Telling Blackness: Young Liberians and the Semiotics of Contemporary Diaspora / by Krystal A. Smalls

Format:

• Book

Author/Creator:

• Smalls, Krystal A., author.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

• Environment and Social Issues.
• Individual and Groups Rights.
• Cultural identity.
• African diaspora.
• Liberia.

Local Subjects:

• Environment and Social Issues.
• Individual and Groups Rights.
• Cultural identity.
• African diaspora.
• Liberia.

Genre:

• Book

Physical Description:

1 online resource (313 pages)

Place of Publication:

New York, NY : Oxford University Press, 2024.

Language Note:

In English.

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.

Notes:

Title from resource description page (viewed April 03, 2025).

ISBN:

• 0-19-769760-7
• 0-19-769761-5
• 0-19-769757-7
• 0-19-769759-3