RACE AND IDENTITY
EDITED BY MIA BAÑUELOS
In 2003, Jacqueline Jones Royster’s “Disciplinary Landscaping, or Contemporary Challenges in the History of Rhetoric” urged the field to reconsider how we construct and privilege dominant voices in our histories. These ‘dominant voices’ as Karma R. Chávez’s “The Body: An Abstract and Actual Rhetorical Concept” highlights, are “white, cisgender, able-bodied, heterosexual men” whose narratives have been privileged and become normative. Although Royster and Chávez are focusing specifically on rhetoric, they are actively speaking into other disciplines too. Royster’s focus on reform scholars who are “recovering, re-ordering, re-situating, re-visioning, and re-creating the lives, experiences, contributions, and achievements of various non-normative subjects in order to make visible new and different features of the territory that might enable paradigmatic shifts.” Only once we begin challenging the perspective and landscaping of histories of disciplines and institutions as Royster, Chávez, and the authors in this review call for, then can we begin considering the role of intersectionality, specifically race and identity, in constructing an expansive future that challenges dominant voices.
This section begins with Montez Jennings’s review of How We Write Now: Living with Black Feminist Theory. Jennings positions Jennifer C. Nash’s book on motherhood, grief, and beauty as a “case study to demonstrate Black feminist reconciliations with loss.” Through a discussion of the book’s form and focus on various artifacts such as photographs and Black feminist scholars, Jennings highlights how Nash’s reflection on her mother’s death is a vehicle for challenging epistemological understandings of beauty, loss, and the shifting natures of methods in academia. Beauty, for example, becomes a practice while loss becomes about aesthetics. This micro example becomes one of the many ways that Jennings highlights how this book is a counterstory that is a “testament to the power of Black feminism.”
In their review of Left Turns in Brown Study, ethen peña offers a philosophical journey of the past, present, and future. peña traces Sandra Ruiz’s use of “brown study” and how it continues to shift throughout an examination of its history to its use in the current socio political and cultural climate. Throughout their review, peña examines how “brown study [is] a refusal of inert knowledge, insisting instead on study as an act of dynamic return, where history and thought remain in flux, continuously reshaping the present.” Ruiz and peña call for us to challenge the fields we are in and “embrace disorientation as an intellectual and affective method.” peña highlights early on that to look to the future is to look to the past and to the present, which is what other authors in this review aim to do in examining race and identity.
isaac dwyer’s review of The Color Black: Enslavement and Erasure in Iran also focuses on race and loss. Recalling Beeta Baghoolizadeh’s methods that range from the personal (family records) to the political (architecture), dwyer explores how the book examines Iran’s history of denying the existence of Blackness. When discussing Baghoolizadeh’s argument that photography was an example of propping up enslaved Black people and highlighted power differentials, dwyer then commentates how “Baghoolizadeh thus astutely asserts how merely suggesting that there could be something morally suspect in Iran’s history of enslavement and Blackface is sufficient rope for the racially privileged.” In examining the past, dwyer emphasizes how Baghoolizadeh commands us to begin listening to archives that are silenced and to position our ‘landscaping’ outside of the dominant narrative.
Floridell Berry also examines the personal and the political in her review of Sugata Bose’s Asia After Europe: Imagining a Continent in the Long Twentieth Century. Bose traces the history of colonialism throughout Asia due to Japanese and European imperialism. Berry highlights how Bose’s focus on the Westernization of Asia has resulted in his coining of “Asianism,” which seeks to unite Asia. While Berry highlights the ambition behind this argument, she is not afraid to challenge its lack of focus on social class dynamics and national security risks in considering a concept like Asianism. Berry leaves the audience with hope after a section focused on reconciling with the past and challenging what we know, she claims that “as countries move forward into the twenty-first century, the shifting geopolitical climate may conversely allow Asiansim to take hold and unite the Asian region.”
Zooming in on one pivotal figure in Asia, Nishant Upadhyay’s review of The Evolution of Pragmatism in India: An Intellectual Biography of B.R. Ambedkar highlights how the personal and the political are intertwined in understanding how we construct a future. In Scott R. Stroud’s biography of Dr. Bhimrao Ramji Ambedkar, Stroud highlights how Ambedkar was a rhetorician that withstood tradition and sought to challenge power structures. In their review, Upadhyay links pragmatism, philosophy, and religion in order to “disengage from the archive” as “Ambedkar is re-inventing pragmatism in the Indian context as a rhetor, politician, social reformer, and representative of Dalits.” Upadhyay is also not afraid to challenge and question the biography of a figure such as Ambedkar. In examining its connection to potential audiences, they encourage readers to begin thinking about the role of US racial segregation and case systems in South Asia. Overall, Upadhyay highlights the importance of focusing on how we construct histories for pivotal figures.
Closing out this section in a powerful review, Jumi Kim’s review of Ordinary Notes highlights how Christina Sharpe “interrogates how language performs this (mis)representation of Blackness in a way that amplifies its abjection, thus problematizing recognition as a racially inflected notion that warrants a careful recalibration in Black lives.” Specifically, Sharpe challenges epistemological notions of seeing as it is not neutral and can result in destructive misreadings. Kim’s own review, similar to Sharpe’s book, is not linear and becomes an exercise of Sharpe’s continual challenging of language. Kim weaves in Jennings and dwyer’s discussions of beauty and antiblackness, emphasizing how beauty is “both borne of and exceeds the impossibilities of anti-Blackness.” In her review, Kim highlights the mobility of a text like Sharpe’s and other books in this section which seek to shake up academia by questioning how we construct knowledge.
