Telling Blackness - Young Liberians and the Raciosemiotics of Contemporary Black Diaspora

Telling Blackness looks at the everyday lives of a small group of young Liberians in the US as they make meaning about being Black, African, Liberian, and human in ways that counter dominant antiblack meanings and that inform how they relate to Black people from different parts of the world.

List of contents

• List of Figures


• List of Tables


• Acknowledgments


• Introduction: Telling Blackness and Black Livingness in (Anti)Black America


• 1 Telling Blackness Through Liberia


• 2 Telling Through Love: A Methodology for Testifying to Black Life


• 3 Telling Time and Black Personhood in Early Liberia and Beyond


• 4 The Loom of Loss: Telling as Transitive Ante-Narrative


• 5 Sense and Sensibility: Ways of Relating and Black Diasporic Languaging


• 6 Sounding Off: Sonic Cartographies of Black Diasporic Girlhood


• Conclusion: Telling, Meaning, and Mattering

About the author

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

Summary

Telling Blackness looks at the everyday lives of a small group of young Liberians in the US as they make meaning about being Black, African, Liberian, and human in ways that counter dominant antiblack meanings and that inform how they relate to Black people from different parts of the world.

Additional text

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.

Product details

• Authors: Smalls, Krystal Smalls, Krystal (Krystal A. Smalls Smalls, Krystal A. Smalls, Krystal A. (Assistant Professor Smalls
• Publisher: Oxford University Press
• Languages: English
• Product format: Hardback
• Released: 07.07.2024
• EAN: 9780197697573
• ISBN: 978-0-19-769757-3
• No. of pages: 306
• Series: Oxford Studies in Language and Race
• Subjects: Humanities, art, music > Education > General, dictionaries; Ethnic Studies, EDUCATION / General, Linguistics, LANGUAGE ARTS & DISCIPLINES / Linguistics / Sociolinguistics, SOCIAL SCIENCE / Sociology / Social Theory, HISTORY / United States / State & Local / General, Sociolinguistics, Social & cultural anthropology, Social and cultural anthropology, Semiotics / semiology, SOCIAL SCIENCE / Race & Ethnic Relations, Black & Asian Studies, SOCIAL SCIENCE / Activism & Social Justice