Introduction: Threads and Omissions

Abstract

''You are killing me with your formalities''-The Slack Republic ''Committee,'' the photographic image that graces the cover of this special issue, announces our intentions in compiling the writings, images, and sounds found herein. Taken by Allison Janae Hamilton as part of an ongoing photo essay on Afropunk in Brooklyn, the image centers women of color within the punk scene, rewriting the idea of margin and center, announcing feminist power. Such revisions to the historical meaning and framing of punk rock have circulated since the genre's inception. This issue seeks to capture the performance of those revisions, bring them to the fore, and conduct a genealogical mapping of critical race and feminist thought within the punk movement and its scenes, music, ethics, and aesthetics. For this introduction, we frame these interventions with the phrase ''punk anteriors.'' The process of anteriority, for us, focuses specifically on excavating and capturing punk's blowback and debris, including past and present critical race and feminist artefacts and performances so often left unaddressed, despite their centrality to the making of punk, its politics, its scenes, and its forms of resistance. Echoing Tavia Nyong'o's assertion that ''Punk may be literally impossible to imagine without gender and sexual dissidence'' (with the important addition of racialized dissent), we propose to re-tell punk stories to reflect these foundational disruptions. 1 In reimagining what ''comes before,'' then, we understand punk much like Hamilton's photo, as being already about race, gender, sexuality, and power, and as being produced by and for people of color, as a revision to statements that baldly make claims such as ''hardcore was white music.'' 2 We use the word ''anteriors'' in the title of this issue to think through the included articles that address punk spaces and remnants, plotting what might come before, or anterior to, the telling of punk's stories in two senses. 3 First, punk anteriors is temporal, interrogating punk's (always seemingly) resistant genealogy and questioning the source of politics and performances for punk. For example, what if we imagine punk springing from women of color feminisms, as Mimi Thi Nguyen and