36.166, Telling Blackness: Smalls (2024)

[The LINGUIST List]

LINGUIST List: Vol-36-166. Tue Jan 14 2025. ISSN: 1069 - 4875.

Subject: 36.166, Telling Blackness: Smalls (2024)

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Date: 14-Jan-2025
From: Rachel Havard [Rachel.HAVARD at oup.com]
Subject: Telling Blackness: Smalls (2024)


Title: Telling Blackness
Subtitle: Young Liberians and the Raciosemiotics of Contemporary Black
Diaspora
Series Title: Oxford Studies in Language and Race
Publication Year: 2024

Publisher: Oxford University Press
           http://www.oup.com/us
Book URL:
https://global.oup.com/academic/product/telling-blackness-9780197697573?utm_source=linguistlist&utm_medium=listserv&utm_campaign=linguistics

Author(s): Krystal A. Smalls

Hardback: ISBN: 9780197697573 Pages: 306 Price: U.S. $ 99.99

Abstract:

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.

Linguistic Field(s): Sociolinguistics




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