Black or Right: Anti/Racist Campus Rhetorics

Black or Right: Anti/Racist Campus Rhetorics explores notions of Blackness in white institutional--particularly educational--spaces. In it, Louis M. Maraj theorizes how Black identity operates with/against ideas of difference in the age of #BlackLivesMatter. Centering Blackness in frameworks for antiracist agency through interdisciplinary Black feminist lenses, Black or Right asks how those racially signifying "diversity" in US higher education (and beyond) make meaning in the everyday.

Offering four Black rhetorics as antiracist means for rhetorical reclamation--autoethnography, hashtagging, inter(con)textual reading, and reconceptualized disruption--the book uses Black feminist relationality via an African indigenous approach. Maraj examines fluid, quotidian ways Black folk engage anti/racism at historically white institutions in the United States in response to violent campus spaces, educational structures, protest movements, and policy practice. Black or Right's experimental, creative style strives to undiscipline knowledge from academic confinement. Exercising different vantage points in each chapter--autoethnographer, digital media scholar/pedagogue, cultural rhetorician, and critical discourse analyst--Maraj challenges readers to ecologically understand shifting, multiple meanings of Blackness in knowledge-making. Black or Right's expressive form, organization, narratives, and poetics intimately interweave with its argument that Black folk must continuously invent "otherwise" in reiterative escape from oppressive white spaces.

In centering Black experiences, Black theory, and diasporic Blackness, Black or Right mobilizes generative approaches to destabilizing institutional whiteness, as opposed to reparative attempts to "fix racism," which often paradoxically center whiteness. It will be of interest to both academic and general readers and significant for specialists in cultural rhetorics, Black studies, and critical theory.


Author: Louis M. Maraj
Publisher: Utah State University Press
Published: 12/01/2020
Pages: 208
Binding Type: Paperback
Weight: 0.65lbs
Size: 8.90h x 6.00w x 0.70d
ISBN: 9781646421466

About the Author
A native of Trinidad and Tobago, Louis M. Maraj is assistant professor of English in the Composition Program at the University of Pittsburgh and cofounder of Digital Black Lit and Composition (DBLAC), a mentorship network of Black graduate students in fields studying language. He has received a Conference on College Composition and Communication Scholars for the Dream Award, the Arthur Rense Prize from the Academy of American Poets, and various institutional honors for teaching and digital media projects. Maraj's work can be found in Precarious Rhetorics, Prose Studies, and Women's Studies in Communication.