During the final semester of my junior year of college, I connected with my advisor about the prospect of graduate school.

I entered his office on a sunny spring afternoon and sat down beside his desk, staring at the intimidating rows of Shakespeare, Chaucer, and John Donne books on his bookshelf. The professor, Dr. Little, was quite similar to his stack of literature—often frightening in demeanor (with a hint of humor) and unengaging for me as a Brown outsider. However, as an English major, academia forced me to interact with his whiteness and the whiteness of medieval literature. I always dreaded entering his office because he never inspired me or helped me in the least, but today was going to be different—today I was going to tell him that I wanted to be a professor, just like him (well, not him per se; I hated Shakespeare and most of his area of expertise, but like him in the larger purview of English Studies). I assumed this news would finally make him proud of me.

“Hi, Professor Little. How have things been going lately?” I tried to bond with him at first.

“Everything’s fine, Chase,” he responded while pulling up my degree plan on his computer. I could tell from his tone that he was not interested in this advising session. “You only have a year left, right? Almost at the finish line…” He was just going through the motions.

“Yeah, I do! Also, besides planning my classes for the fall, I also wanted your advice about grad school. I recently decided that I think I want to be a professor…” I anticipated his unwavering support.

Professor Little turned away from the computer to acknowledge me with his eyes. I thought he was going to be proud of me. However, his face took a more serious tone, one ready to finally give me advice.

“Well, to be honest,” he smirked, “someone like you thinking about being a professor makes someone like me laugh.”

He chuckled softly, letting each one pierce my ego. My dreams instantly shattered because if he didn’t think I could be professor, then how I could I ever make it to graduate school?

“Have you ever thought about being a banker? I feel like a lot of English majors go into banking…”

Throughout the next twenty minutes, we talked about career paths I couldn’t care less about and classes for the fall. As soon as I left his office, I called my mom and expressed my frustration. Who was he to tell me what I could or could not be? Why did he think I couldn’t be a professor? Was it because my grades were good but not great? Because I came from a lower socioeconomic background? Because I’m Chicanx? Why wasn’t he helpful? I could not help but feel that I was inferior to him because I didn’t look and act like him. His whiteness—and thus the whiteness of the academy—shunned me.

Aja Martinez’s incredible book, Counterstories: The Rhetoric and Writing of Critical Race Theory, provides marginalized voices the theoretical background to share stories about our experiences and our pain as a means to educate—just like the brief vignette I included to begin this review illustrates how often Brown bodies are excluded from academia, sometimes even by the people who are supposed to be advising us. Most importantly, her text explains how critical race theory’s counterstories, or stories defined as resisting master narratives and hegemonic tropes, exist as both method and methodology and should be front and center in Rhetoric and Composition Studies. While critical race theory has been gradually introduced into the field, especially through Adam Banks’ Race, Rhetoric, and Technology, Catherine Prendergast’s Literacy and Racial Justice, and Carmen Kynard’s Vernacular Insurrections, Martinez’s book is the first to concretely demonstrate how much this theory can shape our discipline from a research methods and pedagogical perspective. The book is also timely in how it can relate to the present moment of racism and white supremacy in our field (especially in our listservs that virtually only promote bigotry now).

Counterstories makes two concise arguments: that critical race theory (CRT) is a still emerging lens that needs to be further developed within Rhetoric and Composition Studies and that counterstory, a method and methodology, is uniquely rhetorical. She states in the first chapter that her book “makes a case for critical race counterstory as a rhetorical research methodology and method by reviewing counterstory through its critical race theory methodological origins and influences, while also analyzing and illustrating the methods of Richard Delgado, Derrick A. Bell, and Patricia J. Williams, whom I term ‘counterstory exemplars.’” She then breaks down the various tenets of CRT, moving through its history, application, and foundations in other disciplines. Her first chapter thus establishes the frameworks of critical race theory—frameworks that guide her principles of counterstory in other chapters. As a whole, the first chapter is one of the first collated critical race theory primers in our field and can be used by both newcomers and advanced scholars of the theory.

Chapters 2-4 focus on the various functions of counterstory, as a narrated dialogue in Chapter 2, as an allegory/fantasy in Chapter 3, and as an autobiographical reflection in Chapter 4, while Chapter 5 focuses on CRT as pedagogy. Martinez takes an innovative embodied approach in these chapters. She first writes the biographies of each theorist associated with each particular genre (connecting Delgado with dialogue, Bell with allegory/fantasy, and Williams with reflection) to establish the principles that comprise each type of counterstory and to illustrate that counterstory is a complex narrative that can take different shapes. Yet those sections only comprise roughly a third of each chapter. The bulk of the text appears after these analyses when Martinez writes her own counterstories that exemplify the principles of each genre, which she utilizes as praxis, connecting the counterstory theory with its form. While the analyses are foundational on their own, the narratives are the heart of the book because they invite the reader to see what makes counterstories so powerful: uniting heart-wrenching tales with revelations about race and identity.

The first narrative is perhaps the most straightforward—a form of a Platonic dialogue that focuses on the permanence of race and racism through a fictional encounter between Alejandra, a mother, and Sofi, Alejandra’s daughter, on a road trip in New York. The narrative in Chapter 3, imitating Bell’s allegorical and fantastical style, confronts the original octalog at CCCC in 1988, as Alejandra travels back through time to engage with “The Eight” (the eight scholars who participated in the octalog that Martinez attempts to personify) as they discuss the politics of historiography in relation to who gets marginalized and minoritized in the field. It was also the most fun I had engaging with the octalog in years because it challenges the field’s understanding of historiography and race by having real people host fictional dialogues that are both respectful and captivating. Chapter 4 transitions to the autobiographical, as Alejandra writes diary entries of various personal border crossings (one being, for instance, an English professor who doesn’t “look like” a professor), which better emphasizes the ever-present pain that lingers for racial minorities. These narratives bring to the forefront Martinez’s argument—that knowledge of race and racism often stems from the experiential and that narrative can promulgate research just as well as academic prose. I found myself completely enthralled with each story, not only because Martinez embodies each genre so well but also because they were expanding my own understanding of race.

These narratives are risky to say the least (especially in trying to personify well-known scholars in our field). They attempt to embody the bedrock of CRT and counterstorytelling while still remaining interesting. proving a point and having the potential to ostracize or anger many in the white establishment who might view Martinez’s research as not as rigorous. Naysayers would be wrong, however, because Martinez’s point is that counterstory is research. Narrating one’s own life and creating philosophical dialogues about race—similar to conversations held by the forefathers of Rhetoric—is just as rigorous as any other type of scholarship. Still, Martinez elegantly crafts every single narrative. While one narrative emphasizes the nuances of a teacher-student discussion and how race is often about perspective, another, while still focused on dialogue, dives into the intricacies and complexities of conversing about theory aloud. Martinez also incorporates autobiography and pedagogical discussions into these stories.  Each of them feels personal—as if Martinez is pulling back the curtains of her life as a mother, former graduate student, and professor—and to be quite honest, the epilogue, “Birth Song,” moved me to tears. That has never happened with an academic text before, yet the way Martinez employs narrative to discuss theory, method, and race is quite unlike any text I have ever read. It’s more engaging.

For many in the field who have studied CRT and Martinez’s work for years, the book will feel like the culmination of a decade of scholarship. Its novelty isn’t its understanding of CRT and counterstory—Martinez and others have preached this for years. Rather, the application of the material, the various ways that Martinez encompasses and expands counterstory through her own narratives, is the book’s driving force. It makes her text not only a great addition for researchers attempting to address CRT in their own work but also as a foundational text in graduate seminars on CRT, race, or research methods.

As I reflect on my opening narrative, I realize it has been over a decade since that uncomfortable encounter in Professor Little’s office.

The anger he caused propelled me to focus on issues of race and racism in graduate school, and by the time I started reading CRT, I understood how often white advisors fail to help Black and Brown students. Yet, my story with Professor Little, as Martinez’s book poetically demonstrates, is just a single story that’s a part of a larger narrative of race and racism in academia. My pain and frustration isn’t much different than the pain and frustration that Martinez describes with her own experiences in the field.

I hardly think about Professor Little anymore, but in remembering my time with him as an advisor, I can’t help but wonder how many students he has failed over the years.

Maybe I should mail him a copy of Counterstory in hopes that he might be as moved by Martinez’s research and stories as I am.

Works Cited

Banks, Adam. 2005. Race, Rhetoric, and Technology. NCTE.

Kynard, Carmen. 2014. Vernacular Insurrections. SUNY P.

Prendergast, Catherine. 2003. Literacy and Racial Justice. Southern Illinois UP.