August 19, 2001, 7:21 p.m.
Did you know that some folks get really, really mad that
I have bad things to say about punk rock? I have the sense they
dismiss me with a superior, "If you're not now, you never were,"
which entirely misses the point of why I'm a punk rock
ex-patriate.
7:06 p.m.
The following is the slap-dash introduction
I wrote for the second issue of the compilation zine ...Race
Riot, which will hopefully find its way to the copy store sometime
this week as the final contributions (FINALLY) trickled in.
Theoretically speaking I've always had problems with the idea of "making
room for other voices" (the limits of liberal pluralism, the issue
of accepting "experience" as necessarily "authentic" or "real," et
cetera) so I tried very hard to frame this as a more pointed grouping of
essays and writing without being overly academic (though there are
footnotes). Does it work? At this point, two years after I started this
project, I say, "good enough," and "good riddance!" Where's my
gluestick, so I can finish this?!
Years ago I decided that I wanted -or needed-- a conversation about
race that wasn't dominated by liberal platitudes, romances with
exoticism, race traitors or racist cool. I needed it if I was going to
justify to myself my participation in this scene, whether or not I
abandoned the Punk Rock for a while or for good. So in the summer of
1995 I passed out flyers, pinned them to the corkboard on the door of
Epicenter. We first met in the library at the store, nine or ten people
of color sprawled across torn couches and lumpy armchairs. I don't even
remember what we said, but I do remember feeling relief, and a
beginning.
But I wanted to come away from those first (and few) early meetings
with something tangible. My first attempts to compose a manifesto of
sorts (everyone loves a manifesto!) were short and bitter. Much later, I
wrote in a call for submissions to the first Race Riot
compilation:
"This is about theorizing our specific histories, experiences, and
situated knowledges. This is about finding the language and vocabulary
to describe the condition of belonging to these multiple, provisional,
and sometimes contradictory spaces --racial, ethnic, cultural, musical,
lingual, political, sexual, et cetera-and how we negotiate the gaps, the
friction between them. And importantly, this is about wanting to create
new spaces."
There was nothing yet in place that might have served as an informal
network, only vague rumors and tenuous connections (friends of friends
who'd heard of so-and-so). I must have sent out hundreds of postcards,
many of which were returned, mailing addresses no longer in service, or
never answered, lost in the mail or simply torn into pieces or ignored.
I was looking to do two things: 1) create some skeleton network of
people of color, and 2) manage a nuanced critique of racism in punk rock
beyond the simplified pronouncements ("Nazis suck") and inadequate
analyses ("We're all united by punk rock, color doesn't matter"1 ). Many
of the writers who eventually made their way into the compilation
expressed the sense of being isolated in their frustration -- or, having
never considered the issue of "race" before in their punk rock or other
surroundings, found themselves dealing with disappointment, or rage. I
wanted to provide a context for all these monologues and conversations
alike.
What I eventually finished over a period of two years was an
experiment in "by, for, and about" people of color in, around, or on
their way out of punk rock. (Along with original writing, I reprinted
essays and excerpts from defunct or hard-to-find zines, ones that had
gone out-of-print, or had only printed twenty, or fifty.) I was angry,
bored with punk rock - doing the Race Riot redeemed my
participation in my own eyes, in part.
+++
I always had specific goals in mind with the
Race Riot project.
I do not want the compilation to be a mere exercise in "telling our
stories" or "sharing" in the "richness" of diversity, and I especially
didn't want to be "discovered" -- as in, "Look, there are people of
color in punk!" I'm not necessarily into "discovering identity" as I am
"deconstructing social relations and the exercise of power." This is not
food to be consumed - how many analogies to a "happy multiculturalism"
refer to dining in exotic restaurants? -or a show or spectacle to be
enjoyed. This is sharp, sharpened -- needles and splinters to be pushed
under the surface of skin, experienced as punctures and upheavals. I
don't want to make this comfortable, or comforting - this is supposed to
fuck with you.
Neither do I want to stop short of critical engagement with the
conditions and ideological apparatus that produce both experiences and
their meanings. That is, our experiences are not just "personal" or
individual, but shaped by social forces and the micro- and
macro-politics of power embedded in institutions and ideologies, in the
structural apparatuses and the everyday encounter -- on the sidewalk or
work place or classroom or bedroom.
On the Invasian list-serv the question had to be asked, and then
bitterly discussed: is a "special issue" of Heartattack (or any
other magazine) tokenism? Would it re-cast us as either educator
("Please tell us about your pain!") or enemy ("Why are you persecuting
me? I never owned any slaves or did anything to you!")? To both
questions I answered "yes, of course;" after all, a "special issue"
implicitly acknowledges that here is something we don't talk about
everyday. A "special issue" can be easily dismissed or discarded,
because the next will no doubt return to "punk, as usual." And as such,
it's practically guaranteed that some of us will be relegated to
educator or enemy or both at once, because whatever we do, it will be an
intervention, however limited or circumscribed, and it will trigger
those guilt-reflexes -- along with resentment, or hostility.
So I also worry about tokenism and its close
relation exceptionalism - I do not want this to become an exercise in
either. The problem of additive diversity -dabbing a bit of color into
the landscape- does not fundamentally disrupt the homogeneity or status
quo. (I still know girls and boys who claim affinity with me because it
suits their "anti-racist" image.) I especially worry about all these in
relation to the Race Riot
because in some sense it's easy to ignore what meaning a riot might have
outside of these photocopied pages, and on the other, it's easy to put
on the shelf and say, "Look, there, I care!"
And I do not want this discussion to be limited to a "race
discussion." Race, gender, class, sexuality, geography, and what queer
theorist Judith Butler calls the "embarrassed et cetera" (because no
list is adequate), are not cans in a cupboard, discrete things we might
draw lines around to distinguish what's what. These are dynamic
processes of making meaning of bodies, gestures, or movements, and they
form and deform each other in complex and contradictory ways, but
neither are these categories equivalent or interchangeable. "Fat
oppression" is not equivalent to "having black skin" (as one famous
grrrl would have it) because the historical and sociopolitical
connotations are not the same in fact, form, function or even
(especially) degree. (Slavery and lynching being the most obvious.)
However, the meaning of fatness (or thinness) does shift according to
gender, race, sexuality, geopolitics and class - and each of these
meanings must be located in its historical context in order to make
sense of how they might limit (or permit) our mobility in the present.
Yes, the work of critical analysis is complicated, contextual, and
sometimes confusing, but so is power and how it operates, and how else
would you have it be in response?
+++
Clearly, these issues have meaning beyond the confines of punk rock,
riot grrrl, or fanzines - we are also forced to examine these questions
in activism and in academia. These are issues I'm forced to deal with in
my work and my teaching in my other life as an ethnic studies/women's
studies scholar, and embody important questions for our activism as
well. So I don't want this compilation series to simply stand as a
critique of a specific subcultural space or musical genre, even though
not everything in here is specifically a critique. And in the end I'm a
punk rock expatriate, still. No matter how many shows, how many columns,
how many zines, how many bands - I still don't count myself in, but out.
Punk rock still can't deal with race in any meaningful way, and because
punk rock is not outside of the so-called "mainstream" (reproducing all
sorts of hegemonic discourses about gender and race, most obviously),
punk rock will never be able to deal with race alone. 2
So this is relevant, how we think outside of
punk rock or "the personal"; that is, we have to reconsider what we think counts as "working"
on our politics, to imagine these to be more than attitudinal adjustments
and individual "prejudices," and more than the redistribution of wealth or the
achievement of "rights."3 I can't even begin to address
what this might be, since there have been reams of books
written on the topic; nevertheless I want to raise the bar and
issue that challenge. At the same time there has to be room for prose
as well as politics, for art as well as activism, and theory as well as
practice.
Thus the essays and pieces published in this issue of Race Riot range
broadly across the spectrum of non-fiction/fiction. In this issue,
questions of identity/identification/disidentification are complicated
and often never resolved; "home" is not always a safe space and
"community" may very well expel you for your transgressions; and there
are no single-issue politics that can be simply or obviously approached.
For instance, Krishna Rau approaches the choice between good beats and
bad politics; Ricky Walker challenges punk rock misanthropy; Kerith
records the daily abuses of being a black woman in America; Tara Sinn
evokes the ambiguity and alienation of being Asian/American in Asia;
Phil looks at a few photographs for what they hide, and what they put in
plain view; and Lauren Martin argues for an everyday critical eye. And
that's just a beginning.
All these pieces were chosen to make you think, to prick you under
the skin, to turn the screw, to incite rebellion in your hearts and
minds.
There's a riot to be had - what are you waiting for?
FOOTNOTES
1 It amazes me that this argument still has
currency in punk rock, but in 2000 the magazine Clamour
published a badly written essay about how punk rockers (presumably white ones) have a necessarily political affinity with people of color because of blue hair and black clothes. The author even expressed disappointment that this affinity wasn't recognized by all people of
color (not even just those who are also punk rockers), some of whom dared to still treat her with suspicion, imagine that. The lesson is that an Amebix butt-flap or purple hair-do do not function the same as racial markers do, and to assume that these make you (and you know who you are) our "allies" is arrogant, presumptuous, and outright stupid. Not to mention the fact there are any number of people of color in punk rock who could testify to this, including myself and most everybody in this and the first compilation.
2 Clearly this comment is focused on punk rock in the United
States/Western European circuit - punk rock doesn't travel quite the
same to the postcolonies or the Second and Third Worlds, and at some
point the measure of the continuities and discontinuities needs to be
accounted for, and more fully than I can in the introduction to this
comp. And obviously issues of race and geopolitics are complicated by
colonial histories or unequal relationships with the West/North. Suffice
to say, this comp is hardly the final word.
3 I say this because the recent anti-globalization protests are
complicated by their limited politics of representation. What does it
mean when North American anarchist youth, clad in black and balaclavas,
chant, "This is what democracy looks like"? What does it mean when some
anti-sweatshop activists on U.S. college campuses presume to speak -or
suffer- on behalf of Asian female workers in Free Trade Zones across the
globe? Moreover, there are limits to the struggle for "rights" -- the
"right" to marriage, for instance, for same-sex couples when the
ideological foundation of marriage goes unquestioned.