During May 1968, students and workers in France united in the biggest strike and the largest mass movement in French history. Protesting capitalism, American imperialism, and Gaullism, 9 million people from all walks of life, from shipbuilders to department store clerks, stopped working. The nation was paralyzed—no sector of the workplace was untouched. Yet, just thirty years later, the mainstream image of May '68 in France has become that of a mellow youth revolt, a cultural transformation stripped of its violence and profound sociopolitical implications.

Kristin Ross shows how the current official memory of May '68 came to serve a political agenda antithetical to the movement's aspirations. She examines the roles played by sociologists, repentant ex-student leaders, and the mainstream media in giving what was a political event a predominantly cultural and ethical meaning. Recovering the political language of May '68 through the tracts, pamphlets, and documentary film footage of the era, Ross reveals how the original movement, concerned above all with the question of equality, gained a new and counterfeit history, one that erased police violence and the deaths of participants, removed workers from the picture, and eliminated all traces of anti-Americanism, anti-imperialism, and the influences of Algeria and Vietnam. May '68 and Its Afterlives is especially timely given the rise of a new mass political movement opposing global capitalism, from labor strikes and anti-McDonald's protests in France to the demonstrations against the World Trade Organization in Seattle.

This issue follows the punk movement’s lingering aftereffects, investigating its unruly profligacy of meanings within music and popular culture and outside and beyond genre. The contributors track punk’s affect and aesthetics across media and geography from the 1970s to the present, seeking to disrupt conventional linear narratives of punk’s development. This collection participates in a growing body of literature focusing on the stories and creative articulations of punk by women, people of color, and queer individuals. The contributors reconsider the presence of masculinity in emo; posit a queer minstrelsy underlying the homophobia in 1980s hardcore punk; analyze the “shadow feminism” within the screams of Rhoda Dakar, Yoko Ono, Grace Jones, and Janelle Monáe; and confront the relationship of faith, feminism, and aesthetics in Pussy Riot’s work. Other essays offer a realignment of punk’s Los Angeles–New York–London axis by investigating South Tejas punk bands and disentangling punk’s thorny connections to ska, dub, dubstep, and pop.

Jayna Brown is Associate Professor of Ethnic Studies at the University of California, Riverside. Patrick Deer is Associate Professor of English at New York University. Tavia Nyong’o is Associate Professor of Performance Studies at the Tisch School of the Arts at New York University.