Event

White Riot? Punk Rock and the Politics of Race

Punk, in its first incarnations, was an attempt by young whites, dissatisfied with the world they were born into, to grab and forge a new ethnicity for themselves. What form it took was up for grabs. Punks of other races, meanwhile, navigated the space between the racism of the dominant culture and that of their "alternative" scene.

Born out of a time: the mid 1970s, and in places: the UK and US, when and where white supremacy was being contested politically, culturally and demographically, punk rock was forced sometimes openly and sometimes obliquely, at times with hostility and at other times with empathy to grapple with the issue of race. The result has been a multi-vocal argument about what it means to be white or not in a world where whiteness is no longer the assumed universal.

Join "White Riot" editors Stephen Duncombe and Maxwell Tremblay for a look at the varied voices that have explored the issue of punk rock and race in film, and a discussion on how different punks have lived and negotiated racial identity.

"White Riot," recently released from Verso and for sale at the event, is the definitive study of the subject, collecting first-person writing, lyrics, letters to zines, and analyses of punk history from across the globe.