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This book is an oral history of the punk scene in Belfast between 1977 and 1986. Interrogating the idea that punk was a non-sectarian subculture, it argues that the accounts of my interviewees suggest a more nuanced and complex relationship between the punk scene and Northern Irish society. Drawing on post-positivist oral history, the work of the Popular Memory Group and the cultural materialism of Raymond Williams, it considers how people’s memories of the punk scene have been shaped in the years since its zenith in the city and how they were shaped in the moment of the interview. Thinking of punk as a structure of feeling that is present in the oral history interview, the book suggests, is a way to draw out its relationship to structures of class, gender and sectarianism in Northern Ireland during the Troubles, and its continuing affective and political legacies in the present.
) by building a heavy industrial ‘base’: given this, a cultural superstructure will somehow build itself. In more Althusserian form … the problems of historical and cultural materialism are not so much solved as shuffled away or evaded.18 In the title essay of The Poverty of Theory Thompson’s main focus may be on ‘the enemy on the left’, but there are a number of places where he links his onslaught against Althusser with his antipathy towards ‘bourgeois’ trends in the social sciences. Lamenting the way that the ‘decade of heroes’ of 1936–46 gave way to the Cold War
. 8 Paul Brown, ‘ “This Thing of Darkness I Acknowledge Mine”: The Tempest and the discourse of colonialism’, in Jonathan Dollimore and Alan Sinfield, eds., Political Shakespeare, New Essays in Cultural Materialism , Manchester 1985, pp. 48–71, p. 58. 9 P
overview of the connection between idolatry and slavery in Milton, see Barbara K. Lewalski, ‘Milton and Idolatry’, Studies in English Literature, 1500–1900, 43 (2003), 213–42. 26 Dympna Callaghan, ‘Irish memories in The Tempest’, in her Shakespeare Without Women: Representing Gender and Race on the Renaissance Stage (London, 2000), pp. 97–138, at p. 100. See also Paul Brown, ‘“This thing of darkness I acknowledge mine”: The Tempest and Colonial Criticism’, in Jonathan Dollimore and Alan Sinfield (eds), Political Shakespeare: Essays in Cultural Materialism
article with John Street, they call for a historical practice informed by Williams's cultural materialism that entails ‘the combination of empirical and archival research with a theoretical method that allows for the complexities, contradictions and contentious nature of punk's cultural practice to be embraced’. 70 While broadly sympathetic to this approach, I would add that an oral history methodology suggests some further complexities. How was the punk scene experienced as an everyday as well as an exceptional set of
, 20; Dollimore, 1985 : 4, 10; Newton, 1989 : 152-3; Bennett, 1990 :19, 21, 52-3, 69, 72-5, 108, 141. For cultural materialism, see Barrell, 1988 : vii-viii, 12, 36. 23 Lentricchia, 1989 : 234; Greenblatt, 1992 : 3. 24