Notes from Underground - Stephen Duncombe

Stephen Duncombe - Notes from Underground

Duncombe sees the history of zines through the identities and lived experiences of those who create them. He tells the history of the people, moving through the different communities that exist within the overarching umbrella of ‘zine,’ and describes the history in a way which I would be remiss to try to

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“Somehow these little smudged pamphlets carried with them the honesty, kindness, anger, the beautiful inarticulate articulateness, the uncompromising life…”

There is truly not a better way of putting it: the beautiful inarticulate articulateness… the way each zine is unfettered by the typical constraints of other mediums, the true freedom of

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Zines can be anything from a political condemnation, a mode of processing grief and loss, an anti-capitalist manifesto, to creativity unleashed–or even, all of the above! Duncombe saw something within this medium; he saw an ‘angry idealism’ housed within these zines, a form of potential political upheaval, a way of inspiring change. Today, it is

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“But what are they? That’s the first question I’m usually asked when I start to talk about zines. My initial, and probably correct, impulse is to hand over a stack of zines and let the person asking the question decide, for this is how they were introduced to me.”

Zines are a form of creation and community that prioritizes, as Duncombe says, the

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How have zines forged community in the past?

Factsheet Five, Maximum RockNRoll, and just generally all of these zines that exist as a collage of so many different things, like the one lettuce slug woman. These types of zines seem to have exited commonplace usage, with more artistic and single-topic focused (though these topics can be intersectional

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