Drawing on methods of composite counterstory, specifically to “derive sources from existing literatures, social commentary, and the author’s professional/personal experiences,” (Martinez 2014, 69) this review will feature and weave throughout the text its composite character Dani, whose story begins at her first encounter with Aja Martinez.

Setting. Dani, a first-year graduate student, arrives with great relief at her Writing and Race course on a severely windy day (in truth, she was almost blown away on the steps to Du Bois Library). In the past weeks, Dani has been introduced to theories of racial formation (Omi and Winant, 2015), antiracist writing pedagogies, and  critical race histories and writers. This week she is scheduled to lead class discussion on Aja Y. Martinez’s “Plea for Critical Race Theory Counterstory” (2016), alongside readings by Patricia Williams, Derrick Bell, and Bruch and Marback. Taking her seat, she reviews her notes:

This week, we met Martinez and her engaging protagonist: Alejandra Prieto, a Chicana graduate student and mother navigating the academy. Alejandra has failed her qualifying exam; in the counterstory, Alejandra speaks to her mother on the phone and resolves to “get mad and get to work!” Alejandra’s mother is persistent—more persistent than mine, surely… I think this is a perfect example in the practice of transformational resistance (Martinez 2020, 28). Alejandra—and Martinez— could leave the academy, but they refuse. Martinez says,“For people of color, the personal as related through narrative provides space and opportunity to assert our stories within, and in many instances counter to, the hegemonic narratives of the institution” (81).  

Dani looks up. Her teacher is across the table, smiling.

“So, what did you think?” she asks.

“Well,” Dani says, “I loved it. It reminded me of why I love writing–”

“And reading,” her classmate chimes in, “I miss reading stories.”

“In college, I was a creative writing major,” Dani continues. “It is funny, I feel a little far from that now in grad school. But, that is why I think Martinez is right: although we do read and interpret narrative texts, we do not really compose scholarship this way. In rhetoric and writing studies, it seems, that is not common practice (Martinez 2020, 58). To begin discussion, my question is why?” 

Four years later. Martinez has “made her case” for narrative scholarship in Counterstory: The Rhetoric and Writing of Critical Race Theory, supplying a fully-integrated critical race theory (CRT) counterstory methodology and methods for scholars and teachers of writing and rhetoric seeking transformation within and through the classroom, scholarship, and their own academic institutions. To present methodology (the verb) and method (the noun), Counterstory links theory with practice to facilitate the doing-and-thinking of research, teaching, and activism for readers. As such, Martinez invites (perhaps challenges) us to choose how we will read this text—which is, she makes clear, nonlinear and open to a multiplicity of audiences. “Whatever way you choose to interact with this project,” she assures us, “there is not a wrong path” (xxiii).

Setting. Upon opening to Chapter 1: a (Hi)story of critical race theory, Dani is thrown into a crowded gallery. On the wall are photographs of critical race theorists,  activists, teachers, and lawyers; and in glass cases are their personal writings. Letters, drafts, fliers. Aja Martinez arrives to provide the scheduled tour at 1:15 pm. She is a warm liaison and welcomes the crowd with a robust (hi)story of critical race theory, its burgeoning methodology, and “exemplars,” from the legal realist movement of the 1920s and 30s, to the critical legal work of the 1970s, to the “emergence of critical race counterstory utilized in scholarly publications” by Richard Delgado, Derrick Bell, and Patricia Williams (Chapter 1). For teachers and scholars of writing and rhetoric: pay attention to her telling.

Modeled across Counterstory, this history is an early lesson in both reading (closely) and writing responsibly and imaginatively as Martinez “carries” her own and the stories of others to continue the CRT endeavor (for more on “responsibility,” see Bruch and Marback 2002). Quite literally, the author writes her fellow scholars (Gilyard, Villanueva, Kynard to name a few) and thus the field into critical race histories, using composite counterstory methods as her vehicle. As Martinez, her predecessors, and colleagues illustrate, CRT composite counterstory methods (CCS) are at once a practical, theoretical, and pedagogical tool for documenting, experiencing, and responding to difference both outside and within the academy. More largely,
Counterstory functions as both methodology and method for minoritized people to intervene in research methods that would form “Master Narratives” based on ignorance and assumptions about minoritized people (20).
Certainly, then, CCS holds great and radical implications for writing and rhetoric, as the field examines power, and works toward racial justice, via writing, language, and literacy education.
Unique to CCS methodology, the theories and methods outlined in Counterstory are, Martinez argues, intended for use by all members of the academy, including students, researchers, and teachers, who are often held in hierarchic or binary relation to one another. Thus, CCS is:

• For students, to “assist learning subjects in imagining and describing their experience” (35); 
• For researchers, to provide “empirical space” to recount and circulate stories of oppression, turning “the focus from individual participants to the issues faced by groups” and “making research accessible beyond academic audiences” (24);
• And for teachers, as a pedagogical tool to facilitate classroom discussion on the “workings of racism [and injustice] in the daily lives of all people,” without threat, violence, or fear (26).        

I would like to reiterate that final point—that counterstory is not only a research methodology, but also, at its very heart, a pedagogy. This teaching/facilitating function is confirmed in the writings of Bell (who wrote stories for the classroom), in the Dialogues of Plato, and in the composite counterstories and CRT course syllabi (Appendix A-D) by Martinez found here. In Chapters 2-4, Martinez analyzes and illustrates for us the methods of narrated dialogue (Chapter 2), allegory/fantasy (Chapter 3), and autobiographic reflection (Chapter 4) in a series of four composite counterstories chronicling a mother-daughter “weekend getaway to Baltimore,” where her protagonist, Alejandra, is scheduled to present at a conference at Towson University.

Setting. Dani sits at her desk in Du Bois Library. She looks out the window. It is (another) windy Thursday, approaching fall season. She is grateful, also surprised, to have her own office now. After four years, she has “made it” to the PhD level. “Three more years, girl,” she thinks to herself. Dani opens her laptop to plan her syllabus, with Counterstory beside her. This semester, she is teaching a first-year writing course focused on theories of critical literacy and language; she plans to make each counterstory a centerpiece for discussion and learning. With Alejandra, Sofi, and other composite characters, Dani and her students travel from the city, into fantasy and cyber worlds. In doing so, they learn about…

Race and racism as a sensory experience. Dani opens class with “The Road Trip,” a narrated dialogue between Alejandra and her daughter, Sofi. Driving to Baltimore, Alejandra reflects, “The privilege to drive is so heavily invested in the soundness of your senses, particularly sight […] It’s all such a metaphor for whiteness.” (46). Together, Dani and her class connect “privilege” and “sight” to Alejandra’s epistolary exchange with her mentor, V. “Here,” Dani says, “she writes about hearing race, seeing race, and bounding race. She’s citing Nelson Flores” (124). In one student’s Reader Response (R&Rs, per Martinez), she asks: What is the relationship between race and language?

Race and racism as a collective experience. Together, Dani and her class discuss autobiographic reflection. In her own octalog, Martinez engages with Eight field-specific narrative theorists. She asks, “Wait, so are you saying that the personal can represent the collective?” (91). Kynard, Young, and Villanueva confirm yes—“a collective voice can speak for a group and represent diverse and divergent viewpoints” (91). After class, Dani revisits Alejandra’s epistles and syllabi. She reflects on her own classroom. A “trensa course framework,” Martinez writes, “presents students with multiple rhetorics/perspectives [and] skill sets to make choices about how they will read and analyze the offered perspectives” (123).

Race and racism require a rhetoric of transformational resistance. Dani and her class study Figure 1, by Solorzano and Delgado Bernal (28). There are four quadrants defining “resistance,” from Self-Defeating to Transformational, which critiques social oppression and is motivated by social justice. To illustrate, the class turns to Bell (allegory/fantasy exemplar), who said,

One of the really impressive events in my life was working […] with black people
who were challenging discrimination […] at very great risk to themselves and with hope that they were born to prevail, but with no certainty (55).

In other words, we must commit to the struggle “even if the battle can’t ever be won” (57). Surely, as Martinez has modeled for us, we can (and should) remain and work from within the academy—with counterstory as “an analytical tool with which to examine our pedagogies, writing programs, and institutions, and perhaps to alter them for the better” (27). Now, Dani often repeats to herself, to her colleagues, friends, and especially to her students (especially those in a rut) the wisdom of Alejandra’s mother: get angry and get to work!

References

Martinez, Aja Y. “A Plea for Critical Race Theory Counterstory: Stock Story Versus Counterstory Dialogues Concerning Alejandra’s “Fit” in the Academy.” Composition Studies, 42(2).

Bruch, P., & R. Marback. 2002. “Race, Literacy, and the Value of Rights Rhetoric in Composition Studies.” College Composition and Communication, 53(4): 651-674. doi:10.2307/1512120