Literacies of Migration
Translanguaging Imaginaries of Innocence

Centers race transgeographically to paint imaginaries of the practices supporting the holistic literacies of Black Caribbean youth.

Patriann Smith (Author)

9781108839037, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 21 November 2024

306 pages
23.5 x 15.9 x 2.2 cm, 0.57 kg

'This book brings together Dr. Patriann Smith's extensive research with Black Caribbean immigrant youth, as well Black immigrants and educators across contexts, to reframe our understanding of translanguaging, raciolinguistics, and semiotics through the border-crossing literacies and imagination of young people. Its extensive synthesis of current theory and research on race, language, and migration, and deeply nuanced portraits of Black Caribbean youths' 'holistic literacies,' offer an invaluable resource for educators, policy makers, and researchers interested in charting an expansive, liberatory, and world making vision of education.' Wan Shun Eva Lam, Associate Professor of Learning Sciences in the School of Education and Social Policy at Northwestern University

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.

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.

Subject Areas: Sociolinguistics [CFB]