Punk, Planetarity, and the Wages of Neocolonial Globalization

Discussions of punk tend to coalesce around its manifestation in the North Atlantic, but recent research and documentary filmmaking have focused on punk as a worldwide phenomenon. What remains underexplored is the neocolonial cultural politics of punk’s global travels. After introducing the theoretical stakes—is punk neocolonial globalization or decolonial planetarity?—the article shifts to focusing on the articulation of that tension in Latin America, with a specific focus on Chile. More precisely, I explore Santiago’s mapunky scene, the punk community formed by diasporic Indigenous Mapuche urban residents in peripheral neighborhoods. Rather than being a global popular culture that originated in the United Kingdom and United States, at times punk serves as a planetary culture formed by diasporic, lower-class colonized youth in metropolitan urban centers, thereby offering a pop-cultural space of solidarity for the dispossessed urban youth of the world.