Music Videos and the “War on Terror” in Britain: Benjamin Zephaniah's Infrapolitical Blackness inRong Radio

Abstract

Benjamin Zephaniah's Rong Radio is an iconoclastic video that takes aim at the configurations of state violence, racial domination, and media misrepresentations of people of color in Britain. In this work Zephaniah also critiques the Western global order that is engaged in militaristic imperialism, counterterrorism, and securitization discourses via the “War on Terror.” Such infrapolitical blackness, as a form of dissident political subjectivity, emerges from an earlier history of African Caribbean/South Asian radical politics in Britain. Zephaniah was a key figure in this movement but now operates within the aesthetics of a new genre of music videos that constructs popular culture and transnational opposition to the “War on Terror.” In the past only music videos that achieved commercial success were regarded as important, but this is changing with the recognition of their political roles in challenging dominant ideologies and shaping unruly racial subject-positions.