Post-socialist punk: Beyond the double irony of self-abasement (Resubmission)

Despite some interest in youth cultural movements and practices in late and post-socialist societies and a slowly growing body of work on particular segments of contemporary independent music, punk has received virtually no serious academic attention. The proposed research rectifies this through the elaboration of an historically and spatially comparative study of punk in Eastern Europe conducted by an international, collaborative team of researchers from the UK, Russia, Estonia and Croatia.

The rationale for the proposed study of (post-)socialist punk is not one of 'gap-filling'. It is driven rather by the argument that this absence is the consequence of scholars shying away from addressing (post-)socialist punk because it disrupts deeply established canons of thought about the meaning of punk. Moreover, these very canons - which emphasise the authentic subcultural moment - facilitate readings of secondary, 'peripheral' punk scenes as mimetic and/or commercial and thus encourage their significance to be ignored.

In attempting to address the challenges posed by (post-)socialist punk, the proposed project focuses on two core tenets of understandings of punk: punk aesthetics; and the social and political meaning of punk. The project challenges the dominant reading of punk in the West as first and foremost an aesthetic articulation of late capitalist social relations. By situating punk in a different political context, the reading of punk as subcultural resistance to dominant class relations is replaced by a more open question about the political significance of the transnormative cultural practices of punk in both socialist and post-socialist Eastern Europe. Answers to this question will enrich our knowledge not only of processes of 'transformation' in East European societies, but will be of interest to international scholarship in the field of cultural studies, which is increasingly engaged with issues of global-local cultural exchange.

The theoretical questions raised are operationalised through an empirical project with historical and spatial comparative dimensions. Three (post)socialist countries -Russia, eastern Germany and Croatia - are studied while a PhD student will work on parallel (West) European case studies (in the UK and The Netherlands). Five key research questions are employed, three of which function as cross-cutting themes facilitating comparison while the other two provide looser comparative parameters with capacity for 'thick description' of local specifics. The project will gather five sets of data - textual, audio, visual, interview and ethnographic - although there is flexibility built into the research design in terms of the sequential or parallel triangulation of these methods.

The project will be based in, and coordinated from, the University of Warwick. The Russian national case study will be conducted by the Research Fellow and the PI both based at Warwick. The Croatian and eastern German case studies will be conducted by collaborators. The collaborators are based in Zagreb and Tartu but will conduct field research themselves in Pula and Halle respectively, employing additional research assistance as necessary.

Outputs from the project include a multi authored, comparative research monograph, as well as books and articles on individual national case studies. The joint monograph will be published in both English and relevant local languages as part of a wider concern within the project to 'decentre' cultural production in practice as well as theory. Another aspect of this practice is the building of an electronic resource as a key project output. This resource will not only feature a quarterly renewed thematic, analytic e-zine on unsigned music and culture in Eastern Europe, but will also contain searchable archives holding interviews, music, videos, still photography and other artefacts. This resource is designed to become self-sustainable after the funded life-time of the project.