Worldmaking in the Palestinian Radio Stations (1965-1982): Revolutionary Love and Anticolonial Afterlives

The Palestinian national liberation movement achieved iconic status as one of the great anticolonial struggles of the twentieth century. Radio stations were an important part of the movement’s cultural infrastructure: as the source of regular news reports; responsible for the production and dissemination of songs, plays, and poetry about Palestine and the international anticolonial struggle; and as a space where cadres from political parties, artists, and international delegations would meet to discuss revolutionary strategy and aims. Drawing on primary materials from the movement’s various radio stations between 1968 and 1982 - including memoirs, interviews, poems and photographs from its operators and contributors - alongside secondary readings, this article provides an overview of the political history of Palestinian radio stations between 1965 and 1982. These Palestinian radio stations are then understood as sites of ‘anticolonial worldmaking’, in which the collective activities and interactions of actors within
the radio stations are understood as the basis of a revolutionary political culture. This approach is used to illuminate the nature of ‘anticolonial worldmaking’ in the Palestinian radio stations: in which political practice and revolutionary love entwined, producing anticolonial traditions with afterlives beyond the material infrastructure and imagined spatiotemporal boundaries of the anticolonial moment.