University of Pennsylvania ScholarlyCommons Publicly Accessible Penn Dissertations 2015 Black Semiosis: Young Liberian Transnationals Mediating Black Subjectivity and Black Heterogeneity Krystal A. Smalls University of Pennsylvania, [email protected] Follow this and additional works at: https://repository.upenn.edu/edissertations Part of the African American Studies Commons, Anthropological Linguistics and Sociolinguistics Commons, and the Social and Cultural Anthropology Commons Recommended Citation Smalls, Krystal A., "Black Semiosis: Young Liberian Transnationals Mediating Black Subjectivity and Black Heterogeneity" (2015). Publicly Accessible Penn Dissertations. 2022. https://repository.upenn.edu/edissertations/2022 This paper is posted at ScholarlyCommons. https://repository.upenn.edu/edissertations/2022 For more information, please contact [email protected]. Black Semiosis: Young Liberian Transnationals Mediating Black Subjectivity and Black Heterogeneity Abstract From the colonization of the “Dark Continent,” to the global industry that turned black bodies into chattel, to the total absence of modern Africa from most American public school curricula, to superfluous representations of African primitivity in mainstream media, to the unflinching state-sanctioned murders of unarmed black people in the Americas, antiblackness and anti-black racism have been part and parcel to modernity, swathing centuries and continents, and seeping into the tiny spaces and moments that constitute social reality for most black-identified human beings. The daily living and theorizing of a small group of twenty-something young people from Liberia provide the marrow of this traditional and virtual ethnographic inquiry into everyday formulations of race via processes of “black semiosis.” As the analytical keynote of the text, black semiosis points us to the processes through which meaning is made about blackness (i.e., how signs are inscribed with racialized meanings and how these signs are deployed on various scales), and it asks that we consider how meaning-making processes and strategies are conditioned by, or made through, blackness (i.e., how the experience of being raced as black codifies ways of making meaning). Specifically, the text uses cultural, linguistic, and semiotic anthropological approaches to examine young transnational Liberians’ productions of verbal and visual “mashups” in face-to-face interactions and online; their theoretical and embodied constructions of gendered and classed models of “sincere” black personhood via hip hop and other globalized phenomena; and their comprehensive semiotic strategies for navigating racialized school structures and discourses in the United States. From their actions, abstractions, and aspirations, I assemble a rendering of black diasporic/transnational subject-formation that yields a keener understanding of the ways black pasts, presents, and futures are currently being made and unmade by a new generation. Degree Type Dissertation Degree Name Doctor of Philosophy (PhD) Graduate Group Education First Advisor John L. Jackson Second Advisor Betsy R. Rymes Keywords Anthropology, Black Diaspora, Education, Language, Race, Semiosis Subject Categories African American Studies | Anthropological Linguistics and Sociolinguistics | Social and Cultural Anthropology This dissertation is available at ScholarlyCommons: https://repository.upenn.edu/edissertations/2022 BLACK SEMIOSIS: YOUNG LIBERIAN TRANSNATIONALS MEDIATING BLACK SUBJECTIVITY AND BLACK HETEROGENEITY Krystal A. Smalls A DISSERTATION in Education and Africana Studies Presented to the Faculties of the University of Pennsylvania in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy 2015 Supervisor of Dissertation Co-Supervisor of Dissertation ________________________________ ________________________________ John L. Jackson, Jr. Betsy R. Rymes Richard Perry University Professor Associate Professor of Education Graduate Group Chairperson Graduate Group Chairperson ________________________________ ________________________________ Herman Beavers J. Matthew Hartley Associate Professor of English Professor of Education and Africana Studies Dissertation Committee John L. Jackson, Jr. Cheikh Anta Babou Richard Perry University Professor Associate Professor of History Betsy R. Rymes Arthur K. Spears, Associate Professor of Education Presidential Professor, CUNY H. Samy Alim Professor of Anthropology and Linguistics, Stanford University BLACK SEMIOSIS: YOUNG LIBERIAN TRASNATIONALS MEDIATING BLACK SUBJECTIVITY AND BLACK HETEROGENEITY COPYRIGHT 2015 Krystal Ashlee Smalls This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution- NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 License To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-ny-sa/2.0/ iii This work is dedicated to my exalted grandmas, Christine Smalls and Evelyn Mitchell, my dear aunts, Patricia Floyd and Barbara Paul, and to the beneficent (Mama) Faybiene Miranda. Thank you for creating so many ways to connote and for continuing to watch over us. iv ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I give thanks to and for Spirit, and for so many people, living and transcended, who have shared their love, time, encouragement, advice, critiques, and good wishes with me. I’m forever indebted to my gifted and long-suffering committee, John L. Jackson Jr., Betsy R. Rymes, Cheikh Anta Babou, H. Samy Alim, and Arthur K. Spears, for easing my growing pains and for being models of the kind of academic awesomeness I hope to replicate. I feel especially fortunate that my chairs, John and Betsy, have showed me how to produce work that comes from the heart as much as it does the mind. Thank you both for fully envisioning possibilities in me that I couldn’t fathom, let alone catch sight of. And thank you, John, for being integral to my development as a scholar and human. I’m most indebted to the young people who opened up their lives to me and allowed me to follow them around, bug them on Facebook, and text them for a couple of years (“Johnetta,” “Victoria,” and “Brian”). I’m honored and humbled that you trusted me enough to talk about you to strangers, to share your words and images, and to say what I think about your experiences. I’m thankful for all of the young people in the Philadelphia area and in Monrovia who were willing to sit with me moments after we met to tell me about their pasts and about their hopes for our collective future. Y’all represent Liberia well. I’m especially grateful to people who made my stay in Monrovia professionally productive and spiritually restorative: Freida Ibiduni M’Cormack, John Monibah, and Cletus Noah come to mind immediately. From my first days as a doctoral student at Penn, I felt valued and cared for and that was because of the way I was welcomed to the Graduate School of Education (GSE) by Mary Schleslinger, Lorraine Hightower, Suzanne Oh, Lois MacNamara, and Christine Lee; how I was technically supported and saved on many occasions by Zachary Nachsin and Rakeem Jeter; how I was patiently steered by Kristina Lewis, Penny Creedon, and Betty Deane; and the ways I was trained by extraordinary faculty like Nancy Hornberger, Betsy Rymes, Stanton Wortham, Kathy Howard, Vivian Gadsden, and the beautiful, late Teresa Pica at GSE. At the start of my second year, I was lucky enough to find another academic home and a second family in the Africana Studies Department of the School of Arts and Sciences. Here I found astounding faculty like John Jackson, Barbara Savage, Deborah Thomas, Eve Troutt Powell, Tukufu Zuberi, Camille Charles, Herman Beavers, and compassionate and omniscient staff like Carol Davis, Michelle Houston, and Teya Campbell who would help carry me through the following five years and who would hold me accountable for doing work that was my truth and that was intended to honor the sacrifices of those who’ve made space for me in the academy and in the world. Providence has also blessed me with mentors and motivators outside of my departments who graciously offered their time and feedback: people like Asif Agha, Mary Bucholtz (thank you, Mary, for everything you’ve done for me!), Salikoko v Mufwene, Norma Mendoza-Denton, Jemima Pierre, and Jonathan Rosa, to name a few. When I needed it most, the faculty and staff in the Department of Black Studies at UC Santa Barbara provided the precious gift of writing time, a writing space, as well as consistent affirmation and inspiration. The department’s radical spirit offered the ideal conditions for closing this circle and beginning a new season. I am especially grateful to Jeffrey Stewart, George Lipsitz, Gaye Thompson, Ingrid Banks, and Shana Redmond (who was visiting from USC Dornsife) who offered sage advice and comfort. I also thank my beautiful and brilliant Santa Barbara Sisters in Exile: Tracy Locke, Shayla Monroe, Dena Montague, Nathalie Pierre, Ashley Thompson, and Jennifer Thompson. I’m enormously grateful to all of the precious friends I’ve made over the past seven years. My confidants Diana Burnett, Khwezi Mkhize, and Savannah Shange have to be mentioned first because, in their distinctly potent ways, they have each impelled my spiritual and intellectual growth over the past few years. I also thank the homies: Osei Alleyne, Venise Battle, Catrice Barrett, Layla Ben-Ali, Cameron Brickhouse, Sofia Chapparo, Gabriel Dattatreyan, Celina de Sa, Mariam Durrani, Cécile Evers, Ashley Freeman, Holly Link, Josslyn Luckett, Keon McGuire, Chike McLoyd, Katrina Morrison, Eziaku Nwokocha, Arjun