Disidentification and Englistan: Aesthetic Resistance of Exclusion in the UK

This article explores the sophomore album, Englistan (2016) of rapper and cultural critic Riz MC (hereafter, Riz) through recourse to the theory of disidentification of José Esteban Muñoz (1999). By taking a wide lens inclusive of the context of the album’s composition during the Brexit campaign, its many inter-textual references, and within Riz’s larger canon, its critical aesthetic practice and theory is explored for its survivalist and world-making potential (Muñoz, 1999). In situating Riz’s work within long genealogies of aesthetic practice and meaning, this article will demonstrate the resilience to cooption of such disidentificatory aesthetic practices, which offer “critical resources with which to oppose the growing pressure to depoliticize life” (Demos, 2013, 247). This genealogical work is informed by an aesthetic referent and floating signifier (Eco, 1976; Laclau, 1996; Elgin, 2000; Agier, 2016) signaled by Riz on the album’s title track, as a ‘a green and pleasant land’. Undertaking a genealogy of the aesthetic referent’s origin, appropriations, and continuing contestation reveals its critical utility for illustrating the conditionality of belonging and imperial critique of the minoritarian subject (Muñoz, 1999) at the heart of Riz’s work, and its potential for enacting a disidentificatory critique of exclusion from genuine representation in culture and the political. The question of this representation and belonging of minoritarian subjects within the UK implicates discourses of substantive access to rights, popular stereotypical and racializing debasement, and exposure to violence, both structural and spectacular (Virdee and McGeever, 2017; Seigel, 2018). The nuance with which Riz’s Englistan project engages symbolically, acoustically, and visually with these discourses situates his critique as intersectional (Yuval-Davis, 2011) and decolonial (Bhambra and Riley, 2017). In exploring in depth three tracks from the Englistan album, ‘Englistan’, ‘I Ain’t Bein’ Racist But…’, and ‘Behnaz’, this article presents the manner in which Riz’s practice illustrates the capacity to speak beyond the boundaries of politics, “beyond and across cultural specificity” (DeDuve, 2008, 146), and in so doing explore the interrelated and co-constitutive experiences of race, class, gender of minoritarian subjects in the UK. By connoting these blended histories and the possibilities they imply, Riz’s disidentificatory practices enact the world-making potential of aesthetics (Muñoz, 1999) and present alternatives representations of the demos that are inclusive and embody the potential and lived experiences of all its subjects rather than a narrow imagined ethnos.