The main focus of this thesis is to understand the myriad ways in which crust punk as an expressive cultural form creates meaning, forms the basis for social formation (or music scene), and informs the ways in which its participants both interact with and understand the world around them. Fieldwork for this research was conducted during the summer of 2012 in Austin, Texas. Primary methodology included participant observation, semi-structured interviews, and online ethnography. Additional research data was collected over the last five years through my own personal involvement with the crust punk music scene. The first section examines the ways in which crust punk as a genre both continues to evolve by avoiding and disavowing genre definitions and boundaries. The second section addresses my particular experiences with the Austin, Texas crust punk scene. I separate and examine the differences within the scene among and between differing levels of participation in various scene practices. These practices include the everyday practices necessary to maintain the music scene, as well as “anarchist” practices such as squatting, train hopping, transiency, and refusal to work. In the final section, I argue that in the crust punk scene dystopian performatives enable an apocalyptic and dystopic view of the world, building upon Jill Dolan’s theory of utopian performatives. I also outline my theory on how dystopian performatives and apocalyptic rhetoric work together to inflect crust punk structures of feelings and social imaginaries.

abstract: This study provides a rhetorical analysis of how Black nationalist protest rhetors have employed apocalyptic discourse in order to call into question the ideological underpinnings of the hegemonic white American nation building project and to imagine new alternatives to replace them. Previous studies by Howard-Pitney (2005), Harrell (2011), and Murphy (2009) have explored how African American abolitionist and civil rights jeremiahs such as Frederick Douglass and Martin Luther King, Jr. have employed appeals to American civil religion in order to mobilize their audiences to seek liberal reforms to racial injustices by appealing to established values and institutions. While apocalyptic rhetoric also constructs its audience as a chosen people, it tends to take a much more skeptical stance toward the established social order. African American apocalypticists such as David Walker, Malcolm X, and the Black Panther Party rejected the notion of American chosenness that underpins much Black and white American jeremiadic speech, and employed a Burkean perspective by incongruity in order to draw attention to the inaccuracy of white supremacist and American exceptionalist representations of the social world. The end result of this history is the nation's imminent destruction, which has been envisioned as a divine intervention in the case of traditional sacred apocalyptics, such as David Walker or the early Malcolm X, or as a revolutionary uprising of the oppressed, as in the secular apocalyptics of the later Malcolm X and the Black Panther Party. African American apocalyptic rhetoric is prophetic in that it invokes a vision of the national past, present, and future defined by a set of values that are at odds with those of the established social order. African American apocalypticism invites its audience to disidentify themselves from hegemonic white American formulations of Black and white identities and to identify themselves instead with radical alternatives. To the extent that an audience is persuaded by apocalyptic narratives of the American nation, new possibilities for action become available to their consciousness, typically involving either withdrawal from a corrupt society or militant resistance involving measures more radical than the nonviolent direct action and moral suasion advocated by liberal African American jeremiahs. / Dissertation/Thesis / Doctoral Dissertation English 2016