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 under-produced 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 an imperialist cultural form.
Interpretations 3 and 4 pay attention to the tensions within the subte scene. Lima's class and racialized hierarchies were reproduced within the underground rock groups, which split between “pituco punk” (white upper-middle-class) and “cholo punk” (mestizo and middle-lower-class) bands. Pituco and cholo punks had their own venues and circuits and viewed each other with contempt, as reflected in the lyrics they wrote about each other and in incidents of violence that erupted when they came together. Greene also explores the cases of María T-Ta and, to a lesser extent, Támira Bassallo, to illustrate not only the misogyny at the heart of the subte movement, but also the creative force of punk feminism. Yet, importantly, he does not romanticize punk feminism's transgressive critique of heteronormativity, pointing to how even someone as iconoclastic as María T-Ta could not fully escape reproducing in her songs racialized stereotypes expressive of Peruvian punk's broader failure to engage with the country's Andeanness.
Later interpretations focus on what ultimately the punks were doing aesthetically and politically, which Greene sees as crafting “a political aesthetic that was fundamentally ambiguous in the context of a war that demanded political ideologies to be straightforwardly black and white” (123). This ambiguity gave punk authenticity while also placing it in danger from a state that made little distinction between punk aesthetics and the social-realist aesthetics of Sendero Luminoso. As Greene reports, some punks paid a heavy price: several were killed, others were given long prison sentences. Yet, as he goes on to show in Interpretation 6, through a series of short narratives where names and places have been anonymized (a reminder that the conflict continues in some ways), not all punks were mere victims of the state's failure to distinguish between punk and “subversión.” Some did become involved with either Sendero Luminoso or the MRTA. Greene also discusses an anonymous “Text X,” a utopian political tract as he terms it, which appears to suggest ways in which the subte political aesthetic could evolve into an anarcho-communist project. It is an example of how, for some at least, punk could form the basis of social and political change.
With limited exceptions, most studies of Peru's internal armed conflict have focused on its impact in the highlands and among Peru's indigenous peasantry. Greene demonstrates the importance of looking also at how the conflict played itself out in urban contexts and among particular youth subcultures in order to develop a more complete understanding of the conflict, its effect on different sectors of Peruvian society, and the varied responses, both aesthetic and political, that the conflict elicited.
At the same time, Punk and Revolution is a major contribution to the comparative study of punk. It enriches our understanding of one of the most important subcultures of the late twentieth century by shedding light on a case in which punk subversion, as Greene aptly puts it, “was not merely about mass culture and its discontents. It was about life and death, struggles for social liberation and the realities of political imprisonment, a country's repressive past and its uncertain future” (16).
