Toward a Dialectic of Discrepant Cosmopolitanisms

The opening of dozens of pubs, cafés and bars catering to an alternative ‘youth’ clientele illustrates how Ramallah, Beirut and Amman have benefited from a post-2008 investment boom that curates leisure and cultural production with bohemian, DIY and other ‘counterculture’ aesthetics. Yet, social expectations and price points in these venues often betray the supposedly progressive politics of these ventures. In this article, I acknowledge that it would be easy to dismiss this cosmopolitan growth and the patterns of policing behavior they impose as an exclusionary and problematic ‘gentrification-as-liberation.’ But such a critique would miss the opportunity to engage the affective and social struggle over visions of a social future enacted by urban Arab youth in their choices of leisure consumption. I argue that being able to cogently critique gentrifying processes in these cities means we must first understand the development of counterculture and counter discourse as necessarily dialectical. The micro-negotiations between competing or discrepant cosmopolitanisms offer important insight into sociopolitical discourse and cosmopolitan feeling in urban centers that did not, in large part, witness sustained mass protests in the years following the Arab uprisings.