault and Perrault captured in their film,
the city of Moncton was over 30% Francophone. This %30 was hardly
represented in the political and educational institutions of New
Brunswick however, and therefore this student movement emerged to fight
for language rights by, in part, asserting their Acadian heritage.The
film captured many of the significant events of this movement. The
successful call for a student strike at the Univertity of Moncton opened
the documentary, which then segued into scenes of a large march for
French language rights at Moncton city hall. The scenes of the students
speaking with city hall council were quintessential of the 1960s
zeitgeist, as they featured a condescending group of aging white (and in
this context, Anglophone) blowhards, proud of their ignorance, talking
down to a group of educated and angry young outsiders. The activists
call for French to be recognized at city hall was rejected, showing how
English, as the only recognized language of the political establishment
of a city that's over a third Francophone, was a means of providing a
barrier to access political power and services in that city. The
activists did not take their rejection well and they left a pig's head
on the lawn of the mayor's home.Brault
and Perrault mix scenes of activist action with talking head interviews
with the Young Acadians, wherin the student agitators express their
opinions on the English power structure of the province, the meaning of
Acadia, the state of the University of Moncton, their views on direct
action activism and violence, and their wish to express themselves
without giving up their identity. The activists are clearly armed with
recent sociological and postcolonial theories that contribute to many of
the views they express in these interviews. There are also some scenes
shot at an Acadian village where the activists discuss language and
cultural politics with some of the villagers - this scene is the
converse of a scene where the activists sat at the meeting of a loyalist
organization, where during the recital of the oath to the Queen and
when the members of this organization sang 'God Save the Queen', the
students held up the clenched fist of activist solidarity. The
activists occupied the University of Moncton's science building for
nine days in the winter of 1969. The students were raising questions
about why their school received zero funding from the provincial
government while the University of New Brunswick was heavily subsidized
(thus making tuition lower for students, and enabling the institution to
provide nicer facilities and better services.) The occupation ended
with students submitting to police requests to move, despite earlier
calls for passive non-violent resistance to the authorities, which
pretty well caused the movement to dissipate. Shortly thereafter
students returned to classes, and thirty students were expelled,
including Michel Blanchard, one of the activist leaders who speaks
throughout the documentary. Furthermore, the university closed its
sociology department, the chief source of the social theories the
activists operated on.The
English film is 75 minutes long, an abridged translation of the
original French version that runs closer to two hours in length. One
feature of the translation is that there is only one female translator
voice, which is fine, it works, but I never noticed how other such films
make the choice to translate the words of male speakers into a male
voice. Overall, this film is probably one of the few sources of
information on this particular movement, as a subaltern, Acadian,
nationalism in Canada has mostly been a subject with regards to the
First Nations or Quebec contexts.
Beginning in 2009, Michel Blanchard was permitted back onto the University of Moncton campus for the first time since 1970.
PS: Here is the link to watch the English version of the film on the National Film Board website.
The New Revolutionaries: A Handbook of the International Left
Tariq Ali (editor)
McClelland and Stewart Ltd.
1969
319 pages
Tariq Ali is a notable historian and an editor of the New Left Review, one of the journals that established a new direction for leftist politics in the 1960s. Ali has recently increased his status as a voice against empire through the publication of a number of books criticizing American and European foreign policy towards the Middle East. The New Revolutionaries, one of Ali’s first books, is a survey of worldwide radical left thought dating from the mid to late 1960s.
This book is edited by Ali however it also contains two writings by the well known activist, written while he was a student at Oxford University. The first of his pieces, titled 'The Extra-Parliamentary' Option, seeks alternative forms of social organization and governance to the parliamentary model. His second piece, the final essay of the book, ‘The Age of Permanent Revolution’, takes a brief survey of the radical-left activity in the world during the 1960s and also takes a survey of the material conditions that inspire such activity. Aside from Ali’s own pieces, there are eighteen other texts contained in this collection. These other texts are of various forms, for example a transcript of the court martial testimony by French rebel of the Bolivian Civil War (and professor of philosophy) Regis Debray is featured. Also featured is a letter by Black Panther Party leader Eldridge Cleaver, written from prison, and republished from Ramparts magazine. Also included are brief pieces by Stokley Charmichael and Fidel Castro. Additionally a number of other essays are included by authors who examine the situation of the radical left movement in a number of countries (Italy, Poland, China, Japan, Zimbabwe, Indonesia, and others).
Not much additional information is given regarding each written piece. The book contains an ‘about the authors’ section which gives a few details about each contributor and their commitment to the left, although it would be preferable if these brief biographical statements appeared as preambles to each essay. Futhermore Ali's introduction states that many of the pieces are republished from other journals and it would have improved the book to have listed each essay's original publication details. These simple changes and additions would have helped the reader (me) contextualize these writings and situate their writers. The book attempts to map out a global radical left and the inclusion of such information as the publication details may have underscored such a mapping by pointing to a global publication network of the left in addition to the global leftist will to action that these pieces describe. Despite such shortcomings, the book is, however, a handbook to a socio-political phenomena, and adequately notes the movement’s situation as of the late 1960s, during its peak.
