Staging Particular Difference: Politics of Space in the Palestinian Alternative Music Scene

Abstract

In recent years, an alternative popular music scene has emerged among young Palestinians on both sides of the Green Line. Musicians and their audiences produce a politicized counterculture that innovatively fuses local and international musical expressions as a form of protest that aims to challenge external and internal impositions of structural oppression and othering. This scene constitutes the struggle of young Palestinians against civil marginalization in Israel and military occupation in the occupied territories, as well as against social and religious controls within their own communities. Drawing on Foucault’s work on Heterotopia, this article analyzes the cultural and political significance of Palestinian festive spaces by tracing the networks and conditions under which partygoers either fail or must compromise the staging of festive resistance, or conversely, succeed in appropriating places for their purposes despite spatial and social constraints.