Memories of Transnational Activism: Palestinian-Danish Relations in the Radical Left
Résumé
This paper explores how we can study the political commitment, ideology and entanglement of differently situated activists during the Third Worldist era through memories of the involved. Its focus is the Palestinian revolutionary movement and its relations to likeminded activists in Denmark during the 1970s. Palestine is one of a handful of emblematic revolutions that became causes to learn from, support, and emulate for Marxian activists in the global New Left. Europeans and others travelled to the Middle East and met with, sometimes even trained with, Palestinian guerillas. For their part, Palestinian thinkers and political activists travelled to Europe, read ‘Euro-Marxist’ theory, and took inspiration from Western student protests. Some of these activists linked up with parallel networks coordinating anti-imperial solidarity in the global south, such as the Tricontinental movement based in Cuba. Historians have recently begun to reconstruct these linkages from a global perspective. In line with the conference theme, I am interested in the historiographical challenges of studying entanglement, and the particular role of personal memories as key sources that can help us reconstruct an understudied phenomenon, but which come with a set of potential pitfalls. In particular, I examine the influence that four decades of events and political discourse about Palestine have on living memories today. How does the historian relate to the memory construction, and how can we triangulate and catalogue different types of memories of transnational struggle? In particular, how can we triangulate memories from within Palestinian life-worlds with memories of European activists, and how do we piece them together to form a cogent global history of entanglement?
