Prove di Sessantotto a Berkeley

Abstract

To celebrate the fifty years of 1968 as an Americanist, I would like to start from a sentence by Luciana Castellina, who, at the opening of her speech on the special issue that MicroMega dedicated to the event, recalls that, among other repercussions, that episode has also played a very significant role in smoothing the gaps between different cultures. «The Sixty-eight - writes Castellina - was a cultured movement…; it is no coincidence that it was born at the end of the Sixties, a period of cultural growth in which one came into contact with American sociology, with the English one, with the positions of the New Left in England, with the Frankfurt School… ». And as for those fundamental experiences of dialogue mentioned, perhaps we should also add the new sense of closeness to American culture, which in those same years began to make its way overwhelmingly. After all, as in recent years the great development of transatlantic studies has shown, the second half of the twentieth century has contributed to almost definitively eliminate the distances between the two sides of the Atlantic, to the point that it no longer makes much sense today. , speak of a persistence of profound cultural diversity between the United States and Europe.