Seminar Announcement: The Color Green: Emotions and Gender after 1968

Michael Woods Discussion


Tuesday, 25. October 2016 - 17:00 - 19:30
Location: 
Max Planck Institute for Human Development, Lentzeallee 94, 14195 Berlin, Small Conference Room
Host: 
Center for the History of Emotions
Contact: 
Christina Becher, sekfrevert@mpib-berlin.mpg.de

The Center for the History of Emotions at the Max Planck Institute for Human Development, led by Prof. Ute Frevert, cordially invites all interested to attend its winter semester 2016/17 colloquium.

Timothy Scott Brown

The Color Green: Emotions and Gender after 1968

Timothy Scott Brown will examine an emotional sea change in the activist milieu in West Germany after 1968. Exploring the transition from the student movement of the 1960s to the alternative movement of the 1970s, he will trace the development of a new sensibility with the rise of the Greens in the 1980s. In the transition from a Third World-centric Marxist internationalism to a new holistic conception of humankind’s place in the world, he will show, male-gendered notions of militant struggle and revolutionary objectivity—frequently expressed in terms of a denial of the legitimacy of personal subjectivity—gave way to female-gendered conceptions of the sanctity of life, values of caring and stewardship, and a valorization of motherhood, expressed both in concrete-personal and philosophical-universal terms. As the identity of the “revolutionary subject” changed, the range of activist emotion changed as well. The history of the emotions thus offers one useful way of charting the rise of a new politics in the 1970s and 80s that, drawing on both scientific and spiritual perspectives, followed out of and transformed the political impulse of 1968.

Timothy Scott Brown is Professor of History at Northeastern University. He is currently Bosch Fellow in Public Policy at the American Academy in Berlin. His book Sixties Europe is forthcoming with Cambridge University Press. His new project is entitled The Greening of Cold War Germany: Environmentalism and Social Movements across the Wall and Beyond, 1968-1989. His previous monographs are West Germany in the Global Sixties: The Anti-Authoritarian Revolt, 1962-1978 (Cambridge, 2013; 2015), and Weimar Radicals: Nazis and Communists between Authenticity and Performance (Berghahn, 2009; 2016). He is co-editor (with Andrew Lison) of The Global Sixties in Sound and Vision: Media, Counterculture, Revolt (Palgrave, 2014), and (with Lorena Anton) of Between the Avantgarde and the Everyday: Subversive Politics in Europe, 1957 to the Present (Berghahn, 2011).