fanziny

The conceptual problem this article aims to research is how zines (of the Western or “the first world”) and music samizdat (of socialist countries or “the second world”) should be analysed. Thus far, they have been regarded as separate phenomena; however, do these two forms of underground literature differ so greatly that they should be analysed using different theoretical approaches? The subject of the paper, От Винта (Ot Vinta), is a Russian-language music samizdat from the Latvian Soviet Socialist Republic which was published in the late Soviet period.

From the early 1980s, with the common ground of the DIY ethos, lots of and different kinds of popular music idioms (from hardcore, punk to reggae and trip-hop) blossomed in Thessaloniki, Greece. This rich and constant music-making would not have been as vivid during its first period (1982 – 1994) without its own pillars of distribution, which consisted of independent labels and music stores, pirate radio stations and fanzines. In this essay I will focus on Thessaloniki’s emblematic fanzine Rollin Under, which was active from 1985 to 1992.

In this article we introduce the theme of special issue focusing on self-publishing activities In Central and Easter Europe from 1980s to 2000s. The articles presented in this issue offer an interdisciplinary view on the history of independent publishing in both the late socialist and post-socialist periods. We would like to enrich the scholarly debate beyond the dichotomies of communism/capitalism, socialism/post-socialism, East/West and samizdat/fanzine, respectively.

The aim of this paper is a description of domestic football fanzine production in comparison with developments abroad. Zines from the scenes of football fans represent a key source for mapping their histories. While fanzine production is not a new topic in international critical literature, in the Czech Republic it has received only limited attention. The majority of football fanzines in the Czech Republic arose in the milieus of specific subcultural groups – football hooligans and ultras.

Taking a specific case of the subculture of the Czech “White Power skinheads” in the 1990s, this paper engages with the role of zines, zine-makers and other contributors (such as readers whose letters to the editors were published, or interviewees) in the (re)production of subcultural capital and the formation and reproduction of alternative hierarchies in the subcultural field.

Fanzines simultaneously reflected the subculture’s ideological cleavages, including those within the far-right branch itself (disregarding anti-racist or apolitical fanzines). As the racist skinhead subculture formed in the first half of the 1990s, it split into the more-or-less open neo-Nazis, on the one hand, and the so-called Utraquist skinheads, with their ideological amalgam of nationalism, racism and authoritarianism, on the other. The Utraquist skinhead groups are a unique Czech phenomenon; they have no international counterparts and have thus far received minimal attention.

This article compares Czechoslovak, Czech and Slovenian hardcore punk fanzine scenes from the 1980s up to the present, emphasising in particular their connections to the various anti-authoritarian movements with which they share the common idea of do-it-yourself (DIY). The comparison is embodied in the histories of above-mentioned scenes and in the context of their legacies. Fanzines are the author’s main sources mainly because cultural and political activities were connected on their pages.

This paper scrutinises how alternative cultural scenes from Central and Eastern European countries have been represented in fanzines published in France since 1977. The study focusses principally on the geographical and temporal rather than the qualitative or cultural aspects of the question. Four countries clearly stand out, representing 57 % of the analysed corpus: Poland, Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia and Hungary.

While we strive to develop existing research on fanzines in Central and Eastern Europe (CEE), this article provides an introduction to the discussion about of fanzines and the specific historical contexts of CEE. This thematic issue aims to open a debate about CEE subcultures and alternative-press practices in the context of the relationship between the local and the global in contemporary history.