Cut, Paste, and Cut: How Zines Enabled Pure, Unregulatable, Self-Expression and Community Formation For Black Punks
Two page spread (pg. 8-9) from "Black Punk" Why does subculture exist? To the uninitiated, it often seems purely aesthetic, maybe based around a shared interest in a genre or media. To those who are familiar with subculture, often a part of one themselves, they know that is often one of the last reasons a subculture is chosen. Aesthetic and interest are tertiary at best, a happenstance interest that is fluid. The core of subculture is community and authenticity. It is a necessity, a lifeblood. At risk of sounding like a rebellious 16-year-old, it is hardly a choice—it's a lifestyle. When you look past the clothes and the music, subcultures are more often broken down into behaviors and beliefs rather than visual appeal—the music or what have you is just how people gather. One of the subcultures that immediately comes to mind for its strong, often radical, values is the punk rock and hardcore scene. Punk is all about acting strongly and efficiently in what you believe in, and it has deep roots in the politics of oppression. One of the key facets of how punk moves is in the DIY ethic, often expressed through zines, which are short, hand-made, independently circulated booklets of art, info, and more. Zines provide a uniquely independent, uncensored, and authentic access to self-expression that allows for nonhegemonic depictions of black punks that do not conform to what anyone—white, black, and/or punk—expects of them. To understand this, there must first be an understanding of punk, DIY, and zine culture as a whole.
In punk culture, there is a focus on the unregulated, the uncensored, and the raw. It's hyper-local and delocalized at the same time. It’s about community and it’s about the individual ethic to create. This is exemplified no better than by the DIY movement and the creation and circulation of zines. Zines include art and music, interviews and show promotions, educational instruction and political manifesto. And, most importantly, as necessitated above, they are completely independent. This obsession with the grassroots, uncensored and noncommercialized, comes from a need for true self-expression. That is the core of the punk movement (and many other subculture based movements as well). By their nature, zines, and punk as a whole, are highly varied; it is practically impossible to present any of it as a single, homogenous, subject.
Zines can be many, many things, but are often found—and are often the most influential—when they present narratives of resistance and/or diversity that would normally be heavily fortified against in commercial publications. Zines are cheaply made, easily circulated, uncensored, and uncontrolled, making them great sources of personal and/or revolutionary information (Nijsten 80). Further, these quick-circulating pamphlets help to build intricate community ties that are tightly woven and personal. It is not just about building solidarity, though, as zines and their resulting communities allow for mobilization. In this way, they are multitude, as they “develop affinity, create social movement spaces, and build global solidarity” (qtd. in Nijsten 85). This social movement is enacted by zinesters and the punk scene in a unique way as they completely abandon the expectation to be “presentable” or “respectable” by conventional definition. As proposed by Stephen Duncombe, “zines' loopy celebration of the loser and the nerd is a critique of middle-class culture’s self-serving fetishization of the professional expert and high achiever” (Radway 142). Essentially, zines did not play in the realm of respectability politics. They were not going to promote, or even falsely pretend to conform to, the idea of typical success, productivity, or formality.
Now to the true heart of the subject: how this culture of nonconformity and self-expression, freedom, and radicalization was used by black punks to promote their own voices. Subculture has always been an important part of finding community and sense of self, especially for those not accepted by mainstream society. To turn away from punk for a moment, Bettina Love’s description of “Black rachet imagination,” attributed to queer youth in the hip-hop scene, hits many of the same targets that punk does: “[t]he term Black ratchet imagination was first introduced by L. H. Stallings (2013) to define an imaginative, agentive, creative, performative, uplifting transitional space established and occupied by queer youth of color in the hip hop community to promote the ‘performance of the failure to be respectable'” (541). Here Love is talking about two things very different from what has been discussed so far here—that is, hip-hop, and as her paper later develops, the intricacies and controversies around the word “rachet.” There is a lot that can be said here, but to not derail to conversation of punk, the key part to highlight is the definition, particularly the words “agentive” and “performance of the failure to be respectable.” Across all subcultures that are based on value and action, not just aesthetic or subject, these two things are common themes. Agency alone is extremely important, but tied in with deliberate, extreme nonconformity, it becomes a statement of truth, self, and community. I opted to introduce these subjects with a quote not about punk but hip-hop to highlight a point very important to the black experience of subculture: non-homogeny and pointed defiance of a monolithic representation. Here punk is discussed as an outlet for self-expression, but there is also hip-hop, and many, many more.
Zines allowed for various unique voices to be spread, and to dismantle hegemonic representation within the punk community. As discussed above, zines are delocalized and independent. This gave room for black creators to express individual voice and not be confined to make a statement for a company, even a black-owned one. Zines had sections on obscure (or non-marketable) history, advertised artists and musicians on merit not marketability, and told personal stories that would struggle to meet the neutering standards of any company, let alone reach the shelves to be sold. This is especially true at the height of zines’ creation, as independent sources were much harder to commercialize, and diverse topics had trouble gaining footing, let alone diverse and controversial ones.
Example covers of “Shotgun Seamstress” by Osa Atoe
An iconic example of a punk zine produced by a black woman is “Shotgun Seamstress,” created by Osa Atoe. Over its decades of runtime, her zine covered a myriad of topics, with a key part of its manifesto being defying the monolith.
Left: Card from ”Shotgun Seamstress” blog article “ADE AKINLOBA OF BLACK CLASH”
Right: Flyer advertising “Shotgun Seamstress” Zine
The quote “black culture is not monolithic. Do not label us ‘urban’ or ‘hip-hop’ any longer. We are all things. We are whatever we want to be.” comes from a flyer for the “Shotgun Seamstress” zine. This quote speaks not just to the mainstream white majority, but the white majority within the punk scene as well. Atoe’s zine, and others like it, were defiance and self-expression on another level. Unlike non-intersectional white peers, Atoe and others were fighting against not just mainstream society, not just the white majority, but expectations for what was allowed of them just for being black, female, and/or queer. In this way, zines like “Shotgun Seamstress” were incredibly important in fostering community around this authentic expression of self. In the first volume of “Shotgun Seamstress” Brontez, in an interview with Atoe, both laments “the same bullshit” in the punk scene as any other white dominated scene, but on the same page attributes strength to the community he is able to build stating, “I know that I’ve always felt stronger when there are other punk kids of color around me. I always feel stronger when I have my girls with me.” (27).
“Shotgun Seamstress” vol. 1 pages 26-27
“Black Punk” Zine pages 1-2
Zine is an art form. It is collage, it is story, it is journalism, it is education. It is impossible to corral into narrative, and thus it is impossible to fully acknowledge the breadth of what it has done and can do, here. Zine, as an art form, fulfills many of the same attributes that other forms of media—such as comics, cartoons, or graphic novels—do, however it is most valuable as it is not beholden to the rules of mass production. This, admittedly, can impact its reach—one of the most important goals of any media meant to provide representation or information is to be able to reach the people outside of the culture who need it most. However, zines make up for this by fostering an equally as important, and usually stronger, local community. Community, whether it be global and undefined, or local and intimate, is the most important part of any movement. It provides strength—strength to continue on your own, strength to enact change. Zines come from community, immortalize community, and create community. They are unique and self-defined. In this way, there is no better place to express yourself and live authentically.
Works Cited
Atoe, Osa. “Shotgun Seamstress.” [Zine], Volume 1. Portland, Oregon. August, 2006.
Em, Amira, Ismacil, Nala, Jama, Hana, Vincent, Melissa. Toronto Chapter of the QPoC collective: "Babely Shades." “Black Punk.” [Zine], Volume 1. Toronto, Canada. January, 2007.
Love, Bettina L. “A Ratchet Lens: Black Queer Youth, Agency, Hip Hop, and the Black Ratchet Imagination.” Educational Researcher, vol. 46, no. 9, 2017, pp. 539–47. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/44972482. Accessed 29 Nov. 2023.
Nina Nijsten. “Unruly Booklets: Resisting Body Norms with Zines.” DiGeSt. Journal of Diversity and Gender Studies, vol. 4, no. 2, 2017, pp. 75–88. JSTOR, https://doi.org/10.11116/digest.4.2.5. Accessed 29 Nov. 2023.
Radway, Janice. “Zines, Half-Lives, and Afterlives: On the Temporalities of Social and Political Change.” PMLA, vol. 126, no. 1, 2011, pp. 140–50. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/41414086. Accessed 29 Nov. 2023.
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