Telling Blackness young Liberians and the raciosemiotics of contemporary Black diaspora By Krystal A.Smalls, New York: Oxford University Press. 2023 pp. [x + 294pp.]

Over the past few decades there has been no shortage of calls to decolonize the discipline that is anthropology.Despite important contributions in this endeavor, including in the subfield of linguistic anthropology, the calls have not receded.In 2020, Ryan Cecil Jobson made the compelling argument to let anthropology burn, a metaphor for the dismantling of Western liberal humanism in favor of a new humanism that more proactively addresses the conditions set by the global afterlife of colonialism ("The Case for Letting Anthropology Burn: Sociocultural Anthropology in 2019."American Anthropologist, 2020; 122: 259-271).Five years later, the discipline has not burned, but it is starting to feel warm.The year before Jobson published his piece, Jonathon Rosa expanded on his and Nelson Flores's pioneering theory, raciolinguistics, in Looking like a Language, Sounding like a Race: Raciolinguistic Ideologies and the Learning of Latinidad (Oxford University Press, 2019).Rosa and Flores's publications have triggered an outburst of critical research in a variety of domains-all undergirded by the raciolinguistic perspective.Now, in the field of semiotics, Krystal Smalls has taken the reins.Published in 2024, Telling Blackness: Young Liberians and the Raciosemiotics of Contemporary Black Diaspora sets the bar for how one actually decolonizes the discipline.Smalls's debut book is an ethnographic investigation of Black diasporic life and meaning making practices.The work straddles two principal disciplines: Linguistic anthropology and Black Studies, and fuses together critical theories from Black feminist thought, sociolinguistics, queer and Indigenous studies, among others.The transdisciplinary nature of the book means that it can, and should, be used in the classroom for a broad range of disciplines in the humanities, and it is an essential inclusion to any syllabus exploring semiotics.In Telling Blackness, Smalls engages with 25 young, transnational Liberians-the key participants being a group of four students of an English as a Second Language class in Philadelphia.The main theoretical and epistemological approaches are raciosemiotics and Black livingness, the latter being a concept borrowed from Katherine McKittrick (Dear Science and Other Stories, Duke University Press, 2021).It captures the way that Black life is made-the intersubjective practices that produce joy and manage grief-in worlds that have denied the livelihoods of all those hailed as Black.For readers without a strong background in Black Studies, Smalls does a thorough job of providing concise explanations for key terms.Replete with citations, the book is a magisterial engagement with the cannon of which Smalls now takes a crucial part.