Skateboarding as imperial endeavour: A response to ‘The ludic lives of memoryscapes’

Abstract

The present commentary explores the implicit and explicit role of skateboarding and skate studies in upholding Russian colonial practices in, and the coloniality of knowledge on, the territories of the former Soviet Union. Addressing Duncan McDuie-Ra’s article ‘The ludic lives of memoryscapes: Skateboarding post-Soviet peripheries’, I argue for the need to consider more openly how the power relations extant in leisure practices may shape the region’s construction both in geopolitical terms and within academic discourse. In doing so, this examination urges a broader reconsideration of how skateboarding is analysed while simultaneously adding to the understanding of memoryscapes in the post-Soviet context.

The present commentary explores the implicit and explicit role of skateboarding and skate studies in upholding Russian colonial practices in, and the coloniality of knowledge on, the territories of the former Soviet Union. Addressing Duncan McDuie-Ra’s (2023b) article The ludic lives of memoryscapes: Skateboarding post-Soviet peripheries, I argue for the need to consider more openly how the power relations extant in leisure practices may shape the region’s construction both in geopolitical terms and within academic discourse. In doing so, this examination urges a broader reconsideration of how skateboarding is analysed while simultaneously adding to the understanding of memoryscapes in the post-Soviet context.

In the article, McDuie-Ra attempts to set out the ‘tension between hegemonic memory practices of state and state-like agents and the seemingly apolitical reinterpretation by skaters’ (p. 369). However, I contend that this reinterpretation by the skaters cannot be viewed as apolitical, especially when considering that the skate sites under discussion are situated within the complex colonial legacies of Russian and Soviet rule (Koplatadze, 2019; Spivak et al., 2006). This is particularly the case for the Russian-occupied territories of the South Caucasus (not ‘Caucases’ as is written throughout) which McDuie-Ra describes, where Putin continues to use his support of the de facto Abkhazian authorities to exert pressure on Georgia (Avdaliani, 2024; Gavin, 2024; Seskuria, 2021). Most recently, Russia has been involved in the construction of a Russian naval base near the Abkhazian town of Ochamchire (Nelson, 2023; Williams, 2024). The skateboarders’ actions, recorded in the 2017 documentary analysed by McDuie-Ra (Lindevall, 2017), whether conscious or not, are embedded within and respond to these legacies, becoming politicised by their very geopolitical context.

The ludic lives of memoryscapes brings into sharp relief some of the recent debates that are taking place within the field that may be loosely termed East European and Eurasian Studies (itself a problematised moniker see RUTA Association, n.d.) and the study in and of the countries that experienced Soviet socialist rule. Here, I draw on these discussions, examining how skateboarding intertwines with the Russian Federation’s foreign interventions and ideological projects, specifically in the context of the post-Soviet space. I attempt to problematise the framing of skateboarding as an emancipatory activity, arguing that its presentation as a ‘ludic’ adventurous, boundary-pushing pursuit in territories like Abkhazia can be seen as a form of contemporary imperialism, mirroring historical patterns of exploration and domination. By urging a reconsideration of how skateboarding is analysed within these contested spaces, I am pushing for a deeper understanding of the region’s complex memoryscapes and the ways in which global and local narratives of resistance and power intersect. By engaging with skateboarding in this way, I highlight the global hierarchies skate studies may serve to uphold.

The Russian full-scale invasion of Ukraine on 24th February 2022 has brought the contemporary Russian neo-imperialistic ideology and track record of foreign interference and aggression to the forefront of public discussion (Kassymbekova and Marat, 2022; Sasse, 2022). And yet, this can be understood as part of a broader pattern of Russian belligerence, with the 2008 Russo-Georgian war serving as a critical precursor not only to the 2022 war against Ukraine but to the 2014 annexation of Crimea and intervention in Donbas, and aggression in Syria since 2015. The region of Abkhazia, along with South Ossetia, has been occupied by Russia since the Russo-Georgian War in 2008, with 4000 Russian soldiers stationed on the territory and along the Enguri river, which marks the Georgian-Abkhazian border.

A substantial body of scholarship has emerged, mostly from political science and international relations, on Russia’s influence in Georgia’s occupied territories, encompassing various tactics such as military intervention, passportisation and annexation through bilateral agreements (see, for example, Ambrosio and Lange, 2016; Artman, 2013). This multifaceted approach is indicative of Russia’s broader strategy to assert its influence across the post-Soviet space, underpinned by a belief in its right to a ‘sphere of influence’. Russian talking points, which are imperialist in origin, are subtly repeated by McDuie-Ra through reference to the regions under discussion as ‘peripheries’ – although the Soviet Empire no longer exists, the relationships between Russia as the centre and other former Republics as peripheries persist through this framing. Moreover, the conflict is minimised through the brief allusion to the ‘heavily shelled building’ of the Council of Ministries in his discussion of skatespaces in Abkhazia’s largest city, Sukhumi; while mentioning the occupation of Abkhazia only in terms of the region’s ‘unsettled sovereignty’ feeds into Russian narratives that it has liberated Abkhazians (p. 379). In reality, Russia’s recognition of Abkhazia and South Ossetia as independent states has been condemned by Georgia and most of the international community.

There is a tendency for researchers, especially those who are also engaged in the practice, to underscore the liberatory and transgressive nature of skateboarding (Marlovits, 2024; Vivoni, 2009). This narrative of resistance is particularly compelling when skateboarding is positioned as a response to the restrictions of urban environments (Stratford, 2002), and, in particular, those of the neoliberal capitalist city (for example, Borden, 2001; Dinces, 2011; Gazeres, 2023; Vivoni and Folsom-Fraser, 2021). Although there has been some recent critical discourse within skateboarding scholarship (Abulwaha, 2020), these discussions are largely absent from their geopolitical contexts. We also need to consider the ways in which such leisure practices may function to uphold certain power structures and how, in the case of the skateboarders described by McDuie-Ra, their activities may serve to ideologically legitimate the Putin regime, its imperial ambitions and aggressive foreign policy. Indeed, Abkhazia is only accessible to the skaters as they come from the Russian side of the Abkhazia–Russia border, which is not under Georgian control, meeting in the Russian city of Krasnodar before crossing the border. By emphasising the ease of travel into the area, there is an implication that the space is safe and ok to visit and that there are no questions of political legitimacy of the space; however, this is illegal under Georgian law.

In his book Skateboarding and Urban Landscapes in Asia: Endless Spots, McDuie-Ra (2021) writes that ‘[s]earching for spots in post-Soviet Asia shifts the emphasis of skate mobilities from seeking perfect spots to seeking discovery in new lands, lands previously untouched by skateboarding’. In this regard, we can see a manifestation of skateboarding as an explicitly imperial endeavour (cf. Dennison, 1989; Ram, 2006). Through its focus on international or, in this case, Russian skateboarders (although Finnish skateboarders are also present) seeking ‘exotic’ skate spots, skate practices may replicate colonial patterns of exploration and, by extension, exploitation. By describing skate spots as ‘frontiers’, McDuie-Ra (whether consciously or not) may also serve to uphold imperial imaginaries through the orientalisation of locales and linking of skate spots with narratives of adventure and exploration ‘in the imagination of intrepid skaters’ (p. 371). As Willard Sunderland (2014) writes: ‘One of the persistent factors shaping Russian exploration was its close interrelationship with the history of Russian imperialism’. (p. 137) Beyond this particular case, this is surely relevant to other forms of imperialism and serves to underscore how subcultural practices such as skateboarding are not merely about accessing physical spaces but also about asserting practitioners’ ideological and cultural supremacy onto the built environment. It entails an assertion of skate culture, both specific (as defined by where the skateboarders have come from) and global, reinforcing global hierarchies. In its attempt at mastery over the built environment, skateboarding employs imperial (and often masculinist) narratives of conquering the city as the skateboarder-explorer exerts his power across the urban space (and metaphorically, as an extension, the world).

In one exchange, described by McDuie-Ra, the protagonists of the skate film Abkhazia encounter a local resident in Sukhumi.

Man:

‘You are not allowed to do this here’.

Korobov:

‘We can’t skate here?’

Man:

‘It’s a monument dedicated to the tragic pages of our history. You can’t do it here. Please understand this. Thank you’. (p. 378)

This brief exchange underscores the fraught nature of contested memoryscapes, particularly in regions that have experienced (and continue to experience) colonial legacies and deep geopolitical tensions. As Mariusz Czepczyński (2008: 41) writes,

‘[c]ultural landscape always mediates between past and future, representing both negative and positive aspects of history, as well as contemporary powers and visions. Authorities, hopes and expectations can be represented on many different levels and arrangements, all of them deeply anchored in local, regional and national historical discourses’.

Here, we are reminded that the legacies of the Soviet era are not remembered uniformly across the region that experienced Soviet socialist rule as the skateboarders ‘play’ on a memorial to Abkhaz poet and politician Bagrat Shinkuba, whose work deals with Abkhaz identity and cultural erasure (Gould, 2016; Sahni, 1997). This is itself a further act of erasure: we witness the skateboarders’ denial of local interpretations of the memoryscapes being described as tragic and painful with the aim of transforming these spaces into ‘playgrounds’. This act might be interpreted as a form of symbolic violence – a denial or overwriting of the local narratives and meanings attached to the site. Such actions mirror broader patterns of cultural erasure, where dominant groups or external actors (including those of the Russian Empire and Soviet Union) impose their interpretations and uses onto spaces, sidelining or invalidating local voices and experiences. This dynamic illustrates how practices such as skateboarding, often framed as emancipatory or subversive, can inadvertently reproduce imperialist logics, particularly when they occur in contested or colonised spaces.

This interaction between the skateboarders and the local man highlights the uneven ways in which memory is constructed and contested within post-Soviet contexts (Kabachnik, 2018; Yekelchyk, 2021). The legacies of Soviet socialism, the effects of post-Soviet transition, as well as the ongoing Russian influence in the region, means that historical narratives often remain fragmented and polarised. Monuments such as the one dedicated to Shinkuba are not merely physical markers of the past but are active participants in the ongoing and very real struggle over identity, sovereignty and historical interpretation (Epadze, 2022; Krzysztan, 2024). This becomes especially salient when mobile subcultural practices like skateboarding encounter such contested memoryscapes with little awareness of their symbolic weight. While the skateboarders’ engagement is driven by the material affordances of space rather than its historical or political significance, the resulting frictions reveal how uneven space is ‘known’, accessed and valued. These moments raise critical questions not about whether such practices should move globally, but about what happens when they do, particularly in places where memory, identity and sovereignty are still being actively negotiated.

McDuie-Ra’s framing of this incident fails to fully engage with these deeper implications. While there is brief recognition that the skateboarders’ actions may be read ‘as a denigration of memory, an affront to the contested narratives of the past’ (p. 382), there is little recognition of present conditions. Instead, the skateboarders’ actions are framed merely as ‘the limits of ludic geographies’ (p. 381). Here, ‘playing in the city’ is employed as an entirely uncritical framework. By adopting this ostensibly ‘neutral’ lens of urban play, the analysis risks flattening the complexities of the memoryscapes, ignoring the ways in which such spaces are deeply entangled with local histories, traumas and aspirations (Efadze, 2023). By privileging a largely aesthetic or surface-level reading, McDuie-Ra’s analysis risks overlooking the layered historical, political and spatial contexts in which these practices are embedded: even when cultural producers do not consciously engage with concepts like memory or identity in scholarly terms, their practices are nonetheless shaped by these dynamics. The failure to engage with local communities or to grant them agency, instead privileging the voice and orientalising gaze of the (Russian) skateboarder, deprives these narratives of complexity and reduces the understanding of how skateboarding functions as an expression of identity, or resistance, and naturalises its role as an imperial endeavour.

The decision to analyse the activities of skateboarders travelling to the territory to skate, rather than autochthonous skate culture, not only serves to legitimate Russian occupation but also privileges the dominant, often Western-centric, narratives of skateboarding culture (Willing and Pappalardo, 2023). I contend that this may have a further detrimental impact, functioning to marginalise or even erase local, indigenous skateboarding cultures that have emerged organically in postcolonial settings and underscores global hierarchies that are often present in skateboarding. This is despite the attention that skate studies has paid to the ways in which the activity may reinforce hegemonic dominance along gendered, racial and class lines, something that McDuie-Ra has indeed examined in the 2023 article, Racial diversity in skateboarding: Destabilising whiteness, decentring heartlands (2023a; See also, for example, Hellman and Odenbring, 2020; Yochim, 2009). Such an approach underscores the need for sensitivity and cultural competency as it overlooks the unique social, cultural and political dynamics of skate spaces globally, where skateboarding may hold different meanings and serve different functions according to local contexts (Akkad, 2023; Critchley, 2022). It centres on the experiences of outsiders rather than acknowledging the efforts of local skateboarders who are negotiating space and rights within their own cities.

In contrast to the protagonists of Abkhazia, the 2015 Georgian-language film When Earth Seems to Be Light, directed by Salome Machaidze, Tamuna Karumidze and David Meskhi explores the intersections of the local and global within Georgian skate culture. The film examines how global skateboarding influences interact with contemporary political and social forces within the country, shaping the practice and identity of its youth. As Lia Tsuladze (2009: 39) highlights,

‘Georgian youth culture has formed as an amorphous mixture of different consisting parts that have been remade Georgian [. . .] young people emphasize the uniqueness of Georgian youth culture as the combination of world innovations with Georgian traditions that makes a unique synthesis that cannot be reproduced elsewhere, and even the concept of freedom has its culture-specific connotation among Georgian youth’.

In When Earth Seems to Be Light, the architectural remnants of the Soviet past are reinterpreted by the young Georgian skateboarders and transformed into ‘ludic spaces’ as per McDuie-Ra. However, the documentary contextualises this transformation within a broader critique of Georgia’s sociopolitical climate and the rising conservative forces within the country (including the church and the government). By interspersing interviews and skateboarding footage with news clips of demonstrations, the film captures the tension between youthful aspirations for freedom and the restrictions imposed by political conservatism, highlighting the local inflection to the practice. In doing so it underscores the potential of skateboarding as an emancipatory practice and as a means for practitioners to reinterpret the (post-)Soviet memoryscapes and spaces in which they live. Skateboarding, in this sense, becomes a medium of resistance, allowing Georgian youth to assert their agency in the face of socio-economic challenges and cultural stagnation (Akhalgazrdobis kvleva damoukidebeli Sakartvelos taoba: imedebsa da gaurkvevlobas shoris, 2023; Keburia, 2022).

Similarly, Aisultan Seit’s (2020) short film Qazaq Skaters // Culture Shock, depicts the nascent skate culture in Almaty, Qazaqstan, once again presenting the particular blend of global skateboarding influences and local traditions that have emerged. The film highlights the self-fashioning of young Qazaq skateboarders, who incorporate traditional symbols such as the qus qanati (bird’s wing) and qoshqar müiiz (ram’s horn) motifs rooted in Saks art from the 1st Millennium BCE, into their looks (Orazbaeva, 1970). These zoomorphic motifs shaved and dyed into their hair, serve as visual markers of cultural heritage, merging ancient Qazaq artistic traditions and the particular semiotics of these symbols into their practices. Within this context, skateboarding becomes a means for these young people to express a hybridised identity – blending traditional Qazaq culture, and the legacies of the Soviet past, into globalised skate culture, through the insertion of their bodies into the post-Soviet cityscape.

An important dimension of this cultural practice, and a crucial difference between this short film and those analysed in ‘The ludic lives of memoryscapes’, lies in the power of asserting indigenous identity onto the skateboarders’ own landscapes. This is a marked contrast to the foreign skateboarders travelling to regions like Abkhazia to skate on remnants of a past that hold painful or complex meanings for those who live there – as evident in the exchange between the skateboarders and a local resident. By engaging with and reclaiming these spaces, local skateboarders are able to imbue them with their own narratives and heritage, reshaping how these landscapes are perceived and utilised (Mussatayeva et al., 2024). The act of carving and painting traditional motifs into their hair and embedding them into their practices underscores an intimate relationship with their history and environment, transforming skateboarding into an act of cultural self-determination. This localised interpretation of skateboarding rejects the external gaze that may orientalise or exoticise their spaces and instead affirms a deeply personal connection to their environment and traditions.

While McDuie-Ra’s analysis highlights the playfulness with which global skate culture interacts with contested memoryscapes in its presentation on screen, it falls short of acknowledging the agency of local communities and the deep connections that local skate cultures have with their history and their urban environments. This is not to say that McDuie-Ra’s approach lacks value; rather When Earth Seems to Be Light and Qazaq Skaters // Culture Shock highlight the transformative potential of skateboarding (and analysis of the practice through its visual representation) in reimagining and repurposing memory spaces, while simultaneously emphasising the importance of engaging with autochthonous skate culture as a means of reclaiming agency within postcolonial urban environments. Skateboarding takes on a different role and has different meaning within each ‘post-Soviet periphery’. In Georgia, the Soviet-era built environment is transformed into a tool for young people to push back against what they perceive as the negative social and political changes taking place within the country: it highlights the transformative potential of playful engagement with these spaces, in which the young skateboarders are able to reclaim a sense of agency within their own urban environment. This underscores the potential of skateboarding to shape and express new youth subjectivities. In Qazaqstan, on the other hand, the incorporation of traditional motifs into skateboarding culture underscores a reclaiming of heritage, and a reassertion of traditional, indigenous culture onto the postcolonial urban environment. These acts of reinterpretation challenge dominant narratives and offer alternative ways of engaging with history and place, thus highlighting skateboarding’s liberatory potential.

As Madina Tlostanova (2018: 5) argues, in Central Asia and the South Caucasus where ‘the symbolic power and influence of the failed Soviet empire’ has lasted longer than other formerly Soviet republics, postcolonial or decolonial discourse has largely been set to one side (although the situation has begun to change in this regard; Aripova, 2022; Arystanbek, 2023; Dadabaev, 2022; among others). Tlostanova highlights the absence of any critical reflection on Russia’s imperial project, proposing that, as a consequence, the post-Soviet region has been taken over by a discourse that she calls ‘futureless ontology’. As McDuie-Ra (2023a: 1815) himself has written elsewhere, within skate studies, ‘attention also needs to be given to the ways the core of the culture has been shaped and reshaped by different participants from different places and within different places’. And yet, by engaging solely with the text on screen without attending to the voices of the region or the particular context of the memoryscapes that McDuie-Ra is analysing, the examination of the skateboarders in Sukhumi is limited by the focus it places on the voices in the video. Instead of engaging critically with the legacies and ongoing experience of Soviet and Russian imperialism, the text leans into common tropes used to describe the region as ‘bleak’ – ‘Crumbling infrastructure, empty streets, empty piers extending into the Black Sea’ (p. 378).

The tendency to rely on anglophone scholarship and overlook local perspectives, as seen in McDuie-Ra’s analysis, entrenches a pattern within academic inquiry and aligns with Maria Sonevytsky’s account of epistemic imperialism. Sonevytsky (2022) defines this as ‘the hubris of believing that what one knows or studies from a privileged perspective, as within the Anglophone academy, can be exported wholesale to contexts about which one knows little or nothing’ (p. 22). In this sense, McDuie-Ra’s article exists as a symptom within a larger problem that is the coloniality of knowledge production, with the Western (and above all English-speaking) monopoly of knowledge appearing as one of the key manifestations of the coloniality of power (Hendl et al., 2024; Tlostanova, 2010). Achieving meaningful change, therefore, demands substantial shifts in how knowledge is produced and engaged with. A more contextually grounded approach could reveal how subcultural media, such as the skateboarding videos, both reflect and negotiate contested spatial meanings. Such an approach calls for a more critically situated mode of analysis – one that neither romanticises subcultural expression nor flattens it into a generic reflection of global trends. Instead, it demands the treatment of these media forms as complex cultural texts shaped by the interplay of local histories, spatial politics and transnational media flows. In this way, my response here is not a demand for ethnographic expertise in every case, but a call for greater attentiveness to local contextual nuance, that might enrich interpretation and push back against decontextualising tendencies, such as the articulation of the skateboarders’ practices as ‘apolitical’.

For skate studies to evolve substantively, it must move beyond colonial paradigms that perpetuate this epistemic imperialism such as those that I have articulated here, and instead, prioritise local voices and histories that continue to shape the social and cultural fabric of spaces (not only those that endure within the ‘post-Soviet’ region). It is by (re-)centring local knowledge and addressing these epistemic imbalances that scholars and practitioners alike may contribute to more equitable and holistic understandings of skateboarding. Only then can skateboarding’s potential as a ludic or emancipatory practice be fully realised, reflecting a more inclusive and nuanced understanding of its role in contemporary global urban cultures.