Aboriginal Black Power And The Rise Of The Australian Black Panther Party 1967 1972

Examining transnational ties between the USA and Australia, this book explores the rise of the Aboriginal Black Power Movement in the 1960s and early 1970s. Aboriginal adaptation of the American Black Power movement paved the way for future forms of radical Aboriginal resistance, including the eventual emergence of the Australian Black Panther Party. Through analysis of archival material, including untouched government records, previously unexamined newspapers and interviews conducted with both Australian and American activists, this book investigates the complex and varied process of developing the Black Power movement in a uniquely Australian context. Providing a social and political account of Australian activism across Victoria, New South Wales and Queensland, the author illustrates the fragmentation of Aboriginal Black Power, marked by its different leaders, protests and propaganda.

It was a common charge among black radicals in the 1960s that Britons needed to start “thinking black.” As state and society consolidated around a revived politics of whiteness, “thinking black,” they felt, was necessary for all who sought to build a liberated future out of Britain’s imperial past. In Thinking Black, Rob Waters reveals black radical Britain’s wide cultural-political formation, tracing it across new institutions of black civil society and connecting it to decolonization and black liberation across the Atlantic world. He shows how, from the mid-1960s to the mid-1980s, black radicalism defined what it meant to be black and what it meant to be radical in Britain.

Australia is rarely considered to have been a part of the great political changes that swept the world in the 1960s: the struggles of the American civil rights movement, student revolts in Europe, guerrilla struggles across the Third World and demands for women’s and gay liberation. This book tells the story of how Australian activists from a diversity of movements read about, borrowed from, physically encountered and critiqued overseas manifestations of these rebellions, as well as locating the impact of radical visitors to the nation. It situates Australian protest and reform movements within a properly global – and particularly Asian – context, where Australian protestors sought answers, utopias and allies. Dramatically broadens our understanding of Australian protest movements, this book presents them not only as manifestations of local issues and causes but as fundamentally tied to ideas, developments and personalities overseas, particularly to socialist states and struggles in near neighbours like Vietnam, Malaysia and China.'Jon Piccini is Research and Teaching Fellow at The University of Queensland, Brisbane, Australia. His research interests include the history of human rights and social histories of international student migration.'

This book is about modern politics and young people. Judith Bessant revises some long-standing myths about children and young people’s politics. She highlights the huge gap between the many ways young people and politics are talked about and how they have long been politically active. Bessant draws on a relational historical sociology to show how since the nineteenth century certain historical dynamics, political interests and social imaginaries have enabled social scientists, writers, political leaders and policymakers to imagine and ‘make up’ different kinds of young people. Given these representations of childhood, adolescence and youth, everyone knows that young people are cognitively immature, inexperienced, morally under-developed and lack good judgement. For these reasons they cannot possibly be allowed to engage in the serious, grown-up business of politics. Yet in just one of the many contradictions, young people are criticised by many of their elders for being politically apathetic and disengaged from politics. Many think recent global warming movements largely led by quite young people are a novel phenomenon. Yet young people have been at the forefront of political movements of all kinds since the French Revolution. Since the 1960s, children and young people increasingly played a major, if sometimes obscured, role in civil rights, anti-war, anti-globalisation, anti-austerity and global-warming movements. This accessible book is rich in theoretical and historical insight that is sure to appeal to sociologists, historians, youth studies scholars and political scientists, as well as to the general reader.

In Intoxicated Mel Y. Chen explores the ongoing imperial relationship between race, sexuality, and disability. They focus on nineteenth-century biopolitical archives in England and Australia to show how mutual entanglements of race and disability take form through toxicity. Examining English scientist John Langdon Down’s characterization of white intellectual disability as Asian interiority and Queensland’s racialization and targeting of Aboriginal peoples through its ostensible concern with black opium, Chen explores how the colonial administration of race and disability gives rise to “intoxicated” subjects often shadowed by slowness. Chen charts the ongoing reverberations of these chemical entanglements in art and contemporary moments of political and economic conflict or agitation. Although intoxicated subjects may be affected by ongoing pollution or discredited as agents of failure, Chen affirmatively identifies queer/crip forms of unlearning and worldmaking under imperialism. Exemplifying an undisciplined thinking that resists linear or accretive methods of inquiry, Chen unsettles conventional understandings of slowness and agitation, intellectual method, and the toxic ordinary.

The 1972 Aboriginal Embassy was one of the most significant indigenous political demonstrations of the twentieth century. What began as a simple response to a Prime Ministerial statement on Australia Day 1972, evolved into a six-month political stand-off between radical Aboriginal activists and a conservative Australian government. The dramatic scenes in July 1972 when police forcibly removed the Embassy from the lawns of the Australian Houses of Parliament were transmitted around the world. The demonstration increased international awareness of the struggle for justice by Aboriginal people, brought an end to the national government policy of assimilation and put Aboriginal issues firmly onto the national political agenda. The Embassy remains today and on Australia Day 2012 was again the focal point for national and international attention, demonstrating the intensity that the Embassy can still provoke after forty years of just sitting there. If, as some suggest, the Embassy can only ever be removed by Aboriginal people achieving their goals of Land Rights, Self-Determination and economic independence then it is likely to remain for some time yet. ‘This book explores the context of this moment that captured the world’s attention by using, predominantly, the voices of the people who were there. More than a simple oral history, some of the key players represented here bring with them the imprimatur of the education they were to gain in the era after the Tent Embassy. This is an act of radicalisation. The Aboriginal participants in subversive political action have now broken through the barriers of access to academia and write as both eye-witnesses and also as trained historians, lawyers, film-makers. It is another act of subversion, a continuing taunt to the entrenched institutions of the dominant culture, part of a continuum of political thought and action.’ (Larissa Behrendt, Professor of Law, Jumbunna Indigenous House of Learning, University of Technology Sydney)

In a provocative reappraisal of the 1960s, Aborigines & Activism recontextualises the history of Aboriginal activism within wider international movements. Concurrent to anti-war protests, women's movements, burgeoning civil rights activism in the United States and the struggles of South Africa's anti-apartheid freedom righters, dramatic political changes took place in 'assimilated' Australia that challenged its status quo. From the early days of grassroots resistance through to Charles Perkins' 1965 Freedom Ride, the 1967 Referendum, Canberra's Tent Embassy and beyond, this is the story of the Great Southern Land's racial awakening - a time when Aborigines and their white supporters achieved paradigmatic shifts in the search for equality, justice and human dignity that still has powerful implications for 21st century Australia. This is an engaging study of the stories of racial awakening in Australia that marked the coming of the wind of change. Through rigorous research, the author shows how supporters of Indigenous Australians and their struggles for equality pushed Australia into the 60s literally and figuratively. The book also puts the Australian experience of the 60s into an international perspective, portrayed as unique but not in isolation.

The long-anticipated, riveting autobiography of the late Stokely Carmichael chronicles the legendary civil rights leader's work as the charismatic patriarch of Black Power, Pan-African activist, and social revolutionary - a major milestone in African-American autobiography. Populated with an international cast of luminaries, including James Baldwin, Fannie Lou Hamer, Miriam Makeba, Shirley Graham Du Bois, Toni Morrison, Martin Luther King, Jr., Malcolm X, Ho Chi Minh and Fidel Castro, this book captures the cultural upheavals that define the modern world.