Literacies of Migration Translanguaging Imaginaries of Innocence

Drawing on the lived experiences of high school-aged young Black immigrants, this book paints imaginaries of 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 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 Caribbean youth's holistic literacies. 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.

Patriann Smith is a distinguished scholar-educator at the University of South Florida whose scholarship emerges at the intersection of race, language, and immigration. She is a co-author of the book, Affirming Black Students' Lives and Literacies: Bearing Witness (2022) and a co-founder of the RISE Caribbean Educational Research Center.