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.
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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.
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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
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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.
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Krystal A. Smalls is Assistant Professor at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign.
Selling point: Brings together semiotics and race theory Selling point: Centers young Africans in Black Diaspora / Africana Diaspora Studies Selling point: Reformulates narrative and political action (through
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Produktdetaljer

ISBN
9780197697580
Publisert
2024-07-07
Utgiver
Vendor
Oxford University Press Inc
Vekt
476 gr
Høyde
239 mm
Bredde
157 mm
Dybde
20 mm
Aldersnivå
P, 06
Språk
Product language
Engelsk
Format
Product format
Heftet
Antall sider
312

Forfatter

Biographical note

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