Overview

Telling Blackness begins with two simple premises: conventional models of the ways people make meaning of the world fail to account for the particularities of Blackness; and accounts of Black life often miss the significance of the smallest and subtlest acts that sustain it. With this introduction of raciosemiotics, Smalls remaps the field of semiotic anthropology around the specificities of race and the body, and remaps contemporary Black diaspora through the embodied significations of a group of young Liberian women in the US. This transdisciplinary ethnographic account of their lives helps us reimagine their talk, twerks, and tweets as

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9780197697573

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At once a visionary reconceptualization of racialized expressive praxis, a spellbinding ethnographic account of transnational Black life, and a profound invitation to perceive newfound possibilities for relationality, Telling Blackness is a pathbreaking intellectual, affective, and political achievement. The raciosemiotic approach that Krystal Smalls develops throughout the book is an indispensable theoretical and methodological contribution to linguistic anthropology and Black Studies, as well as a moving enactment of the transformative capacities of diasporic storytelling that she honors through her work. * Jonathan Rosa, Ph.D. Stanford University * Mixing sophisticated theoretical interventions (into diaspora studies, racial analysis, black feminism, and linguistics) with scrupulous ethnographic attention to the supple humanity of her young Liberian interlocutors, Smalls uses Telling Blackness to narrate a powerful and under-appreciated social scientific story about how Africana subjects live, relate, and communicate in ways that outstrip attempts to denigrate and demonize them. An insightful work full of anthropological and semiotic insights on every single page, Telling Blackness helps to recalibrate conventional assumptions about racialization in the 21st century. * John L. Jackson, Jr., Author of Thin Description: Ethnography and the African Hebrew Israelites of Jerusalem * Telling Blackness is a brilliant transnational account of Liberian youth as they navigate the politics of history, race, and language through migration. In vibrant and lyrical language Krystal Smalls presents us an ethnographic study of Black immigrants in the U.S. that provides a corrective to the sociological studies of racial identification to empathetically expose how racializing structural processes shape immigrant ""Black life in an antiBlack world."" The analysis in Telling Blackness takes seriously the global status of Blackness as it draws meaning across space and time, oceans and land, and processes and discourses. This is a transformative text that makes key contributions to anthropology and African diaspora studies. * Jemima Pierre, Ph.D., Author of The Predicament of Blackness: Postcolonial Ghana and the Politics of Race *

Author Information

Krystal A. Smalls is Assistant Professor at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign.

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