BEYOND “NO FUTURE”: A GERMAN PUNK READER

eds., Mirko Hall, Seth Howes, and Cyrus Shahan

Punk rock has had quite a decade. Exhibition catalogs, photographic retrospectives, CD box sets, and sold-out reunion tours attest to the central role punk continues to play in stories we tell about the ‘70s and ‘80s, about their politics, and about their culture. If punk comes from England, it has always been equally at home in Germany, where punk scenes, zine networks, and record labels appeared almost as quickly as they had in Britain and the United States. In Germany, as in Britain and the United States, new archives, museum exhibits, and discography projects have emerged which are devoted exclusively to punk—and to thinking about what punk meant for its own historical moment and might still mean for ours.

At this moment of its intense commemoration, German punk therefore seems in need of an interdisciplinary, theoretically informed scholarship all its own. This would be a critical conversation about punk's aesthetic genealogies, transnational affiliations, institutional histories, and political affiliations. What was German punk? What things did it have to say? How did it say them, on whose behalf, and to whom? Can theoretical and methodological interventions developed to explain American or English phenomena be truly adequate to German punk?

To inaugurate this discussion, we invite essay submissions for inclusion in a book-length volume on the cultures of punk in Germany. Possible topics include, but are not limited to:

--after punk: post-punk; neo-punk; anti-punk; New Punk; dark wave, cold wave, and no wave.
--punk in the archive: assembling discographies; building punk archives; the ethics of punk musealization.
--punk politics: punk as protest culture; the political theory of punk; punk interventions; punk and a-politicality; punk, the Left, and the Right.
--punk and the Cold War: punk and MAD eschatology; punk rocking around the Bloc; punk as portable global good; punk of German division; punk as Wendekultur.
--punk and the body: punk and style; the genders and sexes of punk; punk performativity; punks, cyborgs, the man-machine.
punks in the city: punk architectures and punk spaces; punks, decay, and ruination; punk graffiti; punk and Occupation.

Please send >500 word abstracts and brief biographical statements in English to all editors: Mirko M. Hall [mirko.hall[at]converse.edu], Seth Howes [howes[at]oakland.edu], and Cyrus Shahan [cshahan[at]colby.edu] by 01 February 2013. Notification of acceptance will be given shortly thereafter. Completed essays are tentatively due on 01 September 2013.