Performing Africanness, Performing Blacknesses

Before arriving in the United States from Nigeria, I was unfamiliar with race as an identity marker. As a Yorùbá man, I understood identity primarily in terms ethnicities in Africa (Akan, Hausa, Igbo, Luo, Urhobo, and Yorùbá) and nationalities (American, British, and Nigerian). I had never directly encountered self-identifications such as “I am a Black person” or “I am a White person,” nor was I aware of the shared cultural and linguistic practices among Black-identified individuals globally. My understanding of these shared practices was limited by a lack of exposure to the history of the transatlantic slave trade and the fact that, before this rupture, Black-identified individuals were largely indigenous to Africa. Telling Blackness: Young Liberians and the Raciosemiotics of Contemporary Black Diaspora dispelled my ignorance with clarity and depth, illuminating not only the lived experiences of other African-born individuals in the United States but also the nuanced, and perhaps unsurprising, parallels between African and African American languages and cultures. These parallels reveal the deep, latent ties between African and African American cultural practices, which Smalls illuminates in detail. While Smalls examines the relationship between African Americans and Liberians specifically, I observe compelling parallels with my own work and lived experiences among Ghanaians and Nigerians, both on the continent and in the United States, which I reference throughout this review.This book details how linguistic and social practices enregistered to African Americans are embodied and reproduced by Liberians in the United States to construct a Black diasporic identity. The book is divided into six chapters, with introductory and concluding chapters. Chapter 1 (along with the introduction chapter) talks about the theoretical and conceptual underpinnings of the book, which range from linguistic to sociological to anthropological, and discusses Africans’ migration and life in Philadelphia extensively. Chapter 2 describes the methods and epistemological and ethical implications of doing this research. Chapter 3, the most substantial chapter, provides ethnographic encounters of what it means to be Liberian and the multimodalities of what constitutes Liberian-ness from colonial, historical, and cultural contexts and the current relationship between Liberians, Liberian Americans, and African Americans. Chapter 4 shares a retheorization of narration as ante-narrative through the Black ways of transmitting selves. Chapter 5, the most relevant chapter to the readership of American Speech, details the embodied dimensions of Black languaging, how they facilitate ways of relating among Black-identified individuals, and how Black-identified individuals make meaning with each other across time and space. Chapter 6 (along with the concluding chapter) centers on the potentialities of Blackness in Africa, the United States, and between Africa and the United States. This book is primarily targeted at a linguistic anthropology audience, though it offers crucial broader sociolinguistic insights to the ways identities in the United States are constructed, negotiated, and challenged communicatively (i.e., through multiple communicative channels like speech, gesture, text, image, and digital media) by some diasporans.From the title of the book, Telling (or testifyin) Blackness is itself a call to the different Blacknesses—both stereotyped performances of U.S. Blackness and Blacknesses that counter and bypass social meanings associated with U.S. Blackness. Such “countering” (i.e., raciosemiotic disruption Aminu 2025) is exemplified by Donald, a Black-identified Liberian, who names himself a “nasty nigga” (7) and engages in the Black head nod, a nod that shows solidarity among African Americans, but also employs Liberian English discourse markers like “eh!, oh, and sheeeit!” (8) with a Liberian accent. He produces a multilayered Blackness, one that is incongruent with the stereotyped (or enregistered) U.S. Blackness.A trend that stood out to me in chapter 1 is that, according to Smalls, regardless of where African immigrants’ children live, they oftentimes acquire Standardized American English (SAE), not African American English (AAE). In my own fieldwork and lived experiences, this is something I have also observed. Four main reasons come to mind for this: First, there are more social advantages associated with acquiring SAE than AAE in the United States. Second, as they are modeled after British English, most standardized Englishes in Anglophone Africa have more similar linguistic structures to SAE than AAE. Third, raciolinguistic ideologies (Rosa and Flores 2017) delegitimize efforts toward the standardization of most “West African Pidgin Englishes,” leading to their frequent avoidance and stigmatization. Since some African-born speakers might avoid them, they might also avoid AAE because they exhibit some linguistic parallels, as I will discuss later in this review. Fourth, most African families that I have met in the United States reside in “White neighborhoods,” so speech accommodation is unavoidable.Chapter 2, “Telling through Love: A Methodology for Testifying to Black Life,” addresses the epistemological, ethical, and methodological implications of the research. What makes this chapter (and book) particularly compelling to read is Smalls's use of autoethnobiography (a research method that combines ethnography and lived experiences) in analyzing data. Smalls also deliberately avoids recording sensitive conversations she has with participants, opting for notetaking instead. Her preference for notetaking reflects ethical care and reinforces her accountability as a researcher. This ethical care is especially salient in chapter 4, “The Loom of Loss: Telling as Transitive Ante-Narrative,” where she details the experiences of a participant, Victoria, who struggles with racist encounters, the loss of her brother, father, and mother, and separation from her extended family; Victoria's telling was, rightfully, not recorded. Victoria is a Liberian with a “strong Liberian accent” (146) but who is closest to her Black-identified homegirls. A similar loss was experienced by another African, an Ivoirian, Aliya. Both girls have, according to Smalls, experienced Black life,1 which was likely instigated by civil unrest and economic instability in both countries, Liberia and Cote D'Ivoire. Even outside Africa, both girls (and other Black-identified participants, Brian and Johnetta) and even Smalls herself have been involved directly and indirectly in Black racialization in the United States and have “carried loss and feared further loss” (152). Indeed, this mutual loss experienced by Smalls and her African participants represents the consequences of the violence enacted on Black-identified individuals in societies with anti-Black colonial histories.In chapter 5, “Sense and Sensibility: Ways of Relating and Black Diasporic Languaging,” Smalls notes that even as Black diasporans (e.g., Liberians) share ethnic (as opposed to racial) literacy (e.g., code-switching in native dialects), there are ways that they relate with Blackness in the United States. These include (1) the use of AAE; (2) the use of AAE mixed with SAE; and (3) the use of AAE code-mixed with Koloqua (or Liberian English) in specific contexts, by specific participants, and for specific purposes.Smalls observes that there are similarities shared between Liberian English and languages native to African Americans. For instance, Smalls points out some lexicosemantic similarities between her family's language, Gullah, and Liberian English, such as benne (a shared word for ‘sesame seed’), che-che and crackin we teef (shared ways of referring to ‘gossip’ and ‘chit-chat’, respectively), and cracky (‘unreasonable person’). Similarities Smalls notes between African American Language (AAL)2 and Liberian English include the pronunciation of thank God as tenk gawd (also similar to Nigerian3 and Ghanaian Pidgin phonology); the use of some lexicosyntactic expressions (e.g., tearing up ‘eat with vigor’, similar to wack ‘tear, destroy’ in Nigerian Pidgin);4 the variant use of (em)phatic discursive markers like eh, heh, o, hah, ah, and huh; loaded lexemes (e.g., expressive dear and spoil for ‘ruined, damaged’); and mutually intelligible (supra)segmental features among Liberians, African Americans, Nigerians, Ghanaians, and Jamaicans (e.g., consonant cluster reductions in words like left, last, and went).Some additional similarities I observe that are shared between Nigerian and Ghanaian Pidgins (for the sake of this review, I will call them West African Pidgins) and AAL include the metathesis of aks ‘ask’, substituting /ð/ with d and /θ/ with t, substituting /ŋ/ with n in word-final positions, and intensifying steady. As a result, the sentence I keep asking them for support can be said in similar ways in AAL and West African Pidgins: You steady aksin’ dem for support (AAL) and You steady dey aks dem for support (West African Pidgins). Beyond these linguistic features, gesticulations and other body languages racialized as Black (or Blackened in Smalls's terminology) were shared among Smalls and some other Liberian participants, such as their backchannelling (hmphs and uh-huhs), pursing of lips, eye movements, hand gestures, teeth sucking (of varied lengths with varied meanings), and practices of spiritual communication—“the headshaking, surrendered palms, foot stamping, cries of ‘alle'lu'jah!,’ the weeping, the preaching cadence, the ehs and ohs” (174) (see also Rickford and Rickford 1976). Indeed, these similarities came about as a result of the evolutionary trajectories (or what Smalls calls racial terror, the colonial oppression in Africa and containment of Black bodies in the United States) between Liberian English and AAL through language contact. Their evolutionary trajectories enabled the varieties to signify Black esotericism, the practice of creating meaning within and beyond the White gaze. In characterizing these languagings (what Smalls calls Black diasporic languagings), she uses “Black languages,” but not because they were invented by Black-identified people; rather, because they were made “through the material invention of Blackness and through the sociopolitical experience of living in a Black-identified body” (169). Also equally important is the fact that not only is AAL part of the communicative repertoire of Liberian English (locally called cullor or sireese), but there is also a metalinguistic awareness of AAL (even old AAL) in Liberia (e.g., the use of interrogative and affirmative Word), a practice Smalls theorized as Black ways of relating that facilitate intimacy. These ways of relating are “signs that bridged social and ethnoracial distance” (171) and therefore constitute Blacknesses and Black ways of communicating and relating.A particularly useful contribution Smalls makes is the raciolinguistic account of Liberian English. Like many English-speaking parts of the world, including the United States, varieties of English in Liberia that are furthest away from the European lexifier are termed basilectal or nonstandard, while those closer to the European lexifier are considered “clear English, plain English, or school English” (182). Similar to the stereotypes attributed to speakers of AAL and the subsequent consequence of using the language/variety in the United States, speakers of the basilect variety of Liberian English (i.e., Koloqua) will find it difficult to access quality schooling, government/public services, political representation, civil treatment, and gainful employment. In fact, there are metapragmatic commentaries about Koloqua that girls “don't like it” because “they don't think it's sexy” (187). While my own experience suggests a different pattern in Nigeria, where Nigerian Pidgin enjoys widespread social acceptance and, in many contexts, commands greater cultural appreciation than English, koloqua shares similar patterns with Ghanaian Pidgin in Ghana. Many Ghanaian girls avoid it and anyone with competence in it because it is a “broken” form of English, and people with competence in it are, therefore, often considered unsophisticated. In contrast with this ideology, U.S. English is well-received in Liberia. Smalls links this form of linguistic hierarchization to the relationship scholars of language and race have highlighted between ideologies about “simple,” non-European, African languages and the lower social ranks occupied by Black or Black-identified people (189; see also Mufwene and Vigouroux 2008; Aminu, forthcoming).Despite these linguistic and cultural complexities present in Liberia, Smalls posits in chapter 3, “Telling Then and Now: Black Personhood in Early Liberia and Beyond,” that some of the Liberians she interacted with asserted that there are no cultural practices and cultural or linguistic expressions that are truly and distinctly Liberian and that they were all borrowed or adopted from Nigerians, Ghanaians, African Americans, Europeans, and Jamaicans. Of course, this is untrue. It is precisely this convergence, this creative amalgamation of inherited and reimagined forms, that makes Liberian culture truly distinct.In the same chapter, Smalls discusses the postcolonial relationship between Liberia and the United States as being slightly tumultuous. This is not only because some Liberians wished African Americans considered Liberia worth visiting, but also because some Liberians see African Americans as “oppressive and valiant entities” since, in their view, the “so-called colonizers i.e., African Americans and Liberians as the colonized look the same” (136). Smalls argues that this has resulted in different interpretations or meanings of Blackness for them. In chapter 6, “Sounding Off: Sonic Cartographies of Black Diasporic Girlhood,” Smalls shows how Liberian women in the United States embody Blackened and feminized signs to create a “Black sense of place” (198). One of the ways Smalls's participants, Adima and Sarafina, do this is by adopting enregistered AAL phrases, such as drop dead gorgeous, didn't play, and beat that behind (197). By using these phrases, Sarafina engages not only in the performativity of diasporic Black beingness but also in the recontextualization of Adima's Liberian body as a Black feminine body. By recontextualization, Smalls refers to the undoing of anti-Blackness's stereotypes about the feminine body as, for example, excessive. In other words, Sarafina and Adima celebrate bodies that have been deemed illegible and deviant by way of feminine Blackness, and such acts (Sarafina's sound and Adima's movements/twerks) serve as “potential sites of repair, renewal, refusal, or redirection” (201). Importantly, the first two expressions—drop dead gorgeous and didn't play—are similar to some common Nigerian Pidgin expressions: fine die! and no jokes, respectively. Drop dead gorgeous and fine die! are “maximalist compliments” that take a statement of attractiveness and explode it into a dramatic hyperbole. While drop dead uses mock-fatal exaggeration, die in fine die uses intensification to complement an extremely beautiful person. Both didn't play and no jokes are used to indicate that someone approached a task with full seriousness and delivered with intensity.As an African myself, I am particularly intrigued by the metapragmatic commentaries Smalls's participants make about the construction of Africa from a Western lens (via the talks of their “U.S.-born peers”) and how they resist and refuse the naturalness of “White epistemologies” that construct Africa as a “jungle” where “AIDS comes from” (207), a place where we “look like” and “eat monkeys” (208, 213), a place where we “fight with lions” (213), and a place where we “live in huts” (213). Of course, they make metapragmatic evaluations of these constructions on a lexical-denotational level (e.g., “ignorant” and “mean” 207) and on a phrasal/sentential level (e.g., “they don't know nothing about Africa” 207). In their evaluations, they engage in signifyin, a discursive practice of indirectness that involves the layering of different semiotic texts (e.g., AAL, Liberian English and accent, and youth registers) upon one another in a way that outsmarts or confuses overhearers or nonmembers to perform diasporicity; it is a way of refusing ignorant and stereotyped models of African personhood that require shared knowledge schemata and cultural competence and, at the same time, an inoculating practice of making meaning through Blackness. By signifyin, a kind of Africanness that works hand in hand with Atlantic Blackness is constructed, a disruptive telling of African feminine personhood and one that Smalls calls “flipping the performative indexical script” (see also Smalls 2010).The concluding section of the book, “Telling, Meaning, and Mattering,” is a scholarly protest against the brutality of Black-identified people and people of color in the United States. Specifically, Smalls discusses the “Black lives matter,” “Say Her Name,” and “Say Their Names” protest movements in the United States as a plea asking if Black-identified people can “move about the planet without fear” (233), live without being “surveilled,” “murdered,” or “caged” (234), citing Black victims of police brutality in the United States, like George Perry Floyd Jr., Trayvon Martin, and Michael Brown, and women who have been victims of anti-Black state violence, like Rekia Boyd, Tanisha Anderson, Sandra Bland, Breonna Taylor, and Ashia Davis—just to mention a few (see also Rickford and King 2016 for how speech by Black-identified individuals is linguistically prejudiced and can, therefore, distort perceptions of credibility in United States legal settings). The final part emphasizes the “unwavering sense of connectedness” (243) among Black-identified individuals across the globe.In sum, scholars and students of (de)coloniality, identity, race, intersectionality, discourse analysis, sociolinguistics, (linguistic) anthropology, and Black and Africana studies will find this book extremely useful. This book will also be useful to anyone interested in learning about race in America, Black beingness, and Black diaspora-ness. Each chapter comes with its own significant lesson and teaching. For example, chapter 2 brings a range of methodological to ethnographic research most relevant to the readership of American Even though Smalls in a sociolinguistic and she provides and in in an or by after the is this book not only its about in Africa, racial in the United States, how and political bodies are across the world, and but it also as that addresses the of and on I do the Black head nod, use or the “Black (i.e., and with a head among my African American they call me I know to them that not the enregistered U.S. Blackness not make me My my Yorùbá (or Nigerian or accent, and accommodation to AAL constitute multilayered semiotic that a Black diasporic I perform in a different Black the diasporic Black