Book launch for and readings from “Wounded Galaxies 1968: Geopolitics and Culture Wars” (IU Press, 2026) edited by Joan Hawkins. The night will also feature music by ORTET and footage from the 1968 festival at IU in 2018.
Open mic to follow.
WOUNDED GALAXIES 1968 examines the relationship between radical politics, radical aesthetics, radical culture, and the legacy of a watershed year for the world. Like the Surrealists before them, 1968’s counterculture believed that changing the world (politics) and changing art (life, culture) were part of the same project.
This year saw violent protests and uprisings, including those at the National Democratic Convention in Chicago; the Prague Spring and subsequent Warsaw Pact invasion of Czechoslovakia; the Tlatelolco massacre of students in Mexico City; France’s Mai 1968; and further uprisings across Europe, Africa, Asia, and South America. The Vietnam War was nearing its peak with the Tet Offensive and the Mai Lai massacre; Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert Kennedy were assassinated. Yet it was also the year of Rosemary’s Baby and the Beatles’ White Album; Apollo 8 became the first crewed spacecraft to orbit the Moon; and the first International Special Olympics Summer Games were held at Chicago’s Soldier Field. Combining original contemporary documents with scholarly essays and memoirs, Wounded Galaxies 1968 asks readers to consider the geopolitical alongside the cultural, inviting us to make some of the same intellectual and emotional connections that contemporaries did back then.
An engaging cultural critique of a tumultuous year, Wounded Galaxies 1968 demonstrates that, while changing the world proved frustratingly difficult, changing life was largely successful with significant transformations across society, education, and the arts—changes whose impacts have continued to be felt in the United States and Western Europe well into the twenty-first century.
JOAN HAWKINS is Professor Emeritus of Cinema and Media Studies at Indiana University Bloomington. She is author of Cutting Edge: Art-Horror and the Horrific Avant-garde as well as editor (with Alex Wermer-Colan) of William S. Burroughs Cutting Up the Century. https://iupress.org/9
ORTET: “The wizards of Bloomington’s underground improvised music scene” – Ron Kadish, Ryder Magazine
feat. Marty Belcher, Tony Brewer, Norbert Herber, Chris Rall, Joe MF Stone. https://ortet.bandcamp.com/
