Punk Sans Frontières

Punk’s diaspora was not limited to the United Kingdom or the United States, and, even during its mid-1970s heyday, parallel developments were happening around the globe, and what would become known as “punk” emerged in Australia, France, Switzerland, the Netherlands, and Scandinavia at the same time as the nascent UK punk movement. Furthermore, as punk in the United Kingdom reached its commercial peak and began to decline (at least in terms of its public profile), it was being discovered, reinvented, or adapted in far-flung places beyond the (Western) critical radar. More than forty years on, punk has traversed international boundaries, and the legacies of the original UK and US scenes are now accompanied by a variety of global counterparts. This chapter narrates punk’s evolution as an international phenomenon, whose interaction with wider cultural contexts, languages, and systems of belief challenged notions of a homogeneous “punk” identity.