In the Shatila ‘cocktail’: discourses and narratives on past, present and future loss

This paper focuses on how Palestinians living in the Shatila camp in Beirut describe and perceive the neighbourhood and particularly its current and increasingly diverse population. It questions the social, political and symbolic representations and the production of existing narratives about this place. The present-day camp, or more generally the one that was regenerated at the end of the Lebanese War (1975-1990), is presented in radical opposition to a former, mythologised camp that has disappeared materially, socially and symbolically. These discourses about the camp of the past and the one in place now exude a narrative of loss.