Afropunk: Punk Aesthetics Rooted in African and Indigenous Fashions

    One of the moments in the movie Afropunk that I found most interesting was an interview in which the speaker talked about how they were initially drawn into punk because of the aesthetics: the bright hair colors, safety-pin piercings, and other accessories that, to the Eurocentric hegemony in the US, would come off as countercultural. However, they explain, they realized later on in their life that these punk aesthetics have been preceded by the fashions of many African and Indigenous peoples, and that these fashions greatly influenced the punk prototype. The interviewee also that they also had access to images of tribal African peoples from an early age and were moved by the beauty of the "stark beauty" of their aesthetic style; punk later reawakened their interest in these traditional African aesthetics.

The fact that clothing styles that might be considered traditional within different African and Indigenous cultures across the world has been adopted as a countercultural aesthetic within largely white punk circles demonstrates—as mentioned by other people interviewed in Afropunk—that the ethos and attitude of punk speaks to the experience of being black in a white America. That the traditional fashions of Africans peoples—when placed within the context of the US—could be perceived as social unacceptable, unprofessional, or provocative is perhaps indicative of the larger issue: that black culture has historically been made to exist outside the boundaries of social acceptability by white America. 

We can illustrate this problem within other parts of the film, like when multiple people in the film explained how, even within the punk scene, they felt as though they needed to straighten their hair in order to fit in with the punk style (like spiky hair) or to avoid feeling conspicuous amongst the punks around them. Despite punk aesthetics borrowing from the hair and body mods seen in traditional African and Indigenous cultures, black people in the punk scene can still be made to feel aesthetically out of place.