In The Black Jacobins, C. L. R. James centers Black revolutionary agency in the Haitian Revolution, challenging European class-reductionist models of Marxism and demonstrating that race and colonialism fundamentally shape revolutionary struggle. Taking James’s intervention as a point of departure, this paper asks: What does it mean to invoke “Black Jacobins” in a contemporary U.S. punk scene? How do anti-capitalist musicians mobilize revolutionary history in the present? And how might ethnomusicology theorize the relationship between class struggle and identity-based politics?

I examine the song “Black Jacobins” and its music video by the Tallahassee-based punk band Degenerate State. Shifting between syncopated bass grooves and thrashing hardcore textures, the song references the Haitian Revolution before pivoting to the refrain, “Wake up, it’s a world revolution.” Drawing on participant observation in the Tallahassee punk/DIY scene—including shows, reading groups, protests, and mutual aid events—as well as interviews with band members, I situate the song within a local culture of Marxist-Leninist organizing.

Building on Barbara Foley’s theory of Intersectional Marxism (Foley 2019), I argue that Degenerate State’s work refuses the presumed opposition between class analysis and identity politics. All members of the band identify as Trans or Non-Binary, and their revolutionary aesthetics emerge within a regional political climate shaped by legislation such as Florida’s HB 1069. An intersectional Marxist lens, I suggest, allows ethnomusicology to theorize contemporary musical outrage as both structural critique and embodied survival.

In describing various aggressive styles of dance collectively glossed as “moshing,” participants in the hardcore punk subculture often claim that the music “makes” them move without conscious thought. Such “involuntary” responses to musical gestures echo common descriptions of affect as precognitive or pre-discursive (Desai-Stephens and Reisnour 2020). Drawing from ethnographic research in United States hardcore punk scenes, this paper thus considers how affect might be productively mobilized to theorize music’s capacity to initiate moshing. I argue that affect, in dialogue with subcultural practices and discourses, spurs specific movements in the mosh pit, and that these embodied experiences are integral to participants’ engagement with the subculture. Utilizing Garcia-Mispireta’s concept of “sonic tactility” (2023) and Kapchan’s “aesthetics of proximity” (2021), I suggest that affect acts as conduit between proximal sounds and bodies in the mosh pit. Through specific sonic gestures, musicians engage in a sensory dialogue with audience members to encourage particular, often physically violent kinds of movement, retained in participants through an ongoing process of affective entrainment. I discuss affect’s role in fostering community and intimacy through moshing, while paradoxically normalizing violent behavior. I thus consider how these sonic and affective intensities inform nuanced subcultural ethics surrounding the acceptable threshold for violence in the mosh pit. Following recent scholarship on the “affective turn” in music studies, I posit that a deeper understanding of the music’s affect lends crucial insight into the role of sound in reflecting subcultural politics, which often aim to subvert normative behaviors and cultural formations.

A few nights a month, members of the D.C. folk punk scene gather in a small venue or bar to sing and mosh together to the sound of banjos, mandolins, accordions and horns. Amidst original songs outlining the future anarchist revolution, artists lead the room in impassioned choruses of leftist anthems like “Solidarity Forever” and “Bella Ciao.” Many folk punk artists intentionally reference songs from the past when performing in the district in order to convey a sense of continuity between the subculture and anarchist and leftist movements at large. However, I argue that by also leading group singing about events taking place in D.C., the local band Trash Boat and the Ambush link the notion of an anarchist revolution to actions that can be taken against the U.S. government by scene members in their immediate community. I focus on performances of two of their original songs: “The Ballad of Rahul Dubey” and “Burn it Down,” which are situated in the recent past and imagined future of D.C. respectively. This paper, based on ongoing ethnographic research, makes a significant contribution to scholarship on folk punk, as published work on this topic is limited to one recent article (Fox 2024). It also builds on related scholarship on anarcho-punk (Mattern 2016, Dunn 2012) and dynamics of participatory music making (Turino 2008) as part of a larger project on the intersection of folk punk scene participation and anarchist resistance in the U.S.

Soaked in sweat and rain, my voice hoarse from singing, and my body numb with exhaustion, I came to fully understand the appeal of BaianaSystem’s epic Carnival parades. Every time the heavily political popular music fusion band leads a parade in Salvador’s Carnival season on their pirate ship float—rain or shine—one will see thousands of fans bouncing wildly in synchronized chaos. Partly based on my experience and participant observation of this parade in 2025, this paper will explore how the band carefully calculates moments for sonic and corporeal climactic unity through massive synchronization namely by playing key, unifying melodies that require audience participation during the parade’s most climactic moments. The presentation remarks how BaianaSystem builds their parade upon a desfile de paz (parade of peace) that condemns fighting, pushing, and moshing to the music—which often occurs in many other parades. Instead, the fans are encouraged to jump up without harming others, collectively uniting to manifest the musical-political resistance and release through peaceful demonstration. I argue that this resistance is reminiscent of the Black Radial Tradition initially proposed by Cedric Robinson (1983), that has recently reemerged in ethnomusicology literature (Barson 2025, Harris 2022), and that I argue appears in Salvador’s Bloco Afro movement starting in the 1970s (Case 2024, 2025). Having recently earned a Latin Grammy for their album released in early 2025, right before Carnival, the crowd was especially ready to collectively unite in synchronized chaos and Black resistance around BaianaSystem’s pirate ship.