Negotiating ungovernable spaces between the personal and the political: Oral history and the left in post-war Britain

Abstract

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.

The exodus memory community: Leveraging oral history records to understand collected memories of violence

“…Instead, oral histories are in-depth interviews where an oral historian collaborates with a storyteller to piece together the latter's life experiences (Bornat, 2013). This collaborative process means that oral histories are products of inter-subjective encounters that not only reconstruct, but actively contribute to the production of the past being remembered (Hughes, 2013). Thus, oral histories can be used not only as sources for historiography, but also for research into social memory.…”

“…Oral histories are a space of inter-subjective encounters where new renditions of the past can be not only recalled but also engendered (Hughes, 2013). In this sense, oral histories are important sources to explore what Olick (2007) refers to as collected memory, that is, patterns across the narrative arcs from sets of individual recollections.…”

Mining Men: Reflections on Masculinity and Oral History during the Coronavirus Pandemic

“…4 The usual anxiety at being in a stranger's house was absent, as were potential unspoken tensions following the offer of hospitality, captured in Celia Hughes's account of her discomfort at being presented with a 'milky, lukewarm' tea, and her interviewee's disappointment at her reaction. 5 My own experiences were never so fraught, but even simple acts of hospitality like brewing tea 'correctly' sometimes generated unhelpful social anxieties. There was no disruption caused by the setting up of recording equipment and though the fact the interview was being recorded was always acknowledged, the positioning of the recorder off-screen reduced the formality of the engagement.…”