Cultures of resistance in Palestine and beyond: On the politics of art, aesthetics, and affect

Katiba 5 is a Palestinian hip-hop band of young Palestinian refugees, together with Lebanese friends and second generation French-Syrians living in Europe. They meet in a smoky little room with walls covered with resistance graffiti, and floors strewn with musical instruments, on the outskirts of Shatila camp in Lebanon. Katiba 5 is one of the many art experiences of refugee youth in Lebanon that signal a radical shift in the relationship between culture and resistance in the Palestinian landscape. These young artists partake in the emergence of a counter or subculture that is at once local and transnational. They speak through a global genre, hip-hop, to express their anger at political and social predicaments in Lebanon and beyond, but they display no neat ideology or political project. Rather, they state that they compose rap by integrating the plurality of their views. This is one of the ways that they deviate from previous and more conventional nationalist genres that they perceive as "traditional," to quote a band member.