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CANCELLED: On Not Being Punk or Mexican-American and Predicating the Wildebeest of Our Future

16 March 2020, 5:30 pm–7:00 pm

punk lat am

CANCELLED

This event is free.

Event Information

Open to

All

Availability

Yes

Cost

Free

Organiser

UCL Institute of the Americas

Location

Seminar Room 105
Institute of the Americas
51 Gordon Square
London
WC1H 0PN
United Kingdom

When exactly did the term ‘punk’ go from street insult to global descriptor of a subcultural musical phenomenon? This talk departs from a now abandoned historical question: When exactly did the term ‘punk’ go from street insult to global descriptor of a subcultural musical phenomenon? Contrary to popular belief, the story that ensues does not centre on the mid-seventies but rather the late sixties. Nor does it involve rehashed accounts of London or New York, asking instead we reconceptualize Saginaw, Michigan as an epicentre of certain cosmic forces. Even more contrary to belief, the primary figure in the story involves a punk who refuses to be named as such, presenting instead as a utopian whose refusal to engage in identity politics opens up a radical ontological horizon from which the most important lessons to be gained come from the Wildebeest. 

About the Speaker

Shane Greene is an anthropologist and cultural studies scholar working on subcultures, music, art, and social movements across the Americas. He is the author of two books, Punk and Revolution (Duke U. Press, 2016) about the political history of punk in Lima during Peru’s war with the Maoist Shining Path, and Customizing Indigeneity (Stanford U. Press, 2009), about the history and politics of the native Amazonian movement in Peru. Currently, along with Olga Rodríguez-Ulloa and Rodrigo Quijano, he is coediting a compilation volume titled Punk! Las Américas Edition that uses punk as a critical hemispheric lens to rethink the Americas.