Negotiating Ungovernable Spaces between the Personal and the Political: Oral History and the British Left in the 1960s and 1970s

TY - JOUR

T1 - Negotiating Ungovernable Spaces between the Personal and the Political

T2 - Oral History and the British Left in the 1960s and 1970s

AU - Hughes, Celia Penelope

PY - 2013

Y1 - 2013

N2 - In this article, I consider the value and challenges of using oral history interviews to access and interpret narrative memories of men and women who became active in the left network around Britain’s anti-war movement, the Vietnam Solidarity Campaign. I focus in-depth on the individual stories of one man and one woman who, in the late 1960s and early 1970s, joined far left Trotskyist organisations. The stories reveal a two-fold search for past revolutionary and current selves. Reading between the shifting layers of past and present, the article will explore what deeper insights interviewing offers into the complex ways in which activists shaped subjectivities both in their far left groups and in the interview itself. It engages with the concept of inter-subjectivity to reflect on the interpersonal relationship between interviewer and interviewee in the oral history encounter. It thus considers the meeting of particular subjectivities and the role they played in shaping the oral history narratives. Through careful attention to my own internal state at the time of interviewing, and to how the interviewees’ stories made me feel, I seek to understand unconsidered political, social and emotional gendered experiences of life on the British far left around 1968.

AB - In this article, I consider the value and challenges of using oral history interviews to access and interpret narrative memories of men and women who became active in the left network around Britain’s anti-war movement, the Vietnam Solidarity Campaign. I focus in-depth on the individual stories of one man and one woman who, in the late 1960s and early 1970s, joined far left Trotskyist organisations. The stories reveal a two-fold search for past revolutionary and current selves. Reading between the shifting layers of past and present, the article will explore what deeper insights interviewing offers into the complex ways in which activists shaped subjectivities both in their far left groups and in the interview itself. It engages with the concept of inter-subjectivity to reflect on the interpersonal relationship between interviewer and interviewee in the oral history encounter. It thus considers the meeting of particular subjectivities and the role they played in shaping the oral history narratives. Through careful attention to my own internal state at the time of interviewing, and to how the interviewees’ stories made me feel, I seek to understand unconsidered political, social and emotional gendered experiences of life on the British far left around 1968.

KW - Faculty of Humanities

KW - 1960s Britain

KW - composure

KW - gender

KW - inter-subjectivity

KW - left subjectivity

KW - selfhood

U2 - 10.1177/1750698012463895

DO - 10.1177/1750698012463895

M3 - Journal article

SN - 1750-6980

VL - 6

SP - 70

EP - 90

JO - Memory Studies

JF - Memory Studies

IS - 1

ER -