The Routledge Reader of African American Rhetoric is a comprehensive compendium of primary texts that is designed for use by students, teachers, and scholars of rhetoric and for the general public interested in the history of African American communication. The volume and its companion website include dialogues, creative works, essays, folklore, music, interviews, news stories, raps, videos, and speeches that are performed or written by African Americans. Both the book as a whole and the various selections in it speak directly to the artistic, cultural, economic, gendered, social, and political condition of African Americans from the enslavement period in America to the present, as well as to the Black Diaspora.

The Routledge Reader of African American Rhetoric is a comprehensive compendium of primary texts that is designed for use by students, teachers, and scholars of rhetoric and for the general public interested in the history of African American communication. The volume and its companion website include dialogues, creative works, essays, folklore, music, interviews, news stories, raps, videos, and speeches that are performed or written by African Americans. Both the book as a whole and the various selections in it speak directly to the artistic, cultural, economic, gendered, social, and political condition of African Americans from the enslavement period in America to the present, as well as to the Black Diaspora.

In From Bourgeois to Boojie: Black Middle-Class Performances, editor Vershawn Ashanti Young and assistant editor Bridget Harris Tsemo collect a diverse assortment of pieces that examine the generational shift in the perception of the black middle class, from the serious moniker of bourgeois to the more playful, sardonic boojie. Including such senior cultural workers as Amiri Baraka and Houston Baker, as well as younger scholars like Damion Waymer and Candice Jenkins, this significant collection contains essays, poems, visual art, and short stories that examine the complex web of representations that define the contemporary black middle class. Young opens the book with a critical introduction that looks at the articulation of class and race as a mode of performing U.S. citizenship. In four thematic parts-Performing Responsibility, Performing Womanhood, Performing Media, and Performing Sexuality-contributors explore different aspects of middle-class blackness. Acknowledging that the black middle class could never be depicted satisfactorily by one genre or from one perspective, contributors include pieces as varied as drawings by Iowa artist Jean Berry; self-reflexive commentaries from cultural critics Bryant Keith Alexander, Houston Baker, Dwight McBride, and Greg Tate; a short story by novelist Venise Berry; and cultural critiques by scholars Harilaos Stecopoulos and Angela Nelson. The volume also contains a thoughtful foreword by performance artist and scholar E. Patrick Johnson and an astute afterword by sociologist Mary Pattillo. The journey from bourgeois to boojie embraces the long journey of African Americans from the cotton field and the assembly line to the corporate conference table and the White House. This insightful and diverse volume will be relevant to scholars of performance studies, African American studies, American literature, performative writing, and sociology, as well as creative writers and those interested in contemporary political discourse on race.

In ""Your Average Nigga"", Vershawn Ashanti Young uses his own experiences to examine how black masculinity is shaped by identity performances of racial authenticity, academic literacy, class mobility, and sexuality. Moving between autobiography, autoethnography, and scholarly analysis, Young critiques proponents of ""code-switching"" whose solution to the black ""literacy gap"" requires inner-city youth to adopt white English vernacular at school and to reserve black English vernacular for home. ""Your Average Nigga"" exposes the factors that make black racial identity incompatible with literacy for blacks, especially black males. Drawing on scholarship in both performance theory and African American literary and cultural studies, Young argues that exaggerated perceptions of the gap between black and white linguistic performances harm inner-city blacks by requiring them to choose between abandoning their customary ways of speaking and behaving at the risk of alienating themselves from their families and communities and retaining their speech and behavior as a marker of racial authenticity while isolating themselves from mainstream society. Young also shows that exaggerated perceptions of the gap between black and white racial identities leave blacks in the impossible position of either trying to be white or forever struggling to prove that they are ""black enough."" For men, this also becomes an endless struggle to prove that they are masculine enough. Ultimately, Young argues that far from denaturalizing supposedly fixed identity categories, as many theorists have contended, racial performance only reinscribes the essentialism that it is believed to subvert. Scholars and teachers of rhetoric, performance studies, and African American studies will enjoy this insightful volume.