The Introduction is a chapter-length outline of the of the book which does more than simply summarise. Though not exhaustive, it includes both explanation and discussion of the historical context of Brexit and Brexitspeak, combined with a description of the linguistic tools of analysis. The starting point is that without language politics could not happen, so it is essential to understand how language works in general and how it is strategically deployed by politicians. In this chapter populism is discussed as an unwritten ideology best characterised by its demagogic appeal to an idea of ‘the people’ within a nationalist notion of ‘the British people’, at the same time promoting a friend-foe antithesis, stirring up emotion and avoiding reasoned argument. Demagoguery is a little used term in political science but highly relevant to the present state of democracy. Indeed, demagoguery exploits and undermines democracy. It is both an effect and a cause of post-truth politics, where truthfulness and facts are overridden. The final section takes a closer look at the fundamentals of language and language use that are at issue in examining the discourse of Brexit.

This chapter explores how identities were forged and developed under the Merovingians, from the creative fiction of ‘Frankishness’ to more personal identities defined by gender and social status. It examines how identities can appear different through stories, laws, dress, and language, highlighting the importance of how people defined and presented themselves according to need and circumstance. It takes seriously the contention that identity formation fed into discourses of power because they structured hierarchies and issues of inclusion and exclusion.

This chapter examines the temporal texturing of Apollonius Rhodius’ Argonautica. Unlike the Aeneid, the Argonautica is not tied to a specific political project, but it uses epic and specifically Homeric narrative models more allusively to shape its reader’s experience of the world. Focusing on Orpheus’ cosmogonic song, the ecphrasis of the Acherousian headland, and then the consequences of desire as felt by Medea, Phillips draws attention to the small moments of temporal shaping within the Argonautica – how time is experienced by the characters and the readers on the level of the individual line, phrase and even word – which contain the many perspectives offered by Apollonius on navigating the burden of living as a subject of history.

How we should treat nonhuman animals is one of the most important environmental questions that we face. Although most people think of humans as having a qualitatively different moral status than nonhuman animals, there is no morally significant criterion for membership in the moral community that is satisfied by all and only humans. If the criterion is demanding enough (e.g., language), it excludes some humans; if it is permissive enough to include all humans (e.g., sentience), it includes some nonhumans. The discovery that “speciesism” is indefensible opens the door to a range of strong animal-protection philosophies – for example, Peter Singer’s “animal liberation,” which is founded on utilitarianism, and Christine Korsgaard’s “fellow creatures” view, which has a Kantian foundation. These views converge in concluding that many of the ways that we treat animals are wrong.

This chapter analyses the richness and relevance of epic scenes of sacrifice. The detailed descriptions of animal sacrifice found in Homer not only stand out for their rich diction and complex narrative resonance, but they are also unique for the dominant referential role that they continued to play in Greek representations of sacrifice, most notably in later epic poetry. After a quick review of the major sacrifices in Iliad 1, Odyssey 3 and Odyssey 14, Gagné turns to the sacrifice of a cow to Athena in Book 5 of Nonnus’ Dionysiaca, the only detailed sacrificial scene in that massive poem, and the double sacrifice to Apollo in Book 1 of the Argonautica, one of the most emphatic sites of engagement with the verses of Homer in Apollonius. One puzzling verb of Homer, ὠμοθετεῖν, serves as a guiding thread throughout this study on the shifting language of ritual representation. By assessing the traditional language of Homeric sacrificial scenes, and these dramatic examples of its reception in later epic, Gagné demonstrates the enduring, canonical presence of Homeric sacrifice in the development of a tradition of poetic reference, in what he terms ‘the ritual archive’ of Greek epic.

In this introductory chapter, an invitation is provided to begin a journey into the intricacies of Black Caribbean immigrant literacies through the use of Black Panther and Black Panther: Wakanda Forever, as exceptional Black imaginaries already inscribed in the world. Through the adept depiction of racialization and transracialization steeped in the Black experience in the US as juxtaposed against the notion of Black immigrants as a ‘model minority,’ the necessity for examining race in relation to the languaging and semiotizing of Black Caribbean immigrants is outlined. Presenting a brief overview of the emerging global project focused on racialized language, this chapter lays the groundwork for the painting of a compelling portrait of the holistic literacies of Black Caribbean immigrant youth. By signaling the attention to an ultimate positioning of flourishing as a necessary imperative for and alternative to rethinking literacies based on ‘success,’ the chapter concludes with a focus on solidarity between Black Caribbean and other populations as a key impetus for this work.

Chapter 3 approaches Guru Nanak’s poetic artistry in “the language of infinite love – bhākhiā bhāo apāru” from seven angles: (1) the pluralistic medieval north-Indian linguistic context, (2) theophilial heteroglossia comprising infinite names of the singular truth, (3) anthropophilial commercial configurations (4) somatophilial signifiers of the formless One, (5) female-embodied theophilia, (6) biophilial worship (Arati, Samā’), (7) Kristeva’s materiality of language in the guru-bāṇī identity. The chapter explores how Guru Nanak’s images, symbols, paradoxes, metaphors, and allusions materialize the transcendent One. The message and the medium seamlessly coalesce to reveal the shared humanity usurped by age-old dualities, theological conflicts, and colonial mechanisms. The finale analyzes the guru-bāṇī (language) identity birthed by the founder Guru Nanak and embodied in the textual Guru (the GGS) – the sovereign presiding at all Sikh ceremonies and rites of passage, the sacrosanct body circulating with the flow of Sikh gurus, Hindu bhagats, and Muslim sufis.

In this chapter, I acknowledge the intertwined histories of Afro-Caribbean languaging, Englishes, and literacies across the Black diaspora. In doing so, I draw from the notion of ‘transcendent literacy’ to attend to the long legacy of languaging emerging out of the Black race and reaching across the Black diaspora while also lamenting the invented illiteracy often imposed in characterizations of Black peoples worldwide. Acknowledging the traditional lineage of ‘Diaspora Literacy’ in making visible interconnections across Black peoples within and beyond the US, I then present Caribbean Englishes across the Black diaspora, describing the languaging, Englishes, and literacies of English-speaking Afro-Caribbean students in the Caribbean and in the US. Based on this discussion, I call for a silencing of the historical tradition of invented illiteracy used to characterize Black peoples across the diaspora and invite a strengthening of accessible knowledges surrounding the rich literate and linguistic heritages they inherently possess. Through this discussion, it is possible to understand the broader transnational contexts influencing racialized translanguaging and transsemiotizing in Black immigrant literacies and thus, the inherently induced economic bases for racialization of language.

In this chapter, I begin by complicating how Black immigrants’ perception as a ‘model minority’ in the US creates a challenge for equitably engaging with their literacies and languaging as a function of schooling. Joining the conversation on immigrant and transnational literacies, I present foundational language and literacy research in the US that has functioned as a backdrop against which Black Caribbean immigrants’ literacies and languaging are considered. To situate Afro-Caribbean languaging, Englishes, and literacies within its broader contexts, I then discuss education, migration, and cultures across the Black diaspora addressing the historical and contemporary educational landscape of Black people in the Caribbean. I further accomplish this situational placement of Afro-Caribbean languaging, Englishes, and literacies through a discussion of the historical and contemporary socio-educational landscape of Black immigrants in the US. Through this broadly painted portrait operating at the interstices of the educational, racial, historical, social, linguistic, and religious domains in the lives of Black Caribbean peoples and specifically youth, this chapter serves as a nuanced and contextual backdrop against which to understand the analyses of Black Caribbean immigrant youth’s language and literacies presented in this book.

In this chapter, I present findings from interpretive analyses of the data as they relate to the multiliteracies and translanguaging practices engaged in by six Black Caribbean immigrant English-speaking youth across their Bahamian and Jamaican Caribbean home countries and the US. Specifically, I contextualize these findings within (decolonizing) interpretive analyses that clarify the raciolinguistic and raciosemiotic ideologies informing students’ multiliteracies and translanguaging practices. This chapter shows how the literacies of Black immigrant youth are enacted holistically by adeptly illustrating the languaging associated with these literacies and the ideologies influencing these literacies. Based on these findings, I propose and discuss the framework of semiolingual innocence for understanding how elements of multiliteracies and translanguaging practices as well as the raciolinguistic and raciosemiotic ideologies intersected to clarify the literacies leveraged by Black Caribbean immigrant youth. In turn, through semiolingual innocence emerging from transracialization of the Black immigrant as an analytical prism, I invite a reinscribing of the innocence of Black youth, whose ancestors have for centuries leveraged semiolingually, sans white gaze, their multiliteracies and semiotics for agentively reading and writing themselves into the world. Moreover, I argue for a semiolingual innocence of all youth, made possible through the cultivation of translanguaging and transsemiotizing imaginary presents and futures.

The chapter explores the ways in which Clare’s sense of personal identity and selfhood is first created, and then fashioned and influenced, by the many differing pressures brought to bear upon it. Such pressures include poetic antecedents, social and economic conditions, literary associations and relationships, as well as the more personal features of an upbringing rooted in the natural world, which is authoritative and confirming, and an internal world, which is increasingly fragile and unstable. The chapter traces these evolutions – from the earliest verse that Clare wrote to the last poems of his asylum years.

In this chapter, I synthesize the findings from the study presented in the book. Reflecting on these findings, I then identify and discuss recommendations for instantiating the translanguaging imaginaries of all youth through a reinscribing of semiolingual innocence, sans white gaze, as a potentially vibrant literate characteristic of Black Caribbean immigrant students specifically, and also, of all humans. The scholarly recommendations proposed outline future directions for research that invite intersectionally and transdisciplinary driven investigations into how youth’s holistic literacies across geographies, languages, races, and cultures function as disparate pieces of one interdependent puzzle in the problem-solving necessary to flourish and to design imaginary presents and futures, using the meaning-making undergirding their translanguaging practices. I outline also practical recommendations useful for researchers, teachers, administrators, and policymakers who wish to support Black Caribbean immigrant youth’s holistic literacies. The recommendations proposed also allow all youth whose language and raciosemiotic architecture can allow them, through these holistic literacies, to design translanguaging futures as new beings engaging transraciolinguistically, in solidarity. I conclude with a painting of liberatory Caribbean imaginaries as a version of what this notion of literacy and language teaching and learning might look like and of what it means to embark on a collective return to inonsans jan nwè.

As a result of French colonization, Haiti is a nation-state with a predominantly French-speaking written tradition. However, there is also a smaller body of Haitian texts written in Creole, dating back to the eighteenth century. Based on their linguistic and aesthetic characteristics, we can divide the corpus of Haitian Creole letters into two main chronological stages: the great period of emergence that stretches from colonial times to the middle of the twentieth century, and the period of emulation. The first period was dominated by texts of a mainly religious, administrative, and political nature. Written for the most part by high-ranking white settlers, these texts, using the local language, were intended for Creole-speaking slaves with a poor command of French. The second period, that of the autonomy of Creole letters or the beginnings of an authentic Creole literary tradition, began in the mid-twentieth century, in parallel with linguistic work to standardize the written code of the national language. This advance in the standardization of Creole led to a significant development of the language’s written code, particularly in the field of literature.

This chapter provides the reader with a depiction of the methodology involved in conducting the study of Black immigrant youth’s literacies presented in the book. I begin with an overview of who I am, how I am situated in the study, and what I bring to this book as a person and as a Black-immigrant-scholar-single-parent-mother-educator. A discussion of the (decolonizing) interpretive research design is then presented and justified. The context of the study is described, followed by a detailed description of participants and informants (i.e., secondary participants) involved in the study. The protocols for collecting data are discussed. This is followed by the procedures for collecting data from participants. The analytical discussion follows, accompanied by an example of the analytical process used to organize and narrate the data. Credibility, verisimilitude, and transferability are then addressed.

This chapter discusses Clare’s nature poetry, in the contexts of the politics of land use, then and now. It reads the verse against issues including the introduction of capitalist forms of agriculture and their effects, including the dispossession and pauperization of agricultural labourers and the degradation of ecosystems. It also considers the politics of language and memory in Clare’s poetry, in relation to changes in the agricultural economy.

Clare had the good fortune to be born into a period of excitement and experimentation in poetry. Ideas about poetry were changing, as were practices of reading and writing. This chapter examines how Clare participated in these changes. He helped to elevate the meditative lyric to the pinnacle of literary prestige by showing how everyday experiences yield pleasure and insight; by using forms with roots in oral and folk cultures, including popular song; and by modelling his poems on the music of nature and the structure of bird nests. He took part in contemporary experiments with form, language, and voice. His poems draw on the philosophical atmosphere of the Romantic age by offering readers opportunities carefully to observe Clare’s world and, by doing so, to come to know it.

In this chapter, I present a conceptual framework for understanding the perspectives used as lenses to examine the construct of Black immigrant literacies in this book. The chapter begins with a historicizing of multiliteracies and translanguaging followed by a description of the way in which literacy has emerged as a sociocultural and multimodal practice. Raciolinguistics, a raciolinguistic perspective, transracialization, as well as language and raciosemiotic architecture are then presented in tandem, highlighting how linguistic and broader semiotic affordances work based on ideologies steeped in racialized language and semiotics. In turn, raciolinguistic and raciosemiotic ideologies influencing multiliteracies of Black immigrant youth are discussed as well as mechanisms such as a transraciolinguistic approach which function as an avenue for understanding how Black immigrants leverage literacies in relation to peers. Following this, translanguaging based on an integrated model of multilingualism is presented along with a description of the ways in which Black immigrants’ language practices have been examined and intersect to undergird the current study regarding the literacies of Black immigrant youth. In doing so, connections across these concepts as well as the potential influence of race-based ideologies for clarifying Black immigrants’ multiliteracies are illuminated through attention to translanguaging and transsemiotizing with Englishes.