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

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.