Caribbean-born Louis M. Maraj, PhD, thinks/creates/converses with theoretical black studies, rhetoric/communication, and (digital) media. More specifically, his critical/creative projects address (anti)blackness and expressive form.

Maraj’s book Black or Right: Anti/Racist Campus Rhetorics is winner of the 2022 Conference on College Composition and Communication Outstanding Book Award and the National Communication Association Critical and Cultural Studies Division 2022 Outstanding Book Award; it also received an Honourable Mention for the 2021 Rhetoric Society of America Book Award. The study explores notions of blackness in historically white educational institutions, asking how those racially signifying “diversity” in these spaces make everyday meaning.

Additionally, Maraj has been recognized with the Rhetoric Society of America Fellow’s Early Career Award (2024) for his “innovative and robust research record within eight years of having earned the Ph.D. degree”; the National Communication Association Critical and Cultural Studies Division New Investigator Award (2023); as well as their Scholar-Activist Award (2022) for social-justice-oriented community, intellectual, and pedagogical work; the Conference on College Composition and Communication 2023 Richard Braddock Award (with coauthor Pritha Prasad) for the article “‘I Am Not Your Teaching Moment’: The Benevolent Gaslight and Epistemic Violence”; the Academy of American Poets Award/Arthur Rense Prize (2016) for poetry; and a number of institutional honours and fellowships for teaching and research.

Maraj’s published essays include, but are not limited to, studies: on rhetoric/communication in Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies (2023), College Composition and Communication (2022), and Women’s Studies in Communication (2020); on media in Digital Humanities Quarterly (2022), Revista Brasileira de História da Mídia (2021), and Films for the Feminist Classroom (2021); on autoethnography in Self+Culture+Writing (2021) and Precarious Rhetorics (2018); on pedagogy in A Socially Just Classroom (2022), Composition Studies (2022), and Narratives of Joy and Failure in Antiracist Assessment (2024); and on history, literature, and performance studies in The Routledge History of Police Brutality in America (2023), Canadian Literature (2023), and Liminalities (2024), respectively. His more explicitly creative endeavours have recently appeared in College English (2024) and at the Black Arts Centre in Surrey, BC—where, from October 2023 to February 2024, his multimedia art exhibition on Caribbean language and labour, Say Mi Affi Work, was installed.

Coauthored with Pritha Prasad, Maraj’s 2026 monograph The Benevolent Gaslight: A Technology of Race-Making examines how acts of racial dominance are reframed for well-meaning pedagogical purposes or “teaching moments.” The book explores the application of this technology across epistemological orientations, educational history, university race management, popular culture, and politics. Maraj’s ongoing projects question dominant frames with/in which to view media/communication platforms, analyze the eco-logics of antiblackness, and find anti-imperial event in Afro-Caribbean poetics. These include the in-progress book manuscript Un(knowing )human that theorizes blackness as it travels globally northward through communicative tropes in (a)historical frames and contemporary popular culture. For more, visit loumaraj.com.

Selected Publications

The Benevolent Gaslight: A Technology of Race-Making with Pritha Prasad. Logan: Utah State University Press, 2026. Print.

“The Race Traders.” College English 87.1 (2024): 77-82. Print.

“Not/Too/Deep: T(h)inking Archipelagic Rhetorical Blackness.” Liminalities: A Journal of Performance Studies 20.1-2 (2024): 1-24. Online.

“‘Quite here you reach’: T(h)inking Language, Place, Extraction with Dionne Brand’s Land to Light On.” Canadian Literature: A Quarterly of Criticism and Review 251 (2023): 35-50.

“Subject to/Flesh, Object/to Verb (:) the Business of Naming.” Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies 20.1 (2023): 47-53.

“#BlackLivesMatter” in The Routledge History of Police Brutality in America. Ed. Thomas Aiello. New York: Routledge (2023): 436-447.

“Unlike Conventional Form(s) Of: Beyond Reparative Antiracism.” Composition Studies 50.3 (2022): 40-58.

“I Am Not Your Teaching Moment: The Benevolent Gaslight & Epistemic Violence” with Pritha Prasad. College Composition and Communication 74.2 (2022): 322-351.

Black or Right: Anti/Racist Campus Rhetorics. Logan: Utah State University Press, 2020.