Punk

by Golnar Nikpour, Mimi Thi Nguyen

"Punk is a moving target": Punk is an unwieldy object of study--because of fictions that circulate as truth, absences in archives and the questionable subject of recovery, and the passage of “minor” details into fields of knowledge. A conversation about the politics of methodology, and historiography, of subculture.

MIMI THI NGUYEN is an Associate Professor of Gender and Women’s Studies and Asian American Studies at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign and the author of The Gift of Freedom. She has made zines since 1991, including Slander and the compilation zine Race Riot. Nguyen is a former Punk Planet columnist and a Maximum Rocknroll shitworker; she is also a frequent collaborator with Daniela Capistrano for the POC Zine Project.

GOLNAR NIKPOUR served as co-coordinator of Maximum Rocknroll between 2004 and 2007. She is also a founding editor of B|ta’arof, a magazine featuring art, literature, historiography, and cultural critique related to Iran and its diaspora. She was born in Tehran, Iran, and lives in New York City.

Genres: Music

32 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2013

Reviews

[Leslie]

This zine documents a conversation between a pair of "punk academics whose scholarship has nothing to do with punk." This is definitely the first text I've ever read about punk that is written in an academic register. A quote I liked from Mimi Thi Nguyen: "When I first discovered punk, I checked out books on punk from the local library, but I felt no affinity for these stories--largely about the emergence of British punk, but also the New York scene--at all. It seemed so static and staid--oh great, more tortured male geniuses with pretensions to a modernist avant garde!--and so far removed from, or irrelevant to, the scenes I saw around me. Which is not to say I'm not fascinated by what punk stories become canonized (even in all the oral histories that are compiled by punks) before this moment--why are we burdened with reams of paper about The Sex Pistols, but little about Poly Styrene or Vi Subversa?--because it does matter what we know and value about punk parameters. But when I worried about these theories of value--masculinity, modernism, individualism, violence, whatever--that generate our knowledge about what is punk, I wrote about it in zines, not in academic journals, even while in graduate school, because it mattered to me that these erasures or norms not continue IN punk."

[Melanie · Rating 5 out of 5]

the best thing I have read about punk in a very long time.