Occupied Joy: The Politics of Skateboarding in Palestine

Abstract:The tangible project of decolonization requires revolutionary hope to sustain it. Quite often, studies surrounding oppressed populations largely tend to theorize from a point of death, contributing to a culture of hopelessness and pessimism. This essay explores what happens when we theorize from a point of life and joy, specifically theorizing Palestinian resistance and place-claiming through the embodied sport of skateboarding—not in hopes of erasing death, but in hopes of providing a fuller view, and looking for ruptures wherein quotidian life seeps through coloniality as a form of resistance itself. Thinking through skateboarding as a subculture, I analyze a nonprofit organization, SkatePal and its media presence, using my theory and analytic: occupied joy. I argue that the skate scene in Palestine functions as a site of quotidian anticolonial and anti-imperialist resistance through reclaiming freedom of movement, resisting multiple effects of military occupation, and unsettling trauma spectacle through the play and joy associated with the immediate act of skating. In theorizing from life and bearing witness to the sense of agency that skateboarding restores in Palestinian youth, there is hope that the theory of occupied joy can do the same for other oppressed peoples, bringing us all tangibly closer to a more liberated world.