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Drawing on the lived experiences of high school-aged young Black immigrants, this book paints imaginaries of racialized translanguaging and transsemiotizing, leveraged transnationally by teenagers across the Caribbean and the United States. The Black Caribbean youth reflect a full range of literacy practices - six distinct holistic literacies - identified as a basis for flourishing. These literacies of migration encapsulate numerous examples of how the youth are racialized transgeographically, based on their translanguaging and transsemiotizing with Englishes, both institutionally and individually. In turn, the book advances a heuristic of semiolingual innocence containing eight elements, informed by the Black immigrant literacies of Caribbean youth. Through the eight elements presented - flourishing, purpose, comfort, expansion, paradox, originality, interdependence, and imagination - stakeholders and systems will be positioned to better understand and address the urgent needs of these youth. Ultimately, the heuristic supports a reinscribing of semiolingual innocence for Black Caribbean immigrant and transnational youth, as well as for all youth.
List of contents
Foreword; 1. Introduction: looking through the lens of Black immigrant literacies; 2. Why 'new model minority' youth? Understanding Black immigrants in the United States; 3. Afro-Caribbean languaging, Englishes, and literacies across the Black diaspora: unmasking the fallacy of invented illiteracy; 4. Conceptualizing translanguaging in Black immigrant literacies: multiliteracies, raciolinguistics, language and raciosemiotic architecture; 5. Methodologically examining Black immigrant literacies: a (decolonizing) interpretive analytical design; 6. Translanguaging imaginaries of innocence a holistic portrait of the literacies of Black Caribbean immigrant youth; 7. Reinscribing lost imaginaries of semiolingual innocence: futurizing translanguaging for flourishing; Afterword.
About the author
Patriann Smith is a distinguished scholar-educator at the University of South Florida whose research emerges at the intersection of race, language, and immigration. She is the author of Black Immigrant Literacies: Intersections of Race, Language, and Culture in the Classroom (2023), co-author of Affirming Black Students' Lives and Literacies: Bearing Witness (2022), and co-founder of the USAID-funded RISE Caribbean Educational Research Center (CERC: 2022).
Summary
Centering race across geographies, this book paints imaginaries about how Black Caribbean immigrant and transnational youth use translanguaging and semiotics to reflect a broad range of literacies. Scholars, teachers, librarians and parents can better understand and address the urgent needs of these youth through the compelling narratives.
Foreword
Centers race transgeographically to paint imaginaries of the practices supporting the holistic literacies of Black Caribbean youth.
