Notes from Underground: Zines and the Politics of Alternative Culture

The third edition of Notes from Underground: Zines and the Politics of Alternative Culture by Stephen Duncombe was published in 2017. The author researches zines as an underground’s mouthpiece, as an opportunity for “losers” who do not fit in to speak up for themselves. According to Duncombe, zines serve as an identity constructor and help to find one’s place through joining a community of like-minded individuals. By deviating from conventional publishing practices, zinesters, following the DIY principle, prefer authenticity to professionalism, creativity to consumption, and the personal to the accepted and popular. Zines, while remaining in the realm of the pre-political, engage in complex relationships with politics as such. The ideology of zines allows one for a continuous questioning of existing cultural norms, never offering fixed politics but always inviting a zinester to remain in a “free space” of exploration. This enables them to evade a consumer culture that threatens to absorb certain underground identities and strategies. New challenges for zines arise from self-publishing and the overall change in communication practices associated with the development of the Internet. The translations of two chapters from the book, presented for the first time in Russian, shed light on fundamental questions about what zines are and what their place is in the modern world.