Coloring Between the Lines of Punk and Hardcore: From Absence to Black Punk Power (original) (raw)

Abstract

For three decades, African Americans have often been depicted in the popular press and even independent media as embodying the living legacy of a hip hop nation, which the media often signifies as an urban, misogynist, and materialistic “street level” musical genre and lifestyle. Such representation effectively diminishes, or even negates, through absence or scant coverage, African American participation in punk and rock’n’roll. In doing so, the media perpetuates hegemonic notions of African Americans as a homogeneous community -- easily containable “others” -- without nuance and individuation. Ensminger interrogates the common misconception that punk is essentially a white (or Anglo) Do-it-Yourself participatory subculture. In contrast, he argues that the neglect of a mixed, diverse, and inclusive punk history demonstrates that African American punk cultural productions are undervalued, absent, or deleted. Such interrogation leads to what Stuart Hall has termed “making stereotypes uninhabitable” in his lecture “Representation and Media” (1997). Ensminger reclaims the roles of people of color in punk, thus undermines fixed, normalized assumptions about race in American pop culture, rendering them unstable and arbitrary. Rewriting punk music as a transhistorical, cross-cultural, and synergistic negotiation between African American and Anglo music cultures creates new potentials for meaning and a mode of empowerment for a generation previously unaware of punk’s truly democratic ethos. This paper can be accessed here: http://www.pomoculture.org/2013/09/03/coloring-between-the-lines-of-punk-and-hardcore-from-absence-to-black-punk-power/

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