The Best of Hard Times

Gustavo Barbosa is an associate researcher at the Center for Middle Eastern Studies at Universidade Federal Fluminense (NEOM/UFF), in Niteroi, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil.

List of Illustrations, Tables, and Charts xi Acknowledgments xiii Acronyms xix Timeline: History of the Palestinian Diaspora in Lebanon xxi Introduction: Thinking through Water 1 1. Submerging: Under Siege 43 2. Drowning by Numbers and Legislation: Statistics and (Non)State Making in Shatila 73 3. Swirling and Twirling: The Fida'iyyin's Heroism and the Shabab's Burden 122 4. Pororoca, Thinking through Music: Fida'iyyin and Shabab Talk (Sometimes) Past Each Other 181 5. Reemerging: Noncockfights 236 6. Resurfacing: The Antilove of Empire 251 Glossary of Levantine Arabic Terms 273 References 285 Index 311

This ethnography is ultimately a deeply empathetic and humane call for attention to the urgent conditions of Palestinian refugees and other disenfranchised communities in Lebanon and beyond.-- "Arab Studies Quarterly" Barbosa elegantly and astutely blends two years of ethnographic research among Palestinian and other Arab residents of the Shatila refugee camp in Beirut with a critical 'diseducation' of structural concepts such as agency, gender, generation, power, and the state. Highly recommended.-- "Choice" The writing is beautiful, playful, and at times subversive, as the chapters weave back and forth through history, ethnography, and theory. It is a must-read for scholars of gender, refugees, youth cultures, and Middle East anthropology.-- "Marcia C. Inhorn, Yale University" This thoughtful ethnography, with its focus on masculinity, makes important interventions into the anthropological scholarship on gender, refugee studies, and state in the Middle East. There are direct voices of the interlocutors-- also female interlocutors--which combine beautifully and often humorously with the author's own voice and sensibility.-- "Nefissa Naguib, author of Nurturing Masculinities: Men, Food, and Family in Contemporary Egypt"