In this week’s episode, guest Mohan Ambikaipaker discusses his article “Music Videos and the ‘War on Terror’ in Britain: Benjamin Zephaniah’s Infrapolitical Blackness in Rong Radio,” which analyzes the political project of the music video Rong Radio, created by British artist Benjamin Zephaniah based on his own dub poem. Ambikaipaker argues that Rong Radio illustrates an “infra-political blackness,” a form of coalition building that is less tied to specific identity markers and instead builds solidarity across people of color responding to shared legacies of disenfranchisement through colonialism and imperialism. Ambikaipaker also discusses the affordances of music videos for activists looking to raise awareness of transnational issues and for educators hoping to generate discussion on complex topics in the classroom.
Pirate Film Cultures in Manila (with Jasmine Nadua Trice)
In this week’s episode, guest Jasmine Nadua Trice discusses her article “Manila’s New Cinephilia,” which analyzes the informal circulation of DVDs through Manila’s street vendors during the early 21st century. Trice demonstrates how these pirate forms of film distribution and consumption are quotidian practices in the Global South and why they represent new form of cinephilia, an appreciation of and deep knowledge of cinema’s technological aspects independent of the text itself.
Documentary Ethics and Trans Activism in the Philippines (with Curran Nault)
In this week’s episode, guest Curran Nault discusses his article “Documenting the Dead: Call Her Ganda and the Trans Activist Afterlife of Jennifer Laude,” which analyzes the production and circulation of the documentary that Nault co-produced about the murder of transpinay Jennifer Laude by a US marine. Informed by his roles as both producer and media scholar, Nault raises critical questions about the aesthetics and ethics of re-presenting trans death and, ultimately, reflects on the possibilities and limitations of documentary as a trans activist tool.
Brown Girls, White Feminism, and the Necropolitics of War (with Moon Charania)
In this week’s episode, guest Moon Charania discusses her article “Ethical Whiteness and the Death Drive: White Women as the New War Hero,” which examines how contemporary films use white women protagonists to justify drone warfare and military intervention in the Middle East. Charania argues that media mobilize the figure of the suffering brown girl to elicit empathy and to assuage Western audiences’ guilt about collateral damage in neo-colonial wars. Through what Charania calls “ethical whiteness”, Global North citizens can promote humanitarian causes to rescue Global South brown girls from numerous atrocities without interrogating how their own governments are responsible for creating the conditions for such atrocities.
Global Media Cultures Podcast 