“Wot ‘Bout Me?”: Punk, Africa, and theorizing International Relations

Abstract

This essay offers a narrative history, though certainly not definitive, of punk in South Africa. Rather than an ethnographic study or a history of popular culture, the essay places this narrative firmly within the academic fields of Political Science, International Relations, and International Political Economy. The story of punk in South Africa also illustrates the tensions and contradictions within the multiple, complex circuits and processes in play in formal and informal realms of everyday life that are central to, but often ignored, by the field of International Relations. The narrative of punk in South Africa is offered as a corrective to the disciplines’ Western-centrism and places people at the centre of scholarly analysis.