Exposing the linguistic racism that permeates vocabulary about race and equity, this book addresses the importance of unseating the sometimes unrecognized racism of everyday Language. The Contributors discuss the potential of words to prompt a real change in discourse--and then in the world--and call for a rethinking of racist Language that is vital for anti-racist work.
Toward an Anti-Racist Poetics seeks to dislodge the often unspoken white universalism that underpins literary production and reception today. In this personal and thoughtful book, award-winning author Wayde Compton explores how we might collectively develop a poetic approach that makes space for diversity by doing away with universalism in both lyric and avant-garde verse. Poignant and contemporary examples reveal how white authors often forget that their whiteness is a racial position. In the propulsive push to experiment with form, they essentially fail to see themselves as “white artists.” Noting that he has never felt that his subjectivity was universal, Compton advocates for the importance of understanding your own history and positionality, and for letting go of the idea of a common aesthetic. Toward an Anti-Racist Poetics offers validation for poets of colour who do not work in dominant western forms, and is for all writers seeking to engage in anti-racist work.
This book addresses questions of antiracism and its connections with difference in a variety of educational settings and schooling practices by focusing on systems, structures, relations of domination, and the racist, classist, and sexist constructions of reality that serve as dominant paradigms for viewing and interpreting lives and historical realities.
'Why are you making this about race?' This question is repeated daily in public and in the media. Calling someone racist in these times of mounting white supremacy seems to be a worse insult than racism itself. In our supposedly post-racial society, surely it’s time to stop talking about race? This powerful refutation is a call to notice not just when and how race still matters but when, how and why it is said not to matter. Race critical scholar Alana Lentin argues that society is in urgent need of developing the skills of racial literacy, by jettisoning the idea that race is something and unveiling what race does as a key technology of modern rule, hidden in plain sight. Weaving together international examples, she eviscerates misconceptions such as reverse racism and the newfound acceptability of 'race realism', bursts the 'I’m not racist, but' justification, complicates the common criticisms of identity politics and warns against using concerns about antisemitism as a proxy for antiracism. Dominant voices in society suggest we are talking too much about race. Lentin shows why we actually need to talk about it more and how in doing so we can act to make it matter less.
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.
The contributors to Otherwise Worlds investigate the complex relationships between settler colonialism and anti-Blackness to explore the political possibilities that emerge from such inquiries. Pointing out that presumptions of solidarity, antagonism, or incommensurability between Black and Native communities are insufficient to understand the relationships between the groups, the volume's scholars, artists, and activists look to articulate new modes of living and organizing in the service of creating new futures. Among other topics, they examine the ontological status of Blackness and Indigeneity, possible forms of relationality between Black and Native communities, perspectives on Black and Indigenous sociality, and freeing the flesh from the constraints of violence and settler colonialism. Throughout the volume's essays, art, and interviews, the contributors carefully attend to alternative kinds of relationships between Black and Native communities that can lead toward liberation. In so doing, they critically point to the importance of Black and Indigenous conversations for formulating otherwise worlds. Contributors Maile Arvin, Marcus Briggs-Cloud, J. Kameron Carter, Ashon Crawley, Denise Ferreira da Silva, Chris Finley, Hotvlkuce Harjo, Sandra Harvey, Chad B. Infante, Tiffany Lethabo King, Jenell Navarro, Lindsay Nixon, Kimberly Robertson, Jared Sexton, Andrea Smith, Cedric Sunray, Se’mana Thompson, Frank B. Wilderson
"Dei argues that analyzing the intersections of race, class, gender and sexual oppression is essential if we are to fully address educational equity, social justice and change. He examines how we can value our differences while equitably sharing power, and discusses ways to counter the reproduction of societal inequalities in our schools."--Pub. desc.
In Black Aliveness, or A Poetics of Being, Kevin Quashie imagines a Black world in which one encounters Black being as it is rather than only as it exists in the shadow of anti-Black violence. As such, he makes a case for Black aliveness even in the face of the persistence of death in Black life and Black study. Centrally, Quashie theorizes aliveness through the aesthetics of poetry, reading poetic inhabitance in Black feminist literary texts by Lucille Clifton, Audre Lorde, June Jordan, Toni Morrison, and Evie Shockley, among others, showing how their philosophical and creative thinking constitutes worldmaking. This worldmaking conceptualizes Blackness as capacious, relational beyond the normative terms of recognition—Blackness as a condition of oneness. Reading for poetic aliveness, then, becomes a means of exploring Black being rather than nonbeing and animates the ethical question “how to be.” In this way, Quashie offers a Black feminist philosophy of being, which is nothing less than a philosophy of the becoming of the Black world.
This collection adds to our understanding and critical engagement of how gendered and racially minoritized bodies can and do negotiate their identities and politics across several historical domains and contemporary spheres.
Extra Bold is the inclusive, practical, and informative (design) career guide for everyone! Part textbook and part comic book, zine, manifesto, survival guide, and self-help manual, Extra Bold is filled with stories and ideas that don't show up in other career books or design overviews. • Both pragmatic and inquisitive, the book explores power structures in the workplace and how to navigate them. • Interviews showcase people at different stages of their careers. • Biographical sketches explore individuals marginalized by sexism, racism, and ableism. • Practical guides cover everything from starting out, to wage gaps, coming out at work, cover letters, mentoring, and more. A new take on the design canon. • Opens with critical essays that rethink design principles and practices through theories of feminism, anti-racism, inclusion, and nonbinary thinking. • Features interviews, essays, typefaces, and projects from dozens of contributors with a variety of racial and ethnic backgrounds, abilities, gender identities, and positions of economic and social privilege. • Adds new voices to the dominant design canon. Written collaboratively by a diverse team of authors, with original, handcrafted illustrations by Jennifer Tobias that bring warmth, happiness, humor, and narrative depth to the book. Extra Bold is written by Ellen Lupton (Thinking with Type), Farah Kafei, Jennifer Tobias, Josh A. Halstead, Kaleena Sales, Leslie Xia, and Valentina Vergara.
