Black or Right

Anti/Racist Campus Rhetorics

Louis M. Maraj

• Editorial: Utah State University Press
• Año: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781646421473
• Categoría: Lingue e linguistica
• Categoría: Linguistica

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.

1

“Are you Black, though?”

Black Autoethnography and Racing the Graduate Student / Instructor

DOI: 10.7330/9781646421473.c001

The difference between poetry and rhetoric

is being ready to kill

yourself

instead of your children.

Audre Lorde (1974), “Power” (71)1

As usual, as I ease into a fresh semester at the Midwestern State University, I can count the Black-identified students in my second-year writing class on the one hand: two men, one woman. The Black woman, Shaina, is vocal, speaks to her biraciality, to one of her parents’ experiences as a Black Caribbean immigrant, and calls out white privilege when she sees it. One of the men is typical of the Black male students I encounter at Midwestern State: shy, withdrawn, but willing to speak sometimes, though not always in debates directly related to Blackness. The other Black man, T, outspoken, consistently challenges me in overt, often excoriating ways. For the first time, he puts my Blackness as an instructor at a historically white institution routinely up for open debate.

Unlike most Black men I encounter in other white spaces here, T performs “stereotypical” Blackness: through his clothing, speech, and in ways through his writing. I remember gold chains with large pendants and felt pride knowing that T could dress like this in a classroom here—my classroom. He drops “nigga” frequently, nonchalantly, throughout discussions from the jump. That he says it so freely in front of all the white students in my class engenders a kind of selfish confidence for me.

The first time T asks “Are you Black?” in some discussion of a Black authored-text, I’m shook. At the front of the classroom, I feel coerced into disclosing my identities. Having worked through a positioning activity during the first week of class, asking students to consider their intersectional identities, T and my own pedagogies compel me to respond. I want to empathize—though this response requires public disclosure. I explain my background. I identify as Black, though ethnically both Afro- and Indo-Trinidadian (hence my light skin tone). He doesn’t push further.

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My aunt and twin cousins visit from Trinidad. I invite them to see me teach. My immediate family never see me in this role and don’t know my academic life, and my aunt is a retired schoolteacher I look up to. They sit as I review paragraph structure. My histories crisscross my present, living, as though its own body, with its own voice, in the classroom space—with my “Yankee-d” accent and flailing gesticulation—finally revealing another Lou, not the quiet, introverted child they know, here in “the States” at a major university, teaching (mostly) white kids how to write in a plaid button-up and jeans. Their videos and pictures document my teaching for the first time, letting me look at myself as an English instructor while a Black Caribbean im/migrant working in a privileged role. I proudly introduce my students to my relatives at the beginning of class and listen eagerly to their reaction to my teaching.

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“#schoolboyLou” shows up on the margins of student assignments throughout the semester. T develops this nickname for me, which begins to appear on his and other students’ handwritten work. I never directly ask. I infer that T is signiyin’ on the name of LA rapper ScHoolboy Q. Although it seems subversive, I feel honored that a Black male student thought it his business to give me a new name, a Black name. I want to find something generative in what might be typically deemed disruption. Because it riffs on the name of a rapper associated with “wokeness,”2 I think honor into what seems like his identification of me via urban Black masculinity. But such identification makes its way into the classroom as interrogation again, where, in a white space, we engage in some kind of antagonistic, verbal throw-down for Blackness.

During group project presentations, I sit at the back of the room. T’s group is up next, and as he shuffles to the front of the class, he turns and asks in the lag between projects: “Are you Black, though?”

I sigh exasperatedly “Uh yea.” But before I can even vocalize that, Shaina, seated in between us, responds immediately: something along the lines of “He already told you he was Black. Why do you keep asking?” T ignores her, again engages with me, as I continue what must be a critical, staring-at-the-sun look at him. T’s next question has me even more shook: “So, like . . . if this was plantation days, would you be in the house while I was in the field?”

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I begin this story to give an intimate sense of how my experiences as a Black im/migrant able-bodied male graduate student/instructor frames my analysis of deep rhetorical ecologies at white institutions. In its fractures, my Blackness, perceived by others or articulated by me, cannot be separated from these spaces and communities with/in which I operate. When I use the word “space,” I speak to the ecological and environmental conditions that surround, constitute, and embody social intra-action and interaction. Interdisciplinary feminist theorist Karen Barad conceptualizes spatial meanings as co-constituted by such “agential intra-actions” between spaces’ components, a concept integrating Marxist, feminist, and antiracist approaches (2003, 815, 810–811). But although I nod to these (re)new(ed) materialist interests in spatial constitution, I foreground here an analysis of Blackness informed by Black feminist—and supported by African indigenous—approaches that prioritized relationality long before rhetorical scholarship’s recent “new materialist turn.” Sylvia Wynter, for instance, through the sociogenic principle, explains how the physiological processes of the body cannot foreclose “being human,” as Western Man’s governing codes mean that human life forms enact “a third level of hybridly bios and logos existence” (1994a, 6). In other words, selfhood and its social environments, and vice versa, always already mediate the body (Wynter 2001). Meanwhile, Denise Ferreira da Silva, argues that modern thought, in treating humans as objects in studying racialized others and their regions, formulated and spread prevailing ideas intertwining notions of globality and raciality. Western philosophy mobilizes what the Black feminist calls the hegemonic “transparent I” of rational self-determination in contrast to racialized minorities as “subjects of affectability” needing control by exterior reason (2007, 40). Conscious of these lenses, I re/present my Black im/migrant experiences through Black feminist autoethnography,3 revealing the insidious ways that racialized precarity operates with and in US educational spaces vis-à-vis/with/in its long-standing in/justice systems.4

Focusing on “everyday, taken-for-granted knowledge” (Hill Collins [1990] 2000), I pick up and extend disability studies scholar Margaret Price’s notion of “kairotic spaces”—“the less formal, often unnoticed, areas of academe where knowledge is produced and power is exchanged” (2011, 60)—to spaces not traditionally considered “academic.”5 The above narrative demonstrates not only my inability to separate my subjectivity from this project but also the inevitably of being read racially based on my spatiality and (literal/metaphorical/identity-based) positions within the institution. My para/ontological Blackness moves with/in my body’s position in the frame of the classroom, where, for instance, being at the back of the room might invite T’s attempted subversion. My relationship with T deeply puzzled me for a while: How could I at once be #schoolboyLou while also some kind of Black poser? Some house slave (contingent English instructor) for the white massa (MwSU)? How is it that Shaina sought to defend my Blackness in all of this?6 What roles do the writing classroom—and, by extension, “white” campus spaces—our material identities, and our stories unfolding within them play in theorizing difference in rhetoric, writing, and literacy studies? And what histories within the fields do those roles speak with, push against, draw from, and add to? Let’s dig deeper.

In this chapter, I offer Black autoethnography as a rhetoric to theorize Black, potentially antiracist, agency within rhetoric, writing, and literacy studies. Ratcliffe’s Rhetorical Listening notably deploys autoethnography as the first of several steps in her titular antiracist concept. Though she views autoethnography as “valuable,” for her theory, it remains “admittedly limited in its perspective” and separate from “academic research” in disrupting white supremacy in our fields (2005, 37).7 In merging style and content, autoethnography as a principal methodological orientation—rather than a cursory or introductory one—holds greater possibilities for our fields, as scholars of color and particularly Black scholars in it have demonstrated. Forwarded through a Black feminist intersectional lens, this chapter presents my autoethnographic stories as a Black im/migrant male student/instructor while situating my narratives in a reflexive charted history of Black storytelling traditions within the frames of rhetoric, writing, and literacy studies. I mobilize and push forward that history, charting it from Jordan’s “Nobody Mean More to Me than You and the Future Life of Willie Jordan” (1985) to Kynard’s “Teaching While Black” (2015).

Within that tradition, my analysis considers how my Blackness and im/migrantness visualize/d, (em)body, and (per)form difference (and consequently institutional “diversity”) for/against US historically white institutions. Through this approach, I fracture understandings of the precarious positions of the Black graduate student/instructor at these institutions, wrestling with how my meaning-making produces/negotiates with/in these white, capitalist, nationalist, heteropatriarchal spaces.8 “Precarization means more than insecure jobs,” as political theorist Isabell Lorey shows; “by way of insecurity and danger, it embraces the whole existence, the body, modes of subjectivation” (2015, 1). In embracing my racialized precarity, I explore how I am criminalized in spaces of social death, building on critical race scholar Lisa Marie Cacho’s stance that in so doing, possibilities for agency that come from the decision to struggle matter more than its outcomes (2012, 32). Indeed, fractures within deep rhetorical ecologies allow us to recognize where social death is most visible. I thus present experiences to demonstrate how these educational spaces entangle my identities in a kind of self-defeating bind where Blackness becomes tangled in an object-beingness. Black autoethnography as antiracist rhetoric highlights the paradox of that bind by (per)forming resistance along with certain spaces and temporalities—a kind of para/ontological object-being. Through its presentation, this study calls on our disciplines to pay more attention to Blackness and Black gendering in ways that might involve our particularly theorizing/performing the latter to destabilize static cultural binaries and stereotypes that diversity policy often maps onto Black bodies in white institutional spaces.9

As cultural studies scholar Marie Louise Pratt demonstrates, autoethnographic texts “involve a selective collaboration with and appropriation of idioms of the metropolis or the conqueror . . . with indigenous idioms to create self-representations intended to intervene in metropolitan modes of understanding. Autoethnographic works are often addressed to both metropolitan audiences and the speaker’s own community. Their reception is thus highly indeterminate” (1991, 35). Despite that potentially precarious reception, both white scholars10 and scholars of color within our fields have embraced, and in some ways appropriated, women of color and Black feminism’s application of autoethnography—theorized/practiced by Lorde, Gloria Anzaldúa, hooks, and so on—in their work in critiquing identity in educational spaces. Those scholars of color include Richard Rodriguez (Hunger of Memory 1983), Victor Villanueva (Bootstraps 1993), and Morris Young (Minor Re/visions 2004), among others.11 But here, within that subsection, I particularly prioritize the tradition of Black academics whose work in rhetoric/communication, writing, and literacy studies take up autoethnography as their central methodological framework to extend this tradition through my own stories.

I highlight this long-standing, though unrecognized, foundation utilized by Black academics in our fields through the figure of the griot-as-scholar. Such a move follows on Banks’s call to “build theories, pedagogies, and practices of multimedia writing that honor the traditions and thus the people who are still too often not present in our classrooms, our faculties, and in our scholarship” (2010, 13–14; emphasis mine). Autoethnographic orientations align with African indigenous relational paradigms that emphasize self-awareness, belonging, and ecological accountability, which should permeate community and thus research engagement (Chilisa, Major, and Khudu-Petersen 2017). Moreover, Black historian Carter Godwin Woodson describes the storyteller’s importance to African/diasporic communities. They—often older women—tell stories to youth to maintain posterity of the tribe’s traditions. These persons, venerated in the community, play crucial roles in social functions and through daily performance of stories (1928, ix–x). Storytelling, thus linked with both educational and the daily performance of communal being, holds a particularly esteemed value in customary Black knowledge-making.12 I interrogate the functions of reflective stories that position Black rhetoricians and me within the griot-as-scholar tradition,13 to advance this project’s Black feminist analytic that “affirms, rearticulates, and provides a vehicle for expressing in public” an already extant Black consciousness (Hill Collins [1990] 2000, 32).

I think through racialization as relational because, as Alexander Weheliye explains via Black feminists Wynter and Spillers, relationality potentially “reveals the global and systemic dimensions of racialized, sexualized, and gendered subjugation, while not losing sight of the many ways political violence has given rise to ongoing practices of freedom within various traditions of the oppressed,” a lens particularly important and productive in Black studies (2014, 13). Pursuing that analytic, I consider the conditions of particular environments and how they engage with bodies (and vice versa) through fracturing to produce/negotiate identity and meaning with/in them. Each of those bodies has stories to tell, and this chapter spotlights mine in particular. And more than simply acknowledging my subjectivity as significant in ongoing analysis, such a move calls attention to how Blackness engages/emerges in academic labor. Sharpe reminds us that despite our knowing better, the academy often drafts Black academics into servicing our own destruction by adhering to research methods that do “violence to our own capacities to read, think, and imagine otherwise . . . We must become undisciplined” (2016, 13). I join with Sharpe in this pursuit of what she describes via Dionne Brand as “a kind of blackened knowledge, an unscientific method, that comes from observing that where one stands is relative to the door of no return and the moment of historical and ongoing rupture” (2001, 13). To delve into that fracture, to undiscipline, I engage in a process of Black storytelling, of Black autoethnography.

“If This Was Plantation Days” (Continued)

As I calmly articulate why we shouldn’t frame ourselves in relation to slavery, T makes his way to the front of the class. I can’t help but think about our bodies’ positionings in the space—his resistance arising as he takes to the front of the room and I sit in the back row that he usually occupies. Where is the house in this classroom? Where is the field? And though I readily dismiss the planation m...