5. To Have Seen Too Much: The 1960s and the Turning of the Camera
6. Now What?
Joanna Swanger is Associate Professor and Director of the Peace and Global Studies Program at Earlham College, USA. Her most recent publication is Rebel Lands of Cuba: The Campesino Struggles of Oriente and Escambray, 1934-1974 (2015). Her scholarly work focuses on the intersection of social justice movements and resistance encountered by those movements.
This book tackles the question of why the United States is so resistant to radical change towards economic justice and peace. Taking full stock of the despair that launched the popular support for Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump, Swanger historicizes the political paralysis of post-1974 United States that deepened already severe economic inequalities, asking how the terrain for social movements in the early twenty-first-century US differs from that of the 1960s. This terrain is marked by the entrenchment of neoliberalism, anti-intellectualism, and difficulties paradoxically posed by the ease of social media. Activists now must contend with a paralyzing “post-factual” moment. Alain Badiou’s thought informs this book on breaking through contemporary political paralysis.