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Heroic and Tragic Pasts: Mnemonic Narratives in the Palestinian Refugee Camps 1

School of Oriental and African Studies, Thornhaugh St., Russell Sq., London, WC1H 0XG, UK laleh.khalili{at}soas.ac.uk

To contest exile and political exclusion, Palestinian refugees have invoked their past as both a constitutive component of their identity and as a basis of their political claim-making; but they have done so in historically situated and discursively diverse ways. In this article I examine the oppositional performances at work when the heroic national past is invoked, or alternatively, when capital victimaire is acquired through narratives of suffering; and I attempt to explain the force and efficacy of each discourse. I attribute the transformations in Palestinian mnemonic narratives, firstly, to shifts in available transnational discourses from celebrating Third-Worldist nationalist movements to advancing humanitarian narratives of victimhood. Secondly, these shifts can be traced to the importance of political factions in one era, and the priority of NGOs subsequently.

Key Words: nationalism • Palestinian refugees • collective memory • mnemonic practices • heroic narratives • victimhood narratives

Critical Sociology, Vol. 33, No. 4, 731-759 (2007)
DOI: 10.1163/156916307X211017


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