• 1 Rodríguez, Richard T. A Kiss Across the Ocean: Transatlantic Intimacies of British Post-Punk and US (...)
• 2 Hebdige, Dick. Subculture: The Meaning of Style, London: Routledge, 1979

1In 101, a documentary about Depeche Mode, young white fans at the Pasadena Rose Bowl call Latino/a/x fans “poseurs”. This incident is mentioned in Richard T. Rodríguez’s book A Kiss Across the Ocean,1 demonstrating how Latino/a/x fans were symbolically barred from belonging to the recognised audience of British pop music, built exclusively on its relationship to whiteness. This shows that punk/postpunk’s global dimension stretched way further than what one might assume by focusing only on transatlantic exchanges between New York and London. And yet, as early as 1979, the idea that punk territory went beyond essentialist attachments to cultural identities was suggested by Dick Hebdige in his seminal writings on punk, which extensively analyse the “messages” of British punk.2

• 3 Chambers, Iain. Migrancy, Culture, Identity, London: Routledge, 1994, p. 77

3Although Hebdige describes the style of punk as supporting political and social revolt, scholars with anti-racist backgrounds may be tempted to question this ideology anew. At a time when postcolonial studies are changing theoretical outlooks, is it still possible to analyse punk without taking into consideration the cultural consequences of migrations from the 1960s onwards? Pop music has reflected the global turn in music, carrying along with it the complexity of migration narratives. Therefore, the intersection of punk and immigration cannot be reduced to garments decorated with fascist symbols. Iain Chambers’ approach to music helps us to understand the ubiquity of pop music from the 1980s and 1990s in its relationship to dominated subjects. According to Chambers, music exercised “a hegemony that simultaneously created the conditions under which a network of sounds subsequently provoked the proliferation of margins and the emergence of other voices.”3 Because punk, as a cultural movement, is unanimously credited with being a space of resistance against all existing powers, we must seriously listen to those other voices – the voices of women, of queer and postcolonial subjects. Part of the recent publications devoted to punk are structured around this issue, and include all the contradictory dimensions the question can entail at first glance, in light of the forms of white hegemony which too often have circumscribed punk.

• 4 Robène, Luc. Serre, Solveig. “On veut plus des Beatles et d’leur musique de merde !”, introduction (...)
• 5 In France, the historiography often outlines the fact that punk transited from London to Paris thro (...)

5Dick Hebdige points out that when punk first appeared in 1976, its distinguishing musical features combined sub-cultures of white (London pub rock, mods…) and black origin (from 1960s British soul to reggae). The history of punk reflects the “cycles of resistance and assimilation in British society, each white subculture being considered as the specific articulation of the interactions between the working-class community and West Indian immigration.”4 However, in the historiography, the issue of cultural transfers in punk has always been framed as a key for understanding internal exchanges within the West.5 But since the middle of the 2010s, research groups such as Punk Scholars Network and Punk is not dead have transformed the field by reworking their approach.

• 6 Rodríguez, Richard T. A Kiss across the Ocean, op. cit.
• 7 Ibid., p. 76
• 8 Gutmair, Ulrich. Wir sind die Türken von Morgen: neue Welle, neues Deutschland, Stuttgart: Tropen S (...)
• 9 Hall, Stuart. “Nouvelles ethnicités”, Art et mondialisation: une anthologie de 1950 à nos jours, Pa (...)

7Besides the issue of cultural transfers, the idea of abandoning the conventional interpretations of punk, understood as being predisposed to defending whiteness,6 is a common pursuit for many authors attempting to re-evaluate the aesthetic of punk and its political contents. In order to emphasize the significance of migrant trajectories, Richard T. Rodríguez highlights the role played by family history in British punk, from Adam Ant’s Romany roots to Siouxsie Sioux’s Belgian father. According to Rodríguez, both suffered forms of social exclusion as children, leading them to appropriate the “symbolic capital of racialized others”7. This experience was decisive for creating their personas and led to their use of Native American culture, which in turn explains the identification of Latino/a/x fans to post-punk music. In his book Wir sind die Türken von Morgen devoted to the Neue Deutsche Welle, Ulrich Gutmair offers an in-depth analysis of the band Deutsche Amerikanische Freundschaft through a similar perspective. He shows how the identity of Gabi-Delgado Lopez, the band’s Spanish-born German singer, led him to write lyrics as a way to examine how Turkish immigration was transforming German society. In one of the band’s first songs, which aims at analysing racism, he plays a xenophobe describing the Kreuzberg neighbourhood in Berlin as a “neue Izmir”. Gutmair explains that the new borders established by the Cold War “produced renewed worries concerning foreigners.”8 Through a process reflecting their own real or perceived social marginality, punk musicians position alterity as a salient feature in the lyrics and imageries that they produce in order to disaffiliate themselves from social normativity, defined as a series of ideals including nationalism. Echoing lyrics on unemployment and relationships, this theme results in a form of social realism that radically challenged the subjectivity of the previous generation, exemplified by David Bowie and Marc Bolan’s escapism. Punk’s non-coercive vision of race is similar to Stuart Hall’s essays, which were published just as post-punk was developing.9

• 10 Debris Eric et Ovidie, Un bon hippie est un hippie mort, Paris: Camion blanc, p. 37
• 11 Rodríguez, Richard T. A Kiss across the Ocean, op. cit., p. 74
• 12 Ibid., p. 5
• 13 Ibid., p. 17

10In France, too, the relics of fascism were part of the punk aesthetic. In 1981, the band Métal Urbain released an album entitled Les Hommes morts sont dangereux [Dead men are dangerous] featuring an eagle whose presence questioned the powerful polarity between freedom and fascism. Métal Urbain stated the eagle was a “way to cultivate paradox”.10 In this respect, one of the issues of visuality, for the punk movement, was to restore the opacity of modern symbols, to condense them, so that images became something more mysterious than mere functional communication tools. The disjunction between symbols and their fixed cultural content goes hand in hand with punk’s refusal to identify with established cultural norms and to perform identities, an attitude that includes musicians and their audience alike. Working on the assumption that the play on paleness, on corporeal chiaroscuros – white skins and black clothes – were a way of framing white normativity in racial and aesthetical terms,11 Rodríguez argues that the adoption of this subculture by Latino/a/x people was invested as a way of playing on racial boundaries and on the very definition of goth. Therefore, although punk politics seem to be “commonly demarcated in class-structured and racially segregated ways”,12 it is possible to understand punk in a new way, as a space that can dis-identify from assigned identities and re-identify according to subjective constructs allowed by visuality. Punk and post-punk as a space for the dis-identification from assigned identities extends to the territory of gender. Consider Boy George, whose persona, according to Rodríguez, quoting José Esteban Muñoz, transformed “a post-punk ‘commons’ aspirant for a queer futurity.”13

• 14 Punk Fashion (9 May-14 August 2013, New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art) ; Europunk (7 April 2011- (...)

12The more historically-informed approach of Action Time Vision: Punk & Post-punk and Punk Art History by Marie Arleth Skov should be mentioned alongside Rodríguez’s offering. Both books question in a new way the relationship between the punk aesthetic and modernism, through a distinctive reflexive approach that consistently explores the epistemological dangers implied by the examination of punk art through the lens of history. With case studies ranging from the origins of the movement to the productions of the Berlin-based band Die tödliche Doris, the author’s approach uses new arguments to foreground punk’s oppositional dimension in its challenging of art. According to Arleth Skov, punk art is based not so much on artistic quotations as on recycling what already exists. By locating this culture below the territory of art, she aims to articulate a critical discourse directed against two authoritative exhibitions, Punk Fashion and Europunk,14 which Arleth Skov describes as contradictory attempts to artialize punk.