Nostalgia, authenticity and writing Goth histories: ‘Would you carry the torch...?’

Spooner, Catherine (2024) Nostalgia, authenticity and writing Goth histories: ‘Would you carry the torch...?’. Punk and Post-Punk. ISSN 2044-3706 (In Press)

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Abstract

In 2023, three books were published that professed to be histories of Goth: John Robb’s The Art of Darkness: The History of Goth, Cathi Unsworth’s Season of the Witch: The Book of Goth and Lol Tolhurst’s Goth: A History. Together, the books and the discussion surrounding them indicate a struggle for meaning around a shared past, occasioning what Svetlana Boym has called ‘reflective nostalgia’, a nostalgia that ‘dwells on the ambivalences of longing and belonging’ (Boym 2007). Reflecting on the tendency of Goth histories to locate nostalgia on the 1980s, this article asks what it means to write subcultural history, and what histories are sidelined or left untold in such popular revivals. It interrogates the relationship between history-writing and subcultural capital (Thornton 1995), identifying the conflicted subject-position of the subcultural historian, who must establish both objectivity and authenticity. It suggests that historical narratives tend to represent Goth as a subculture that is in decline, privileging a masculinised music scene over a feminised adoption of Goth style. Contrasting the works of Robb et al with Leila Taylor’s memoir Darkly (2019) and Andi Harriman and Marloes Bontje’s visual and oral account of the subculture, Some Wear Leather, Some Wear Lace (2014), the article finds that self-proclaimed Goth ‘histories’ often consolidate subcultural capital in the familiar figures of white male musicians, while marginalising women, people of colour and a younger generation of subcultural participants.