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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 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 “tellings” that exceed our understandings of narrative and that potentially act on the world of meaning. And, with careful historical contextualization, we see how such acts reproduce, refuse, or powerfully disregard racial logics that have entangled the US and Liberia for two centuries. Led by Black feminist scholarship, Telling Blackness also provides a semiotic glimpse into ways of relating that help create complex diasporic intimacies and that sustain Black life beyond survival.
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.
