Black Punk as Freedom Praxis

• In Event: Country, Hip Hop and Punk: Cultural Resistance to Black Oppression

Abstract

Throughout the history of the west Blackness, at its best, is a social category that challenges normativity by disrupting imposed social meaning and creating alternative ways for being in the world. Punk Music Culture does the same, and not coincidentally Punk Music is Black Music. Indeed, Punk Music is an underexplored Black Vernacular expression premised on disruption, collectivity, and fighting for and imagining a different way of being. My paper (and planned book) will examine the historical, social, and cultural impact Blackness has had on shaping Punk culture and identities. I am interested in how Blackness that understands itself as non-normative challenges received ideas about the genre and lifestyle, and how Black concerns, experiences, and aesthetic labor are central to the development of the form. The proposed chapter that I will be sharing from my book project will spend time delineating the ideas of collectivity and DIY culture that are strong elements of progressive iterations of Punk and how they find a very bold “pre-punk” expression through The Black Panther Party Free Breakfast Program and the overlapping emergence of Detroit’s Black proto-punk band "Death."

Author

• Brian Stephens, Ohio University