Literacies of Migration

Translanguaging Imaginaries of Innocence

Patriann Smith (University of South Florida)

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English

Cambridge University Press
21 November 2024

Sociolinguistics; Semiotics & semiology; Educational strategies & policy

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.

By: Patriann Smith (University of South Florida)
Imprint: Cambridge University Press
Country of Publication: United Kingdom
ISBN: 9781108839037
ISBN 10: 1108839037
Pages: 314
Publication Date: 21 November 2024
Audience: Professional and scholarly , General/trade , Undergraduate , ELT Advanced
Format: Hardback
Publisher's Status: Forthcoming

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.

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).

Reviews for Literacies of Migration: Translanguaging Imaginaries of Innocence

'A métissage between biography and autobiography, poetry and strong poetry, languaging and translanguiging, this book is a bottom-up testimony explicating how a group of Black Caribbean immigrant youth situates themselves in a time and space while questioning the adequacy of that location. It is where language learning is no longer an abstract exercise but a question(ing) of desire and identity mapping and as such, it moves beyond grammar and syntax to semiotics and raciosemiotics.' Awad Ibrahim, Vice-Provost, Equity, Diversity and Inclusive Excellence, University of Ottawa, and the author of Black Immigrants in North America