Punk and Revolution: 7 More Interpretations of Peruvian Reality by Shane Greene (review)

Shane Greene’s Punk and Revolution is an impressive and important book. It has interesting things to say about punk as a musical style and subculture, and perhaps more importantly as a disposition, an aesthetic, and a political project. Equally interesting is what it says about Peru’s internal armed conflict of the 1980s and 1990s in the city of Lima and among urban youth, a context and social group that have not received much attention. The work is scholarly, based on rigorous research and a sophisticated engagement with a range of literatures, but also iconoclastic in its approach and style. One would be tempted to see the book itself as punk.

The book “talks punk,” for sure. Stuart Hall is referred to as a “Birmingham wanker,” Derrida is taken to task for his “dumb-ass” deconstruction, and cultural studies scholar Dick Hebdige becomes Dr. Dick Head. But Greene convincingly argues that one defining characteristic of punk is “under-production.” The book is neither underproduced nor over-produced. It is just very cool.

The book’s structure, as the subtitle indicates, is inspired by José Carlos Mariátegui’s famous collection of seven essays, published in 1930. Greene’s first three interpretations (not so much the last four), moreover, engage with themes that Mariátegui examined in his first three essays (such as class and race and their relations to political economy), and borrow playfully from Mariátegui’s chapter titles. The approach produces some repetition of the issues and content, but the repetition serves to clarify the general argument that is developed across the chapters, restating it in different formats and styles that include fanzines and photographic collages. Some material has appeared elsewhere, in formats normally considered non-scholarly (such as fanzines), and in this sense the volume is perhaps best understood as a fuller version of a project that has had previous iterations.

The second chapter (or interpretation), for example, broadly repeats the arguments of the first, but does so in a different style, punctuated by obscenities, and titled “El problema de la sub-tierra.” The title is both a play on the title of Mariátegui’s essay “El problema de la tierra” and an allusion to “rock subterraneo” and to “subtes,” as Peruvian punks were often known. It serves to illustrate quite brilliantly, in form as well as in content, a key point made in Chapter 1: the importance of creative underproduction and risk-taking to punk generally and to Peruvian punk more specifically. By contrast, interpretation 7 has little relation to Mariátegui’s seventh essay, which dealt with the history of Peruvian literature. Instead, it consists of a narrativized discussion between Mariátegui and Mikhail Bakhtin about Peru’s punks over beers at the famous Queirolo bar in downtown Lima. Although it is purely fantasy, it rings true. It features, as any drunken conversation at the Queirolo should, a “sanguche de jamón del país,” as well as great illustrations by Miguel Det.

Greene pays equal attention to the dozen or so bands that constituted the subte scene and to a group of visual artists who provided much of the punk iconography. Through an approach that combines analysis of sources such as posters, cassette covers, song lyrics, show fliers, fanzines, and the work of artists such as Alfredo Márquez with interviews, ethnography, and participant observation, Greene explores what being a punk entailed during Peru’s internal armed conflict, that is to say what it meant to be subversive in a context in which subversion was all but synonymous with Sendero Luminoso. Peruvian punks “intervened” aesthetically and politically through their music, art, and performances in ways that placed them dangerously close to Sendero by virtue of the fact that punk’s social and political critique as conveyed in lyrics, art, and performances looked dangerously like Senderista propaganda. And yet, Sendero Luminoso viewed the subtes with contempt, as degenerates peddling...