Krystal A. Smalls

I study the ways young people make meaning about themselves and the world by conducting ethnographic research in different locations of Black Diaspora (mostly digital and urban). My work specifically concerns the discourses and practices that constitute Black life, Blackness, antiblackness, and anti-antiblackness. 

My recent book Telling Blackness: Young Liberians and the Raciosemiotics of Contemporary Black Diaspora (Oxford University Press - 2024) is a transdisciplinary ethnographic account of the meaning making practices of a small group of Liberian young women that helps us reimagine their talk, twerks, and tweets as “tellings” that exceed our understandings of narrative and that potentially act on the world of meaning. Through careful historical contextualization, we see how such acts reproduce, refuse, or powerfully disregard racial logics that have entangled the US and Liberia for two centuries. Led by Black feminist scholarship, Telling Blackness also provides a raciosemiotic glimpse into "ways of relating" that help create complex diasporic intimacies and that sustain Black life beyond survival.

One of my recent projects concerning digital subjectivity and sociality (there are a few) considers how uses of "emphatically Black" and "intentionallly Black" language and discourse in digital space function as public refusals of antiblack "raciolinguistic ideologies" (Rosa & Flores 2017) and semiotically, may help reracialize public spaces and reconfigure racialized signs in significant ways. Another project in development examines uses of Black bodies in reaction memes/gifs and of Black body parts in internet-mediated images by non-Black people and situates these recursive digital practices within a timeline of slavery and its afterlife (following Saidiya Hartman's retemporalization of the present), and therefore within a history of corporeal theft (specifically, different practices of possession, body-snatching, dismemberment). 

I've worked extensively with young urbanites in Monrovia, Liberia and Philadelphia, PA in the US, and I'm in the early stages of a new project with my own cultural community: the Gullah Geechee of coastal and insular South Carolina.