Here's something for your ears from while you're perusing White Riot: Punk Rock and the Politics of Race: an 'album' of songs treated in the text, with commentary by yours truly. Bop along, enjoy - though not the Skrewdriver track, which is offered only in the interest of scholarly completeness - and hear how different punks have lived and negotiated racial identity.
1. The Clash: 'White Riot'
Composed after witnessing black youth fight back against police presence - at the 1976 Notting Hill Carnival - "White Riot" calls for white youth to do the same, to have a "riot of [their] own." Its message of anti-racist solidarity with people of color is still, to this day, characteristic of most white punks, but it still problematically frames punk, at its inception, as an exclusively white phenomenon.
Springtime: The New Student Rebellions covers student revolts beginning in the autumn of 2009, jumping from the UK to Italy to California to France to Greece to Tunisia. But as Verso reader Miroslav Andjelic points out, Croatia was already in the midst of its own revolt over the imposition of tuition fees in higher education.
And here’s the proof:
For all you punk rock and critical race theory fans out there, three NYC White Riot: Punk Rock and the Politics of Race events to stimulate your mind and your ears:
Sunday, September 18th, 7:30pm | Film Screenings and Discussion | UnionDocs | 322 Union Ave Brooklyn | L to Lorimer or G to Metropolitan
A look at the varied voices that have explored punk rock and race in film, featuring selections from Rude Boy, Decline of Western Civilization, Afro-punk, Mas alla de los gritos/Beyond the Screams and The Punks Are Alright
Michael Sorkin's All Over the Map: Writing on Buildings and Cities, just published in hardback by Verso, has been garnering its fair share of praise on both sides of the Atlantic from popular media and urban design publications alike. The Guardian's architecture critic Rowan Moore has described Sorkin as "an enraged but forever hopeful liberal" wandering the streets of his dear lower Manhattan with a keen eye and sharp tongue for those corporate architects—watch out Rem Koolhaas—and their fawning critics "who dress the works that crush the freedoms." If there is a narrative that runs through these essays, it is in the particulate of September 11th that still coats Sorkin's architectural psyche:
The most persistent theme is the architectural response to the 9/11 attacks on the World Trade Centre, which happened in Sorkin's neighbourhood, early in the time span of All Over the Map. He combines his usual astute analysis of the politics with his own ideas of what might be built there—"A World Peace Dome" for example.