LAUSR

Performing Anti-Racist Pedagogy offers an insightful look into racialized identities within the university. Developed as a reaction to racist institutional effects and unaware instructors, the chapters collectively provide alternative perspectives and ways of thinking through problematic structures and practices related to the teaching of writing. The edited collection altogether contributes methodologically to the field by offering narratives—and often counternarratives—and dialogues. These structures allow for a variety of scholar, teacher, and student perspectives to emerge and intersect, providing a forum for readers to think through their own experiences, identities, and practices. Moreover, this 2016 collection emerges out of a special issue of Writing Across the Disciplines from 2013. Both national and local events demonstrate that such a collection is still relevant and needed, and this collection expands the five essays in the special issue to ten chapters. Both are open-access and available through the WAC Clearinghouse. The collection is divided into three parts: Actionable Commitments, Identity Matters, and In the Classroom. The first section opens with “Making Commitments to Racial Justice Actionable,” where Rasha Diab, Thomas Ferrel, and Beth Godbee propose to move beyond critique in order to make racial justice commitments actionable in their everyday lives. They offer three strategies for moving beyond confessional narratives in particular: embracing a willingness to be disturbed, articulating commitments, and making commitments actionable. Particular examples would have helped me visualize these proposals and understand how instructors can turn internal reflections into outward actions. The next chapter, “Teaching African American Discourse: Lessons of a Recovering Segregationist” by Calvin Logue, contains a personal history of what led Logue to teach a course on “black rhetoric” in the 1970s. One must look at a previous publication in order to see the details of that pedagogy, as this biographical reflection is more a trajectory of what led him to engage in antiracist teaching. Aja Martinez’s “A Plea for Critical Race Theory Counterstory” is a compelling chapter. I have read Martinez’s argument for utilizing counterstory as a methodology, and in this chapter she enacts her argument by presenting dialogues from different perspectives (that of a mostly white graduate committee and the Chicana graduate student being discussed). While the commonplaces that emerge are not surprising, these dialogues help readers reflect on their own experiences in similar situations. The next chapter moves to institutional structures as Mya Poe proposes language for people in WAC roles to discuss race with faculty and students in “Reframing Race in Teaching Writing across the Curriculum.” Poe explains that administrators use multiculturalism, achievement gap, and postracial frames in their work. She outlines limitations with those frames and advocates for approaching race and racism through frames of localizing students, identifying expectations, and acknowledging the racial implications of linguistic diversity. These frames encourage faculty to value students’ reported identities and to beware of how stereotypes affect teaching and assessing student writing. Again, I would have benefitted from particular examples of these Rhetoric Review, Vol. 37, No. 2, 229–231, 2018 Copyright © Taylor & Francis Group, LLC ISSN: 0735-0198 print / 1532-7981 online DOI: https://doi.org/10.1080/07350198.2018.1424482