Punk and Its Afterlives: Introduction

“Punk and Its Afterlives: Introduction” presents the special issue and stages an intervention in the study of punk. Setting aside codified origin myths around punk, alternative histories and futures emerge to offer an expanded continuum of music, politics, and affect. Race and nation, gender and sexuality, all begin to resonate in ways that writing on punk has had difficulty accounting for. The articles in this special issue range from the 1970s to the present; they take us from Philadelphia to Moscow. The ambition is not to be encyclopedic but diagnostic: What questions about punk have we neglected to ask, and how does asking those questions, opening those histories, change what punk meant and continues to mean?