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The Year of Living Dangerously:Italy's Movement of ’77
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Ebook
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The first in-depth English-language analysis of Italy’s explosive movement of 1977
After a decade of social and political turmoil in Italy, popular protest reached a peak in 1977. Young people took to the streets to demand a future in which bosses, borders, and compromise would be consigned to history. The Year of Living Dangerously retells the movement’s origins, ideals, and visual culture, exploring the ongoing debates about its legacy. Alongside the analysis and history, Jacopo Galimberti and Steve Wright have compiled an extensive anthology of crucial annotated texts, many appearing in English translation for the first time. These materials illuminate the richness and complexity of this extraordinary chapter in Italian history, capturing a defiant, joyful movement that briefly threatened to upend the political establishment’s consensus around sacrifice and economic discipline.
Reviews
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At a time when the political imagination is again struggling to find adequate forms, this volume restores 1977 in Italy to its rightful place: not as a footnote between 1968 and the “years of lead,” but as a decisive laboratory of antagonistic politics, cultural invention, and collective experimentation whose questions continue to haunt the present. [...]. It is not only a major contribution to the historiography of 1977; it is an invitation to think again, collectively, about what it might mean to live—and struggle—dangerously today
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The extraordinary political creativity of the Italian radical left in 1977 still has profound resonances with and lessons for activists today. Galimberti and Wright provide a detailed, many-sided analysis of the political groups and events of the time, followed by a rich trove of images and translated documents from the era.
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1977 in Italy was an illumination. The motley composition of the movement, feminists and ‘Metropolitan Indians,’ students and ‘young proletarians,’ workers and the marginalized, anticipated powerful transformations of labor and life under capitalism. But it did so in an offensive register, foreshadowing a radically renewed communism to come. Galimberti and Wright’s book brings back to life the spirit of ’77, offering a compelling interpretation of its significance alongside translations of key documents from the movement itself. This is a must-read for anyone interested in the history of social movements and an essential archive for those ready to storm heaven again.
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This book is an indispensable history and cartography of one of the most explosive, bewildering and creative movements in the annals of European radicalism. Combining archival care, militant sympathy and critical nuance, Galimberti and Wright recover the multiple and conflicting energies of the Italian ’77. They foreground the disruptive dynamism of feminist and queer movements and chart the flourishing of radical experiments in media forms and artistic practice, while guiding the reader through the fissile galaxy of the revolutionary communist, anarchist and armed left. This book – not least through its precious anthology of original texts in translation – shows how our counter-revolutionary times can be illuminated when we do justice to the failed and defeated revolutions that they were engineered to neutralize.