PUNK AND REVOLUTION

.., THE BOOK

Punk and Revolution radically uproots punk from its iconic place in First World urban culture, Anglo popular music, and the Euro-American avant-garde, situating it instead as a crucial element in Peru’s culture of subversive militancy and political violence. Inspired by José Carlos Mariátegui’s Seven Interpretive Essays on Peruvian Reality, Shane Greene explores punk’s political aspirations and subcultural possibilities while complicating the dominant narratives of the war between the Shining Path and the Peruvian state. In these seven essays, Greene experiments with style and content, bends the ethnographic genre, and juxtaposes the textual and visual. He theorizes punk in Lima as a mode of aesthetic and material underproduction, rants at canonical cultural studies for its failure to acknowledge punk’s potential for generating revolutionary politics, and uncovers the messy overlaps between gender, ethnicity, class, and authenticity in the Lima punk scene. Following the theoretical interventions of Debord, Benjamin, and Bakhtin, Greene fundamentally redefines how we might think about the creative contours of punk subculture and the politics of anarchist praxis. (Backdrop:  “La Carpeta Negra” Taller NN)

ENDORSEMENTS

“Shane Greene’s pioneering book exudes a brilliant, destructive punk energy. It’s a screamed prose-theory-anthropology-zine-poem to punk, and a daring mosh pit stage dive of an experimental ethnography”

— Orin Starn (Duke University)

“Shane Greene offers a welcome enlightenment and dignity to a geo-obscurant adjunct in punk rock history, one which may be historically discredited as simply unruly but, in light of Punk and Revolution, has a revolutionary intellectualism/activism that is both singular to its culture and significant in its universal engagement. An amazing read.”

— Thurston Moore (College of Sonic Youth)

“Greene’s candid, no-holds-barred prose is refreshing…at times hilarious.”

— Miguel la Serna (University of North Carolina)

“Punk and Revolution is a major contribution to the comparative study of punk.”

— Paulo Drinot (University College London)

“Even the prose here observes no rules, so you know it’s true to its subject.”

— Remezcla