Punk & Post-Punk - Volume 14, Issue 3, 2025

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 chronotope, 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.

This article explores the intersection of collective identities and cultural state policies in Europe’s semi-peripheries, focusing on Czech and Greek punk. It examines punk rock’s role during periods of significant societal transformation, highlighting its mythologized influence in shaping new norms and values. The article addresses the challenges of defining these transitions, which were characterized by non-top-down changes and diverse trajectories. The study underscores the importance of DIY scenes in fostering bottom-up cultural shifts, particularly during phases of cultural liberalization and globalization. It analyses specific cases, such as the introduction of punk in Greece in 1982, in connection with the cultural policies of the PASOK General Secretariat of Youth and the perestroika-era cultural détente. Meanwhile, it explores how socialist Czechoslovakia attempted to regulate punk music through controlled spaces like ‘Rockfests’ (1986–89). The article also examines how different state and non-state actors navigated the influx of punk culture within these contexts. Ultimately, this study provides insights into how punk collectives, empowered by the DIY ethos, challenged prevailing political and cultural paradigms in both Czechoslovakia and Greece. It sheds light on the complexities of cultural exchange, state regulation and grassroots activism during pivotal periods of societal transition.

American James Dick is the lyricist and singer of the Red Propellers, a now Bristol-based band who make music inspired by the Velvet Underground and other New York bands of the punk and post-punk era, as well as film, performance and the visual arts. In this interview we discuss what the term ‘punk’ means, discordance, musical influences and infatuations, rebellion and reinvention.

Review of: Hardcore Punk in the Age of Reagan: The Lyrical Lashing of an American Presidency, Robert Fitzgerald (2025)

Chapel Hill, NC: The University of North Carolina Press, 241 pp.,

ISBN 978-1-46968-545-8, p/bk, GBP 25.00

Review of: Volcanic Tongue: A Time-Travelling Evangelist’s Guide to Late 20th Century Underground Music, David Keenan (2025)

London: White Rabbit, 524 pp.,

ISBN 978-1-39962-494-7, h/bk, GBP 30.00

Review of: To Hell with Poverty! A Class Act: Inside the Gang of Four, Jon King (2025)

London: Akashic Books, Ltd, Constable and Little, Brown Book Group, 336 pp.,

ISBN 978-1-40872-156-8, h/bk, GBP 25.00

Review of: Keep Your Ear to the Ground: A History of Punk Zines in DC, John R. Davis (2025)

Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press, 257 pp.,

ISBN 978-1-64712-635-3, p/bk, USD 39.95

Review of: Unscripted Moments: Conversations with Propagandhi (2020–2025), Greg Soden (2025)

East Sussex: Earth Island Books, 335 pp.,

ISBN 978-1-91686-469-6, p/bk, GBP 24.99

Review of: Shock Factory: The Visual Culture of Industrial Music, Nicolas Ballet (2025)

Bristol: Intellect, 587 pp.,

ISBN 978-1-83595-078-4, p/bk, GBP 54.95