White Riot: Punk Rock and the Politics of Race
From the Clash to Los Crudos, skinheads to afro-punks, the punk rock movement has been obsessed by race. And yet the connections have never been traced in a comprehensive way.
White Riot is the definitive study of the subject, collecting first-person writing, lyrics, letters to zines, and analyses of punk history from across the globe. This book brings together writing from leading critics such as Greil Marcus and Dick Hebdige, personal reflections from punk pioneers such as Jimmy Pursey, Darryl Jenifer and Mimi Nguyen, and reports on punk scenes from Toronto to Jakarta.
Paperback, 336 pages
ISBN: 9781844676880
July 2011
$24.95 / £14.99 / $31.00CAN
Reviews
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White Riot—this loud, brilliant collection of rants and critical explosions on race, music, and rebellion—has a radical message that goes far beyond punk: in order to build transformative movements and cultures, we first have to reckon with the riots of our own.
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Verso gives us an engaging collection of political essays about race and representation in punk from critics like Greil Marcus to Paul Simonon of the Clash. The book features photos, lyrics, letters, and accessible articles from musicians and academics concerned about the greater issues in revolutionary music.
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It’s a banging pit of engagement, and a shocking reminder that no entire book has ever been dedicated to this subject before.
Blog
"Old School, New School, Frankfurt School": Minima Moralia goes punk
A keen writer on music and an extraordinarily sharp theorist, Theodor Adorno once wrote "The task of art today is to bring chaos into order."
His own selection of essays and journalism on music, Quasi Una Fantasia, reverberates with his deep conviction in the human properties of music as a form capable of resisting barbarity. We're not sure, therefore, how he'd feel about Minima Moralia EP.
"Helping get the party started" - An interview on Punk Rock
Stir features a long interview with the editors of White Riot: Punk Rock and the Politics of Race, Stephen Duncombe and Maxwell Tremblay. The "basic premise" on which the book is grounded, Duncombe and Tremblay explain, is that "race is deeply embedded in Punk Rock, not just musically ... but integral to its very formations." Punk was one of the first subcultures that "acknowledged that we (in the UK and US) were now all living in a multicultural society." At the same time, the book also aims to debunk a white-only representation of the punk scene, stressing
those contributions of non-white punks who were part of the scene from the very beginning yet tend to be marginalized or white-washed entirely out of standard punk histories.
There is much to learn from the history of punk. In an age in which racism seems to be again on the rise, today's young radicals should bear in mind how white punks who claimed to have an anti-racist approach ended up hegemonising the movement, Maxwell Tremblay emphasises:
The lesson of punk rock's attempt to do this is to be mindful of the ways in which subcultures can, in fact, replicate that white power structure within their own limits.
Meet Me at the Race Riot: People of Color in Zines from 1990-Today
Verso's September release White Riot: Punk Rock and the Politics of Race, edited by Stephen Duncombe and Maxwell Tremblay, tries to reconstruct the subtle and complex conversations punks have had around issues of racial identity and inequality.
These dialogues are, needless to say, still taking place, and the work is far from finished.
If you're in the New York area, and at all interested in these problems, you need to go to this.
via For the Birds:
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Meet Me at the Race Riot: People of Color in Zines from 1990-Today
Wednesday, November 16 · 7:00pm - 9:00pm
Barnard College
307 Milbank Hall (3rd floor)
North end of campus
3009 Broadway
New York, NY 10027