Academic and Conversational Genre: Revisionist Visions of Anti-Racist Rhetoric in Claudia Rankine's Just Us

Abstract

Abstract:

This article explores the rhetorical effects of academic writing and conversation in Claudia Rankine’s Just Us. It argues that Rankine’s multimodal and multi-genre text functions as a metacognitive commentary on the problems and possibilities of structure in textual and social senses of the term. Through her revisions of textual genre conventions such as academic annotations and through her attention to rhetorical, textual, and social conventions such as interruptions and questions, Rankine critiques the sociocultural invisibility of whiteness and structural racism and puts a premium on revision as re-seeing, ultimately inviting her readers to re-envision and engage in antiracism in contemporary US life.