What does a hemispheric Americas look like when done through the lens of punk music, visuals and literature? That is the core premise of this book, presented through a collage of analytical, aesthetic and experiential takes on punk across the continent.

This book challenges the dominant vision of punk - particularly its white masculine protagonists and deep Anglocentrism - by analysing punk as a critical lens into the disputed territories of 'America', a term that hides the heterogeneous struggles, global histories, hopes and despairs of late twentieth and early twenty-first century experience. Compiling academic essays and punk paraphernalia (interviews, zines, poetry and visual segments) into a single volume, the book seeks to explore punk life through its multiple registers, through vivid musical dialogues, excessive visual displays and underground literary expression.

The kaleidoscopic accounts include everything from sustained academic inquiry and photo portraits to anarchist manifestos and interview excerpts with notable punk figures. The result is a radically heterogenous mixture that seeks to reposition punk and las Americas as intrinsically bound up in each other's history: for better and for worse. Out of critical pasts, within an urgent present and toward many different possible futures.

This volume critically refashions punk to suggest it emerges from within the long-term historical experience of las Americas in all their plurality and is useful as a mode of critique towards the hegemonic dimensions of America in its imperial singularity. The book is rooted in a theory of 'radical heterogeneity' and thus represents a collage-like juxtaposition of punk perspectives from across the entire hemisphere and via divergent contributions: academic, experiential and aesthetic.

Readership for this collection will include both academic and general readers.

Primary readership will be academic. It will appeal to researchers, scholars, educators and students in the following fields: American studies, Latin American studies, media and communication, cultural studies, sociology, history, music, ethnomusicology, anthropology, art, literature.

General readership will be among those interested in the following areas - anarchism, music, subculture, literature, independent publishing, photography.

About the Author

Olga Rodriguez-Ulloa teaches at Lafayette College. She specializes in contemporary Latin American culture and literatures, with emphasis on the Andean region.

Rodrigo Quijano is a poet and art researcher. He has worked on contemporary art exhibitions in Lima, Sao Paulo, Mexico, Buenos Aires, Santiago, Bogotai, and the 57 Biennial in Venice.

Shane Greene is professor of anthropology at Indiana University Bloomington. He is the author of Punk and Revolution: 7 More Interpretations of Peruvian Reality (2017, Duke University Press).

Reviews

'The book moves beyond the analysis of a single scene, city or nation to consider the 'radical heterogeneity and simultaneous interconnectedness of the Americas through a series of critical punk lenses' (16). Contributors explore Spanish-speaking parts of the Americas, native Alaskans, the English-speaking Caribbean and Brazil. The geographical reach is vast and the cultural approaches to punk in these parts of the Americas display both commonalities and unique characteristics and struggles. [...] The chapters include a mix of traditional academic essays, interviews, a manifesto, an excerpt from a novel, photo essays, a blog reproduction and contributions that are more journalistic in form. The inclusion of different types of materials and diverse analytical approaches yields an edited collection with a rich texture. Moreover, the varied approaches to engaging and analysing punk provide a much more interesting opportunity for a reader to consider how punk exists as a blend of music, cultural practice, ethical framework and way of being in the world. [...] The diverse types of contributions to PUNK! Las Americas Edition make for an engaging intellectual experience that mirrors the myriad ways punks materialize a punk life.'

-- Daniel Makagon, Punk & Post-Punk

'PUNK! Las Americas Edition expands the understanding of punk and serves a very important anti-colonial purpose in punk-related scholarship.'

-- David Vila Dieguez, University of Texas at El Paso

'Showcasing the work and testimony of scholars, artists, and activists from Alaska to Patagonia, and many places in between, through essays, interviews, record reviews, poems, novel excerpts, photographs, zines, record and cassette covers, and manifestos, PUNK! Las Americas Edition invites us to think about punk otherwise. By critically engaging with punk as a musical genre and subculture and as an aesthetic and disposition with multiple interconnected manifestations across the hemisphere, this book demonstrates that punk has much to teach us about the Americas and that the Americas have much to teach us about punk.'

-- Paulo Drinot, University College London

'This volume is a practice: it shows "contradiction" empirically and uses it abstractly, it distinguishes between "the visual" and "the sonic" and mixes them ch'ixi style as it does "the oral" and "the written" - but sorry: because heterogeneity is a main analytics, there is not "the" singular anything: sonic, visual, oral or written - and therefore, perhaps, neither of those fields should be separated ... but they are: ch'ixi style! On transgressing, this volume shows complexity and its "method" becomes tangible, as tangible as all the brilliant hiStories it tells and hints at. An academic book through and through, the transgressions this volume performs run the risk of becoming exemplary. An inspiring thrill to read and indeed to think through. Congratulations to its heterogenous editors!'

-- Marisol de la Cadena, UC Davis



Book Information
ISBN 9781789385847
Author Olga Rodriguez-Ulloa
Format Paperback
Page Count 394
Imprint Intellect Books
Publisher Intellect Books