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Ibrahim, A. (2014). The Rhizome of Blackness: A critical ethnography of Hip-Hop Culture, Language, Identity, and the Politics of Becoming. New York: Peter Lang. ISBN 976-1-4331-2602-4.Against the backdrop of a neoliberal fixation on standardized assessments and results-based management, "The rhizome of blackness: A critical ethnography of Hip-Hop culture, language, identity and the politics of becoming" by CIESC member Awad Ibrahim, provides a much-needed reminder about the infinitely complex nature of Black identity in North America. With daily updates about tragic murders of Black youth in the U.S. and Canada, this examination of Blackness is timely. This book is not situated within mainstream comparative education, but provides a post-structuralist challenge to the functionalist paradigm that dominates much of the field. As Peggy McIntosh (1989) says, I must begin by "unpacking my own knapsack" by acknowledging my discomfort -as a White, Western woman-about reviewing a book which so incisively critiques the deeply problematic colonial construction of Blackness. Ibrahim begins with his own journey of "becoming Black", asking the question: "As a continental African living in North America, am I a Black man? How is one translating and negotiating one's own sense of self vis-a-vis the already pronounced, assembled social order?" (p. 5).Ibrahim (2014) cites Deleuze and Guattari's metaphor of the rhizome, which is a plant that resists facile notions of linear and controlled movement along a continuum. It is fluid, multiple and in a constant state of flow and deterritorialization (p. 32). Over the course of three ethnographic projects, he worked French and English-speaking African immigrant and refugee youth living in Ontario, Canada, situating his methodology within the tradition of critical ethnography. Referring to Franz Fanon's notion of the "passionate researcher" (1963, p. 170), Ibrahim breaks with traditional ethnography and describes his research approach as a 'hanging out" methodology.In the first chapter, Ibrahim theorizes the rhizomatic process of becoming Black, grounding his discussion in a complex web of theoretical traditions, including Homi Bhabha's notion of 'hybridity'. His analysis is both playful and multi-faceted, examining how a heteroglossia of Black identities become lumped together all the various ethnicities, languages, identities and cultures into one uni-dimensional category of "Black". He argues that this "assemblage" must be understood within the relations of power and hegemony that characterize North American society, where "Blackness" is constructed in a'sub-altern' position within schooling, culture and society. We need a "project of hybridization" (Mercer, 1994) that connects Black youth to the rich heteroglossia of forms of Black cultures, languages, and identities that are complex, relational, transnational and global (p. 39). In my own research with young adolescent women in Canada, I similarly found that young women longed for more spaces to identify problematic constructions of female (and male) identity within a context of White masculinist schooling (Ingram, 2013).In Chapter Two, Ibrahim describes the process of racialization that positions Black youth within the history of discrimination in Canada. He describes the three sites of ethnographic study where he worked with young people and teachers between 1996 and 2011. He uses the narratives of 18 Black youth, who are part of a francophone, anglophone and allophone African population in Ontario's English and French language schools, to provide an intersectional analysis of how race, gender, age and culture affect the daily experiences of Black youth. He takes up the issues of push-outs versus drop-outs, refugee students, and the interruption of schooling when students come from countries in conflict. …

Book Review. The Rhizome of Blackness: A critical ethnography of Hip-Hop Culture, Language, Identity, and the Politics of Becoming.