Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects
Date of Degree
6-2025
Document Type
Doctoral Dissertation
Degree Name
Doctor of Philosophy
Program
English
Advisor
Eric Lott
Committee Members
Duncan Faherty
Matthew K. Gold
Subject Categories
American Material Culture | American Popular Culture | American Studies | Digital Humanities | Literature in English, North America | Music | Other Arts and Humanities | Performance Studies | Race, Ethnicity and Post-Colonial Studies
Keywords
punk, infrastructure, popular culture, performance, zines, east bay
Abstract
This dissertation maps the emergence of punk in the San Francisco Bay Area, especially in the East Bay, between 1978 and 1994. Challenging canonical accounts of punk history that foreground London, New York, or Southern California, I root US punk’s aesthetics and politics in the sonic responses to Detroit’s deindustrialization and demonstrate how, particularly in the Bay Area, it evolved into a subculture that forged alternative forms of subjectivity, sociality, and desire through aesthetic practices and infrastructural interventions. Instead of reducing punk to its spectacles, the sonic, textual, and visual archive that I present especially draws out the dialectics between the subculture’s negations and its generative, world-making ambitions. Rather than focusing on punk as a set of encoded practices, I interpret it as a logic of negation caught in a cycle of perpetual renewal—an oppositional cultural formation that iteratively shapes itself by representing and reacting to the material conditions of its participants as well as to its own conventions. In keeping with punk’s participatory maker culture, my intervention includes the development of two open-access digital projects: the East Bay Punk Digital Archive, which preserves zines, ephemera, and other media that document the subjugated knowledge that emerged from the scene, and Visualizing East Bay Punk (VEBP), a suite of interactive tools that renders data about the scene.
Recommended Citation
Morello, Stefano, "Let's Make a Scene! East Bay Punk and Subcultural Worlding" (2025). CUNY Academic Works.
https://academicworks.cuny.edu/gc_etds/6324
Included in
American Material Culture Commons, American Popular Culture Commons, Digital Humanities Commons, Literature in English, North America Commons, Music Commons, Other Arts and Humanities Commons, Performance Studies Commons, Race, Ethnicity and Post-Colonial Studies Commons
