Search

Since the turn of the century, historians have focused on the diverse representations of the past, recognizing that traditional spaces (e.g., museums, statuary, and public commemorations) no longer have a monopoly on the public dissemination of history. This article explores representations of the past from an unusual place: punk rock music and the Canadian band Propagandhi (1986–present). It asks: Can we read history through punk rock? If so, what do we learn? Punks' treatment of the past should be integrated into how we evaluate public consumption of history. While Propagandhi does not create new knowledge, their music acts as an alternative historical epistemology that tracks alongside professional historians. This article explains how punks have integrated historical material similar to the aesthetics used in punk zines, fashions, and record designs. It then analyzes Propagandhi's focus on hypocrisy in punk communities through a historical framework, their perception of the early modern European epistemological origins of animal abuse, and their performance of a social history that magnifies the experiences of marginalized peoples. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the eighteenth century the burgeoning field of political economy incorporated an array of economic, social, moral, and historical themes. This article argues that the Physiocrats’ application of Nicolas Malebranche’s work reveals a critical corporeal component of political economy. The Physiocrats and Malebranche both feared the corrosive effects on the human body of unmitigated commerce and overconsumption. François Quesnay and his Physiocratic acolytes reproduced and expanded on Malebranche’s argument that the cognitive faculty of the imagination could stymie epistemological processes and thus the ability to perceive what the Physiocrats understood to be the natural foundations of political economy. The expanse of Atlantic trade, the subsequent “consumer revolution,” and the growth of new social practices transformed French life and brought individual bodies into novel forms of contact. In reaction, the Physiocrats and political economists prioritized relationships between physical bodies and consumer goods. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

With the release of their seventeenth album of original music (Age of Unreason, May 2019), Bad Religion has reminded the public that their brand of punk rock is not, and has never been, simplistic, reductive or dismissible. While the language of variegated scientific fields provides co-lyricists Greg Graffin and Brett Gurewitz a consistent trove of terms, concepts and imagery, Bad Religion also scrutinizes the past and draws out historical implications for their socio-political-religious commentary. Through an analysis of Bad Religion's lyrics, especially focusing on Age of Unreason, this article will argue that Bad Religion uses historical references as dire warnings, rhetorical devices and examples to instantiate their larger moral and philosophical principles. They seek to entangle the present and the past and reveal how narratives of 'progress' and American 'exceptionalism' are misleading. Bad Religion condenses revolutionary and reactionary historical events into sweeping generalizations of human (usually western) civilization, invoking idealized versions of historical periods ('Dark Ages' and 'The Enlightenment'). While their use of the past is often overgeneralized, Bad Religion examines human history as a record of choices and behaviours that matter to the only existence we have: material and mundane, not transcendental or supernatural. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]