A Blacker and Browner Shade of Pale: Reconstructing Punk Rock History

Embedded in the transatlantic history of rock ‘n’ roll, punk rock has not only been regarded as a watershed moment in terms of music, aesthetics and music-related cultural practices, it has also been perceived as a subversive white cultural phenomenon. A Blacker and Browner Shade of Pale challenges this widespread and shortsighted assumption. People of color, particularly black Americans and Britons, and Latina/os have pro-actively contributed to punk’s evolution and shaped punk music culture in the United States and England. Examining why people of color are not linked to the punk rock genre and culture in normative discourse, this paper first scrutinizes the continuously unaddressed racialization of Anglo-American popular music itself and explores how the historical development and discursive construction of racial boundaries impacted the historiography of Anglo-American popular music. Building on these premises, the second central field of inquiry probes how the music press, aided and abetted by academic texts, constructs punk as a white music mono-culture that such discourse historicizes, analyzes, and maintains. Both popular (journalistic) and academic publications have largely ignored or underrepresented the presence of people of color, especially black (American) as well as Latina/o participants, in punk rock culture. The thesis’ third major focus imagines punk as a fluid social and musical convergence culture that continuously crosses unstable boundaries of genres, races, and genders. A Blacker and Browner Shade of Pale thus indicates an emerging awareness of how popular and academic discourse can become more sensitive to punk's multiracial, inclusive, and participatory mores