“The system of “Knowledge” itself is what functions to motivate and to de-motivate.”
-PROUDFLESH INTER/VIEWS, Sylvia Wynter
How do Afro-Caribbean peoples resist stereotypes that pose their language as broken, mark their labour as disposable, and dismiss the ways they make meaning uncultured? In Say Mi Affi Work, exhibiting artist Lou Maraj presents nuanced new approaches toward the understanding of Afro-Caribbean identity formation and place-making.
Through an intimate orchestration of mediums, including sound and video installation, text- and performance-based pieces, archival interventions and photography, Maraj pays homage to a version of the Caribbean islands, its languages, its peoples and its history that is illegible to western imagination and scrutiny.
Olumoroti George
About The Artist
Reppin’ Trinidad and Tobago, Louis M. Maraj, PhD, is an award-winning scholar, educator, and multimedia artist whose work asks: How do Black(ened) peoples make everyday meaning in an antiBlack world?
An associate professor in University of British Columbia’s School of Journalism, Writing, and Media, Maraj thinks through Black diasporic people’s communicative relationships with/in varied contexts and environments. His first book, Black or Right: Anti/Racist Campus Rhetorics, explores the ways they deal with racism at white educational institutions (and beyond) in the age of #BlackLivesMatter. It complicates our views of university spaces and the social ‘good’ of diversity and other policies in them. Other projects explore relationships between subjectivity and racial identity, the impacts of #BlackLivesMatter on concepts of the human, and anti-blackness in sport. Recent work can be found in Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies, Canadian Literature, and The Routledge History of Police Brutality in America.
Maraj has taught (and teaches), a range of courses to various populations—including high-school, undergrad, and grad students—since 2010. These include classes and workshops on rhetoric, composition, poetry, social justice writing, digital media, Black studies, public writing, and literature.
Maraj is co-founder and former co-director of DBLAC (Digital Black Lit & Composition), an inter-institutional support network of Black graduate students studying language. He has worked extensively with youth of color, including through Pitt-Assisted Communities and Schools’ Justice Scholars programs and Ohio State University’s Office of Diversity and Inclusion (Upward Bound and Young Scholars programs). His more creative work has appeared on the Academy of American Poets website and in several other print and online publications, including Unsplendid, The Potomac Review, and Rock & Sling.