Coyotebanjo: Dieselpunk as historical critique

Why might we care about Dieselpunk?

Operating Premise #1: An arts aesthetic is a situational response to a particular artistic/historical moment and context. Deco, Arts & Crafts, Rococo, Neoclassical, Romantic, avant-garde, Baroque aesthetics are all responses generated as a result of human experience within specific historical contexts, and their meaning both derives from, moves through, and reveals transformations of historical thinking and meaning.

My own subjective critique and aesthetic politics: an arts aesthetic that fails to implicate a political awareness of its originating historical context(s) risks becoming privileged, precious, ahistorical, appropriative, and/or culturally-adrift. As a result, I am not interested in an arts aesthetic which disavows the political.

Operating Premise #2: Art which reinforces dominant cultural or historical tropes is less interesting to me than art which questions them.

Terminology: to “-punk” an idiom, an expression, or a genre, is to critique, subvert, or read against its presumed grain. Hence punk-rock read against the grain of 1970s rock music; cyber-punk read against the grain of mainstream hard-SFF utopianism; and so forth.[1]

Therefore: Dieselpunk, Steampunk, Cyberpunk, Solarpunk—all are essentially both aesthetics, and implicitly politics. That is: the prefix—“Diesel-,” “Steam-,” “Cyber-,” “Solar-”—references the historical time-frame of a specific aesthetic (respectively and approximately 1914-45, 1870-1914, 1950s-forward, 1960s-forward), but the suffix “-punk” references that aesthetic’s oppositional politics—its political intentions.

Thus, to “-punk” an aesthetic is to read the prefix “Diesel” or “Steam” or “Cyber” or “Solar” against the grain, against the norm—to employ the period aesthetics of c1914-45, 1870-1914, 1950s-forward to critique and/or subvert dominant culture in those periods. To “punk” is to occupy the subaltern; to push back; to hack the norms and counter-jam the aesthetic presumptions and even more importantly the cultural politics and entitlements from which those presumptions emerge. This is what the original punk-rock did, what the original cyber-punk did: they read the dominating aesthetic against the grain—oppositionally.

So what would a truly Dieselpunk politics look like?

For the sake of comparison, perhaps we could say that the appeal and the pitfalls of Steampunk run from the gamut from charming, exotic, inventive—to orientalist, appropriative, posturing, precious, racist, while we might say that:

The appeal and the pitfalls of Dieselpunk run from constructive, proletarian, patriotic, courageous—to historicist, brutalist, xenophobic, proto-fascist.

Again—and therefore—what would a dieselpunk politics look like? Or, to phrase this as a more explicitly interpretative question: what would be the oppositional politics of dieselpunk?

If “Diesel-” as an aesthetic (especially a visual one)—in its period of c1914-45—is industrialist, assembly-line, mechanistic, future-utopianist, proto-fascist, then “diesel-punk” could be read as oppositional, subversive, subaltern, proletariat, reading “against the grain”, opposing authoritarianism.

A very central strand of dieselpunk aesthetics in popular culture (games and films especially) is essentially “post-imperial”, mechanistic, romantic, focused upon the visual aesthetic of Mitteleuropaische militarism; see Iron Harvest, etc.[2]

In opposition, what would be less monolithic, less militaristic versions of period-accurate historical manifestations (c1914-45) of a dieselpunk” politics? Certainly not fascism, militarism, industrial consolidation, brutalism—these were the dominating (and repressive) tendencies of the era.

Rather, a -punk-style oppositional stance would seek to counter these tendencies, “reading against the grain” to subvert fascism, militarism, industrial consolidation, brutalism. So “dieselpunk” would be anti-fascist, anti-militarist, anti-industrialist, anti-brutalist; celebrating participatory (ideally anarcho-syndicalist) democracy, radical peace-making, workers’ and communities’ collective ownership and pride in work, organic and sustainable.

For the period c1914-45, historical examples which fruitfully “punked” the era’s dominant-culture consolidations of militarism, fascism, authoritarianism (which dominate much dieselpunk art and design) might instead celebrate:

· The Bonus Army (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bonus_Army): the WWI veterans who came to and camped on the Washington Mall, demanding a payout of subsidies they had been promised for their service. Their encampment was broken up by Federal troops commanded by Black Jack Pershing and which included George S Patton and Douglas MacArthur. Loc.gov lecture (https://www.loc.gov/item/webcast-3710/)

· Aspects, especially folkloric/cultural expressions, of the Popular Front: the international and especially cultural-production face of 1930s Soviet support for international communist & socialist movements; eventually subverted, suborned, and betrayed by Stalinist opportunism in the late 1930s and early ‘40s. More detailed article on the UK version (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Popular_Front_(UK))

· The New Deal (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Deal) and WPA (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Works_Progress_Administration); CCC, FTP, and the rest of the “Alphabet Soup” of FDR’s First 100 Days and Second 100 Days in office, which transformed visions of the Federal government’s responsibilities for organization, infrastructure, and public engagement. Jump-started a revival of American modernist art forms, especially photography, theater, journalism. Betrayed in the early 1950s by HUAC and in the 1980s by Reaganism.

· The anti-nationalist and internationalist politics of the Republican side in the Spanish Civil War (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Republican_faction_(Spanish_Civil_War)

· The international archipelago of tramp steamer lines, populations, communities—and, even more pervasively, the international polyglot creole culture of port cities; see Denning Noise Uprising (https://books.google.com/books?id=q1ZoBAAAQBAJ&printsec=frontcover&dq=denning+%22noise+uprising%22&hl=en&newbks=1&newbks_redir=0&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwifvMHlxIrsAhVkhOAKHQM5AKsQ6AEwAHoECAEQAg#v=onepage&q=denning%20%22noise%20uprising%22&f=false)

· Folksong collecting—but a folksong collecting which more aggressively self-critiqued its own urban, educated, monied, and white-supremacist presumptions. What the American Folklife Collection (https://www.loc.gov/folklife/index.html) at the LOC claimed to be, was in reality, versus what it could have been with more rigorous self-examination. See John and Alan Lomax (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alan_Lomax).

· Lend Lease (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lend-Lease): free nations mobilizing free populations to manufacture weapons to defend other free nations against fascism. Again, FDR’s leadership.

· Vernacular musics of all kinds being heard in niche-marketed as well as popular-access media: 78s and radio: Appalachian music, country blues, all manner of immigrant musics. New media providing new touchstones for minority and proletarian cultural identities.

Seminal period texts which speak to this more sophisticated “-punk” oppositional aesthetic: the 1940s sections in Malcolm’s Autobiography (https://books.google.com/books?id=EtVfCgAAQBAJ&printsec=frontcover&dq=%22autobiography+of+malcolm+x%22&hl=en&newbks=1&newbks_redir=0&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwj59tWvxYrsAhWOiOAKHRvAAtcQ6AEwAHoECAMQAg#v=onepage&q=lindy&f=false); Orwell Homage to Catalonia (https://books.google.com/books?id=8rabAgAAQBAJ&printsec=frontcover&dq=%22homage+to+catalonia%22&hl=en&newbks=1&newbks_redir=0&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwi7svTCxYrsAhUvTt8KHWvEC1QQ6AEwAHoECAYQAg#v=onepage&q=%22homage%20to%20catalonia%22&f=false); Agee Let Us Now Praise Famous Men (https://books.google.com/books?id=qrmm6yNCZysC&printsec=frontcover&dq=%22let+us+now+praise+famous+men%22&hl=en&newbks=1&newbks_redir=0&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwi20Z7axYrsAhVsTd8KHfLrBRkQ6AEwAHoECAIQAg#v=onepage&q=%22let%20us%20now%20praise%20famous%20men%22&f=false); Hurston Their Eyes were Watching God (https://books.google.com/books?id=AxOpIMLco8AC&printsec=frontcover&dq=%22Their+Eyes+were+Watching+God%22&hl=en&newbks=1&newbks_redir=0&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwjn0trmxYrsAhVIc98KHZQ_AS8Q6AEwAHoECAMQAg#v=onepage&q=%22Their%20Eyes%20were%20Watching%20God%22&f=false) and ethnographic work, Steinbeck Cannery Row (https://books.google.com/books?id=1JOfAgAAQBAJ&pg=PT9&dq=%22cannery+row%22&hl=en&newbks=1&newbks_redir=0&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwiskPX5xYrsAhVooXIEHet1BvEQ6AEwAXoECAUQAg#v=onepage&q=%22cannery%20row%22&f=false) and The Grapes of Wrath (https://books.google.com/books?id=fUoQFk8aTCkC&printsec=frontcover&dq=%22grapes+of+wrath%22&hl=en&newbks=1&newbks_redir=0&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwiS8rKIxorsAhWUmHIEHQLuB2MQ6AEwA3oECAMQAg#v=onepage&q=%22grapes%20of%20wrath%22&f=false); Woody Guthrie (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Woody_Guthrie); Lead Belly (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lead_Belly) , etc.