Black or Right

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.

“Maraj’s Black Theoretical Sophistication takes my breath away. Too often, Black critical theory in the field is muted or outrightly dismissed. I salute Maraj for his decolonial refusal of these racialized writing practices. Black or Right is exactly what we need right now. The timing, theoretical lens, and prophetic wisdom are divine.”—Carmen Kynard, author of Vernacular Insurrections“Maraj offers a not often heard from and unique voice within Black studies. He is the very person, his background and experiences, to write this book to push us along. The range of topics are uniquely and, in fact, brilliantly conceptualized.”—Vershawn Ashanti Young, author of Your Average Nigga"Louis Maraj’sBlack or Right is courageously ambitious, putting rhetoric and communications studies into direct conversation with theoretical black studies, gender studies, discourse analysis, and digital media theory in a way that achieves cross-fertilization and opens up new vistas of scholarship."—R. A. Judy, author of Sentient Flesh“The book is a thoughtful and engaged meditation on race, place, and identity within and across academic institutions, as well as digital activist communities. It asks us to pay closer attention to the way our campuses maintain some of the same troubling social practices that we too often and too carelessly assume are comfortably distant from academic life.”—David Green, Howard University