The Elsewheres of PuNK! Reading Zines and Youth Culture in Turkey

Objective

This project is based on the study of unpublished punk related fanzines produced in Turkey in the 1990s, when punk began to take its first steps in the country. Literally “magazine for fans”, fanzines are informal, photocopied, low-cost self-publications that forged the literary and graphic language of punk. The varied textual framework these documents provide, where aesthetics, music-related information, and interviews interact with commentary on socio-political and personal issues, enable a unique understanding of the local punk youth. In addition, combining the global circulation of punk and its local adaptation, fanzines testify to the complex processes of connection, interface, and interrelation among transnational punk scenes. My research aims to recover and analyse these documents in Turkey which today assume a crucial historical value due to their distinctive contextualization of youthful agency and generational critique. Fanzines will be used also to trace and study the transmission and translation of punk-related attitudes and politics in the Turkish context. Thus, their analysis allows the decontextualization of punk from the ‘core’ of its Western-based production, contributing to a reflection on the roles that these documents play in non-Western contexts. Following a content-focused approach of fanzine carried out by Prof. Matthew Worley and the University of Reading-hosted Subcultures Network, the project submitted for this fellowship aims to be the first comprehensive research on punk-related fanzines in Turkey. This research provides a unique site-specific case that will help broaden the geographies of fanzine studies exemplifying the variety of socioeconomic, cultural, and political lenses through which punk may be read and understood. At the same time this research takes up the challenge posed by youth studies in Turkey, showing renewed forms of commitment situated far from the categories of what came to define the ‘political’ in previous decades.