Aye Readers,

Where I from, to “mash up de place” signals a desire to revel while also denoting destruction, though sometimes the phrase might conjure one in the other. “Jump and mash up de place,” while a popular refrain in Trini music, could be heard in my childhood and youth in admonition as in “allyuh chirren like to mash up everything eh.” Black or Right: Anti/Racist Campus Rhetorics attempts in most senses to mash up de place. It disrupts given ideas about the academic monograph, space, place, objects, subjects, meanings, semantics in order to read/write Blackness with/in its varied terms. Meanings fragment, tings evolve, sometimes you may feel connection and not know what it signals.

Dear Readers,

I write to provide some orientation to material in Black or Right: Anti/Racist Campus Rhetorics. This move becomes necessary because its styles do more than inflect its contents—they entangle to shape arguments offered here. Style is content, content style, with Blackness between, in, across, and outside. Expressive form and resultant meanings augur mimesis and/or also escape it, continuing to evolve with (re)telling. We might understand these dynamics as mining gaps between narrative and analysis, as seeking possibilities for academic writing to undiscipline knowledge from tightly packed siloing containers.

Yea Readers,

Blackness as content, as subject, like creole languages, tends to consistently shift. As Martiniquais philosopher Édouard Glissant explains, “in Relation every subject is an object and every object a subject” (Glissant 1997, xx). This monograph harvests the rich potential in such, between diasporas of Blackness. But fixing an analysis of Blackness to the page becomes a problematic task. So, I use slashes (/) to enjoin terms throughout, not to suggest that both sides of the slash mean de same ting or are interchangeable but as semantic noting of the spaces in which meanings fracture with/in and between terms involved in such an equation. The spaces between is in/side, along, and out.

Woi Readers,

’cuz dem spaces operate dis way, annotations make way for what can’t be contained in Blackness’ excess. Footnotes radiate as more than ancillary: dey’s ah key part ah de action. I invite you to approach notes in noting this approach to Black or Right where there’s always some ting more to the story. Dig deeper.

’scene Readers,

Wha goin on? Yuh ketchin meh drift? This project shifts between registers, dialects, poetics, analyses, performances, and aesthetics of Blackness to interrogate space and the relation/ships between bodies, environments, and where their excess rifts. To read with/it might involve understanding exhibition as critical, criticism as exhibit and the spaces in between and across those ideas. Black or Right: Anti/Racist Campus Rhetorics provokes dialogue, affective, discursive, or otherwise. It wants to trouble place and space as a/temporal, to think through (with you) what happens when Blackness comes up against white spaces—those entrenched in domination, domination usually producing violence. What shapes do Black processes take in everyday antiBlackness?

Word Readers,

You might be confused. Embrace it. Or don’t. Blackness often obfuscates, often disorients, often shatters/scatters fungibility but offers much by way of meaning. Take care. That is to say, like poetry, the artful craft of de ting lies in being okay with not knowing in order to know.

So leh we mash up de place together, nah?

Later,

Louis M. Maraj