| Abstract | Occupied Joy: A Practice of Resistance, Survival, and Healing Through the Lens of Black and Palestinian Liberation argues that Black and Palestinian radical joy is a vital tool and site of resistance alongside more visible and direct acts of rebellion, elevating affective forms of resistance as also disruptive. This project employs interdisciplinary methodologies by examining a multi-genre inventory of written texts and cultural sites as literature in order to centralize the liberatory potentials of joy as both individual and communal within Black and Palestinian skateboarding subcultures (chapter 1), the poetry of Black and Palestinian women, such as June Jordan, Aja Monet, and Suheir Hammad (chapter 2), and Black and Palestinian graffiti and murals (chapter 3). By theorizing from a framework of “aliveness,” this project theorizes occupied joy as a practice of anticolonial worldmaking and Being, resisting the ontological abjection that dominates public perceptions of Black and Palestinian life, relationality, and solidarity. |
