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1981
Volume 14, Issue 3
  • ISSN: 2044-1983
  • E-ISSN: 2044-3706

Abstract

This article examines how Latin American punk articulates alternative temporalities in response to crisis, repression and neo-liberal acceleration. Rather than adhering to a logic of linear progress or future-oriented optimism, punk often embodies a presentist regime of experience, as conceptualized by François Hartog and Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht. Within this framework, punk privileges a dense and decelerated present while maintaining an ambivalent relationship to the past and a critical stance towards the future. Drawing on Mikhail Bakhtin’s notion of the , the article explores how punk configures time and space through autobiographical testimonies, subcultural practices, performances and symbolic figures. Focusing on punk scenes in Argentina, Chile and Peru, it analyses how the aesthetics of immediacy, the myth of eternal youth, and selective uses of memory shape a spatiotemporal formation that challenges dominant cultural timelines. By engaging with both historical and contemporary materials, the article argues that the Latin American punk chronotope constitutes a mode of temporal disobedience, one that resists normalization and opens space for insurgent subjectivities and affective insurgencies.

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2025-10-03
2026-04-22

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/content/journals/10.1386/punk_00309_1
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  • Article Type: Article
Keyword(s): broad present; collective identity; counterculture; cultural memory; politics of time; punk subculture; subcultural studies; youth cultures

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