COMMUNITY SPOTLIGHT: Mimi Thi Nguyen, Golnar Nikpour and more at ‘Punk Anteriors’ event TONIGHT

We know some of you are bummed that this rad event is 1) far away from you and 2) 21+. We hear ya. Sometimes it seems like all the cool shit is in NYC, right? But that’s just not the case. We know from our travels that people are doing amazing things all over the world, including in small towns.

But this amazing thing is actually going down in NYC tonight, so if you can make it, show some love and stop by our table and For The Birds Collective’s! POCZP founder Daniela Capistrano will be there in solidarity with Mimi and the other readers, along with our Chief Fanalyst Julia B. and Race Riot! tour vet Cristy C. Road.

We’ve been thinking about all the people who can’t afford to purchase Women & Performance’s “Punk Anteriors” special double issue (it’s $85) or attend tonight’s event, so we’ve snagged a copy and made it available to read online, zine-style. <3

We’re also going to live-tweet when we can from @poczineproject using the hashtag #PunkAnteriors. Look for our tweets! <3

“Punk Anteriors: Theory, Genealogy, Performance” is issue 22.2-3 of Women & Performance: a journal of feminist theory and was co-edited by Beth Stinson and Fiona I.B. Ngô.

The issue emphasizes punk feminist spaces and times by bringing them to the forefront to forge and generate “punk anteriors.” We use the word “anteriors” in the title of this issue to think through the included articles that specifically address punk spaces and remnants—plotting what might come before, or anterior to, the telling of punk’s stories in two senses. First, punk anteriors point to the temporal, interrogating punk’s (always seemingly) resistant genealogy and questioning the source of politics and performances for punk. Second, we mobilize punk anteriors in the material and spatial sense of place, bodies, and archives. That is to say, we re-consider the context for the everyday performances of punk as occurring within atmospheres of imperial design; racial, feminist, and anarchist social movements; and immigration, poverty, and dislocation. 

Along with the hope of re-centering people of color in punk’s narratives, part of the goal with this issue has been to expand the places where we find valuable knowledge and aesthetics, to re-imagine who counts as an intellectual producer in punk’s history, and to work across genres.  Though the process was not always perfect, we have found this track productive and insightful, and hope that this model might inspire others to explore these topics and others in similar and even more brilliant ways.

COMMUNITY: After reading “Punk Anteriors,” let us know what you think! Click here to submit your review of excerpts of the journal or the entire publication.

EVENT DETAILS

Big thanks to tonight’s organizers for creating punkanteriors.tumblr.com/ and making this roundtable discussion as accessible as possible to the general public.

We also want to give an especially BIG thank you to this issue’s co-editors Beth Stinson and Fiona I.B. Ngô <3 Thank you for disrupting problematic facets of academia in your own ways.

Women & Performance’s “Punk Anteriors” special double issue release party

Meet POCZP’s first Legacy Series intern: Itoro Udofia!

NAME: Itoro Udofia

ROLE: First dedicated intern for the POC Zine Project’s Legacy Series

REGION: West Coast, USA

COMMUNITY: Join us in welcoming Itoro! You’ll be seeing her contributions manifest on this Tumblr and in other digital and physical spaces very soon …. <3

Bio: Itoro is a first generation writer, artist, and educator of Nigerian origin living in the Bay Area. She develops programs for youth of color (Youth Programs Associate at the Museum of the African Diaspora) where they have a space to honor their histories and thrive. You can find her writings on Your World News, People of Color Organize, Rain and Thunder: A Radical Feminist Journal, Womanist Musings, and her own blog Thoughts of my Mind. Her writings focus on the intersections and dynamics of race, class, gender, power, survival/healing and education.

She also teaches an African History course and when she is not doing that, she works closely with a community organization dear to her heart, working to abolish the school to prison pipeline and hearing the youth speak their truth to move to action. She is happy to be a Bay Area resident and feels like here, she has found a bit of peace and a bit of home!

Itoro’s excited to be an intern with the POC Zine Project because it is a collective that uplifts and cares about what people of color have to say and acknowledges what they have always said.

Some texts that furthered her political consciousness and commitment to uplifting the voices of POC and their struggles are The Revolution Starts at Home, This Bridge Called My Back and Steve Biko’s I Write What I Like: Selected Writings. All these zines and texts named what it means to speak out from the margins and hold to ones principle in building a world that includes us all, and calls for a life of love and continued struggle in ALL our spaces, seen and unseen. Moreover, with many people coming out from the margins, she did not feel alone.

Ultimately, Itoro hopes to be a part of a larger community committed to making our written word available, accessible and visible. Other perks to the internship are gaining more knowledge and organizing with radical zinesters. As an intern, she hopes to further her knowledge about zine culture and help get our Voices out. She is excited and ready to begin this journey and is happy to call the POC Zine Project her media home.

COMMUNITY: Learn more about POCZP internship & volunteer opportunities here. We are still accepting applications for the Summer and Fall sessions. 

IN ITORO’S OWN WORDS

Here are some excerpt from her application that are important to share:

Zine culture, specifically the material production of our knowledge is important to me because our voices are often co-opted, misused or completely erased in the literary canon. I have experienced this dangerous and painful trend most profoundly as an educator within the context of radical and progressive education. Save for bell hooks, Sonia nieto, Michele Foster and a few other people of color directly explaining the intricacies of power and privilege as a teacher of color, outlining a liberatory pedagogy through navigating a hostile terrain and offering something invaluable to the field through articulating underlying race, class and gender dynamics, it was difficult to fully relate to radical literature. I found that much of its thought and analysis was filtered through a white liberal/radical context. Even the class analysis was lacking because the white elephant in the room, white supremacy, was not directly dealt with. These power dynamics alone, the dynamics of who gets listened to, who controls the written word, who controls the publishing house, the way information gets told is what fuels my commitment to writing and working with people of color to have complete autonomy over their material.

… The POC Zine project is necessary at this particular time where knowledge and overall experiences are actively ignored.  Centering people of color’s material contributions as a source of  is important, and is a part of honoring a larger history of people who kept going in spite of these hurdles.  

SOME OF ITORO’S WRITING

In a Quiet Place, A Radical Profeminist (Fall 2012)  

In a Quiet Place, The Black Feminist Manifesto (Fall 2012)

In a Quiet Place, Your World News (Fall 2012)  

Missy Anne’s on the lookout for me, Your World News (Summer 2012)  

And When You Leave, Take your Pictures with you, Your World News (Spring 2012) 

Black Power, Leadership and Privilege, Your World News (Winter 2012)

Shedding the Tears, Looking Back, Moving Forward, People of Color Organize (Winter 2012) 

Conversations with a Student Teacher of Color, Womanist Musings (Fall 2010) 

ABOUT THE LEGACY SERIES

Kicking off with FIRE!!, POC Zine Project will make zines by people of color created from the 1700s-1990s available to read and share.

Every Friday (Editor’s note: date pushed to February), you will find a legacy zine by a person of color on poczineproject.tumblr.com. We will share more details in 2013.

WHY WE ARE FOCUSING ON LEGACY ZINES

People of color in the U.S. have produced independent publications (zines) for decades. Many of these zines were political in nature, creating cracks in the lens of white supremacy that shaped (and continues to inform) popular culture and legislation.

These zines were new maps to our liberation, countering the negative propaganda of what people of color looked like, thought and were capable of achieving.

We want the world to know about these legacy zines, so we are going to archive and share them to the best of our ability.

We look forward to partnering with distros, academic spaces, libraries, anti-authoritarian collectives, literary journals, bloggers and more to share the Legacy Series.

“NEW” ZINESTERS: We will still share information about new and upcoming zines by people of color :) Please continue to submit your zines to the archive.

ABOUT THE RACE RIOT! TOUR

POC Zine Project held its first Race Riot! Tour in 2012, producing 20 events in 14 cities, which included speaking engagements at six universities. Click here to view photos from the POC Zine Project: 2012 Race Riot! Tour tour finale at Death By Audio in Brooklyn and access all the tour stop recaps.

We will be taking the Race Riot! Tour through 14 more cities in 2013. Stay tuned!

SUPPORT POC ZINE PROJECT

If everyone in our community gave $1, we would more than meet our fundraising goal for 2013. If you have it to spare, we appreciate your support. All funds go to our 2013 tour, the Legacy Series and the poverty zine series.

DONATE link via PayPal: http://bit.ly/SHdmyh

You can also send well-concealed cash or a check! Email daniela@dcapmedia.com for details or if you have questions.

Info about the poverty zine series: http://bit.ly/RLVTVt

RELEASE: The Mimi Thi Nguyen Collection in Collaboration with the POC Zine Project

In the summer of 2012, POC Zine Project partnered with Mimi Thi Nguyen to facilitate her donation of over 60 poc zines created in the 1990s to NYU’s Fales Library.

Here is the donation statement in its entirety, along with a list of the zines that were donated.

FALES LIBRARY DONATION STATEMENT

The Mimi Thi Nguyen Collection in Collaboration with the POC Zine Project

January 13, 2012

By Mimi Thi Nguyen

As a zinester and a scholar, it is an odd thing to be both an object of the archive and an interlocutor with them. Or, as the case might be, it is an odd thing to be both an object whose presence is perceived through absence and an interlocutor called upon to enact its retrieval.

The story of this donation follows from just such an absence and call when my collaborator Daniela Capistrano, founder of the POC Zine Project, noted that archivist Lisa Darms’ upcoming manuscript on the Riot Grrrl Collection at the Fales Library –about which Darms’ tweeted, with an invitation to propose materials to include— could not address some of the most important zines by women of color, because at the time almost none of these zines are found in the archive. (It bears noting that the collection depends upon donations, and Darms’ does not purchase zines for the collection.)

In a Twitter exchange, Capistrano encouraged Darms to continue including zines by women of color lest an important but much under-observed contribution to the story continue to be subsumed to a “big picture” of riot grrrl as feminist movement. At the same time, Capistrano contacted me to compile some of those zines for a collaborative donation to the Fales Library. As the mission statement for POC Zine Project states, the archive and access to it are central: “POC Zine Project’s mission is to makes ALL zines by POC (People of Color) easy to find, share and distribute. We are an experiment in activism and community through materiality.”

There are two issues that concern us —myself, and Capistrano at the POC Zine Project— in general: For the first, we argue that the archive is not just a place for study, but must be itself an object of it. What is in the archive, and how did it get there? What are the criteria for assembling, organizing and presenting materials? Who selects and collects, shapes and donates their stories to an archive? What is not there? How do these materials and absences produce knowledges, including norms and teleologies?*

It is stating the obvious to observe that no archive is an authoritative source for grasping a record of the past; we know from postcolonial studies in which the archive is demonstrably an artifact of colonial frames that the story the archive –any archive— tells is provisional, partial. For this reason, some who are concerned with history making aim to create a more full archive, excavating from the cracks and fissures those stories and persons identified as absent (of course, this requires the recognition that absence matters).

But the second question I wish to address here is bigger than just what is in the archive, and how a donation like this one might “correct” an absence— it is for me a concern about how the archive, the absence, and the excavation tell another, useful story.

Such bigger stories are about feminist historiography –how do we tell the story of feminist movement and teleology, and the place of women of color? I want to suggest that a donation from my collection and the POC Zine Project does not necessarily address the underlying troubles for feminist historiographies of riot grrrl movement. As the narrow scope of liberal multiculturalism has by now taught us, it is that inclusion and incorporation might be made to cover over more troubling queries about how women of color are included, incorporated, or otherwise made visible. I am thinking of feminist archives or retrospectives that too often “hold a place” for women of color to say their piece, but in such a way that contains their critique and segregates it from the story of the movement’s contribution.

We can see this logic operating in retrospectives of riot grrrl in which the story of race is contained as a chapter, or a part of a chapter, in its history, when it appears at all. Here then I cite Anjali Arondekar, whose For the Record considers these questions with regards to sexuality in the colonial archive: “The critical challenge is to imagine a practice of archival reading that incites relationships between the seductions of recovery and the occlusions such retrieval mandates. By this I mean to say: What if the recuperative gesture returns us to the space of absence? How then does one restore absence to itself? Put simply, can an empty archive also be full?” That is, it may be that the problem is not just a matter of historical invisibility (in this case, of people of color in punk subcultures) that would otherwise be corrected with further excavation and more visibility.

The problem is this: Through what stories do absences become visible, and manageable? And does filling up that absence somehow hide the important stories that absence might tell us – about history-making, knowledge-making, movement-making? I wondered then, as I was pulling together zines by women of color (pre-1996) for this donation, how an almost-empty archive might lend greater substance to the story of epistemic violence that erases or otherwise contains our presence.

As I have said elsewhere, the archive is a political and cultural meaning making machine for the passage of objects into what Michel Foucault calls knowledge’s field of control and power’s sphere of intervention, and for “minor” objects in particular, we know well how troublesome such a passage might be. At the same time, myself and Daniela here wish to posit another historiographical gesture. That is, what if we refuse the emplottment of absence and subsequent redemption-through-presence that would render women of color as mere addition or supplement to the archives? What if the intervention –like this donation— becomes the story to tell about them?

The donations made from my collection in collaboration with the POC Zine Project and in conversation with Lisa Darms at the Riot Grrrl Collection is both a critique (broadly construed) and an alternate chronicle taking up questions about race and coloniality that cut across assumed feminist histories, investments and teleologies.* These pre-1996 selections from my collection point to not a side story in riot grrrl movement, but the story of encounter and contest, exchange and challenge – denoting not the singularity of riot grrrl movement, but its slide by other feminisms, fracturing and multiplying into other worlds.

Again, as I have said elsewhere (and repeatedly on the first POC Zine Project/Race Riot! Tour in 2012), those other histories of people of color —here represented in the materials we donate together— are not an interruption into a singular scene or movement but the practice of another, co-present scene or movement that conversed and collided with the already-known story, but with alternate investments and forms of critique. These other stories of riot grrrl in particular and also punk at large unfolding enact historical and theoretical provocations with which we have yet to reckon.**

_______________

* I am grateful to my graduate research assistant Ariana Ruiz for the hours she put in copying and creating an inventory for the zines.

** Some of the material adapted here for this statement comes from Mimi Thi Nguyen, “Afterward,” in Punkademics: The Basement Show in the Ivory Tower, edited by Zack Furness, New York: Minor Compositions/Autonomedia, 2012, 217-223; and Mimi Thi Nguyen, “Riot Grrrl, Race, and Revival,” in Women & Performance special issue “Punk Anteriors,” edited by Elizabeth Stinson and Fiona I.B. Ngô, 22:2-3 (July-November 2012); 173-196.

_______________

Here is the full list of zines created by POC in the 1990s that were donated:

Behind These Fragile Walls #1

Boredom Sucks #8.5

Borelando

Broken Thought #1 and #2

Cage #1, #2 and #3

Chica Loca 2

Chinese, Japanese, Indian Chief

Consider Yourself Kissed #2

Cyanide #1

Eracism #1 and #2

Evolution of a Race Riot

Exedra #4

Funeral #1 and #2

Hey Mexican!

Hey White Girl

Hijinx Zine #1

Hollyhock 3/War 1

Hollyhock #4.5

Housewife Turned Assassin! #2 and #4

Juryrig

Kreme Koolers #2 and #4

Mamasita #4

Marks in Time: The Very Early Go-Gos’s

Messy Flowers 3/Lolita

Mestiza

Mija

My Broken Halo #2

Oppression Song #1

Photobooth Toolbox 2

Please Don’t Hit Below The Belt!

Pure Tuna Fish #1, #6, #8, #9 and #10

Race Riot 2

Race Riot Project Directory

Scarbaby

Screaming Goddess #1 and #4 (zine and artwork)

Secret Agent Girl no. 666

Suburbia 8/ Tennis and Violins #2

Tennis and Violins 

The Bakery

Totally Fucked Up #1

Wild Honey Pie #9 and #10

You Might as Well Live #4, #5, #8 and #9

Superette #12

ywap! #13

YOU ARE RACIST WHITE PUNK BOY

—-

Mimi also gave an identical donation to the POC Zine Project and all titles will be a part of the Legacy Series mapping project. If you are interested in accessing digital copies of any of these zines, send us a message.

A duplicate donation was also made to the Barnard Zine Library (details coming soon).