Bryan J. McCann, Ashley Noel Mack and Rico Self

ABSTRACT

This essay examines communication's historical anxieties regarding disciplinary legitimacy as an investment in whiteness. We argue that such anxieties are predicated upon a normative ideal of citizenship. As such, rhetorics of disciplinary legitimacy enact white civil society's originary exclusion, which is antiblackness. To illuminate the ways antiblackness finds expression in these anxieties, we engage the field's lengthy archive of public musings regarding legitimacy to trace the rhetorical workings of antiblackness therein.

KEYWORDS

Antiblackness, citizenship, disciplinarity, legitimacy, whiteness

From: Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies 2020 17 (2)

Editor: Wang Yi