In recent years, punk studies has emerged as an innovative, interdisciplinary field. Often tied to subcultural studies, scholarly accounts of punk unfortunately tend to examine scene-based productions in isolation from or resistant to the broader societal networks in which they are implicated. Approaching punk history in conjunction with broader historical trajectories, however, can illuminate cultural continuities that shape how histories of place and development are appreciated. While London and New York are widely cited as punk’s formative locales, we demonstrate that punk developed concurrently, with often similar tendencies, worldwide and on both sides of the Iron Curtain.

Our papers look at three different punk scenes in three different countries spanning three different continents: the United States, East Germany, and Japan. In each scene, punks were able to secure spaces to help construct their subculture thanks to the support of non-punk actors. Jessica Schwartz examines the ways in which California punk in Los Angeles and San Francisco was sustained by Asian immigrant-owned venues and collaborative entrepreneurialism. Jeff Hayton demonstrates how East German punks carved out space in Protestant Churches with the help of sympathetic clergy. And Mahon Murphy explores the early Japanese punk scene on university campuses, emphasizing the links made across class barriers between punks who were mainly high-school dropouts, and the university societies and political activists of an earlier generation, particularly groups based at the Seibu Kōdō theater in Kyoto University.

Although these spaces were quite different, they nonetheless fulfilled similar functions which points towards a global spatial regime that helped nurture punk across diverse cultures. Nor was this a question of space alone but of the shared cultural patterns of autonomy between punks and their larger milieus. Whether Chinese immigrants in LA, Protestant Clergy in East Germany, or New Left activists in Japan, punks not only found allies among these groups, but depended on them for subcultural survival, relationships which transformed the historical topographies of the places in which such unlikely alliances emerged. Such collaborations not only challenge the notion that punk was a “rupture,” but they also point to how space helped to structure punk subcultures around the world.