Raciosemiotic disruptions: The discursive deconstruction of race among Africans in the United States

Abstract

Building on Smalls's (2024) raciosemiotics, I use “raciosemiotic disruptions” to refer to ways some African-born individuals in the United States have connotatively and denotatively reworked the indexicality of the Euro-American bio-logic racialized signs in different spatiotemporal contexts and at different semiotic scales. I examine, via their metapragmatic commentaries and meta-discursive evaluations, how the processes through which meanings that are made about Blackness are inevitably disrupted and subverted. That is, how do some African-born individuals in the United States, though they share in the signs (i.e., phenotypes) that reproduce racial ideologies/ontologies, refuse racialization? How are race, racialization, and racial meanings transformed, refused, or resisted through the recalibration of these racialized signs? I argue that even as some African-born individuals in the United States seek to distance themselves from Blackness and refuse colonial and hegemonic constructs by interdiscursively refusing the naturalness of white epistemes, they sometimes inadvertently revert to the very hegemony they disassociate from by aligning themselves with white hegemony. I conclude that an awareness of one's Blackness has much less to do with phenotype than a decolonial reclamation and self-affirmation project.