notes from underground zines and the politics of alternative culture

non-professional) but rather an indicator of freedom of expression, community, and cultural resistance. For Duncombe, 'amateur' is not the pejorative term that it has become in our contemporary society (i.e. Here, he highlights the zine culture's oppositional status to mainstream consumer culture, in particular its members position as active, empowered citizens. He ultimately settles on a third definition that combines elements of these first two definitions and emphasizes the social and cultural aspects of zines: 'zines are decidedly amateur' (p. His second definition focuses on their countercultural and often anti-consumerist, or at least anti-mainstream, status: 'zines are noncommercial, nonprofessional, small-circulation magazines which their creators produce, publish, and distribute by themselves' (p. But he eventually determines that amidst all the diversity, zines (and zine publishers) share an element of 'political self-consciousness' and what he calls a 'vernacular radicalism' (p. That is, zines cover a range of topics from music, science fiction, comics, and other pop culture categories to politics, sports, travel, religion, sex, and personal diaries. The first definition starts as something of a non-definition: that zines are wildly eclectic and eccentric and something that the reader needs to judge for him or herself.

He offers three working definitions of his object. In the first of the two chapters that we read (Chapter 1, 'Zines'), Duncombe seeks to define 'zines' and their cultural significance.

Stephen Duncombe's Notes from Underground: Zines and the Politics of Alternative Culture (Verso, 1997) is a study of the history and politics of the (American) small-scale underground publishing culture that was most prevalent in the 1970s and 1980s and peaked in the late 1990s, soon after the book's publication (when it was usurped by the Web and digital self-publishing formats like blogs).

Notes from underground zines and the politics of alternative culture