ABSTRACT
At a 2015 Donald Trump campaign stop, college student Johari Idusuyi became an unexpected national “hero” for a rather mundane literacy act: reading poetry. In an effort to explore what Bennett (2010) deems “the active role of nonhuman materials in public life” (p. 2), this chapter explores how this “minor gesture” (Manning, 2016) and the ordinary materiality of a book elicited political activisms. The moment additionally reveals how reading acts as a force emergent with, rather than designed by, human actors disrupting teleological notions of human intentionality and allowing for the accidental, the surprising, the momentary within notions of both literacies and political activism.
