Race, SIGNS, and the Body: Towards a Theory of Racial Semiotics

Abstract

This chapter considers the utility of a racial semiotics, or raciosemiotics, to further explore the ways race, language, and the body co-construct one another via multiscalar signification. It begins with a brief overview of semiotic theory, underscoring contemporary scholars’ focus on context and materiality. Drawing from Fanonian phenomenology and from ethnographic research with Black-identified young people in the United States and Liberia, the chapter discusses how antiblackness, as a transhistorical interpretive frame, compounds the semiotic weight of Black bodies and shapes how individuals in such bodies make meaning with others. Finally, by focusing on the racialized body in the construction of meaning, I suggest that attending closely to young people’s raciosemiotic labor—meaning-making about and through race—can move us closer towards developing a theory of racial semiotics.