May 1968: Anticolonial Revolution for a Decolonial Future

Abstract

In this essay I argue May ‘68 was (1) in its way an anticolonial revolution, since it was directed against a President and government that had been imposed on France ten years previously by the colons of Algeria; (2) the visible staging of an epistemological break that has marked the contemporary era in which the grounds of knowledge have been switched from history to the spatialized present, from western epistemology based on the linearity of script to the spatialized iconic mode of the image, from diachronic to synchronic forms of understanding.