Hopkins centred his life on the Gospel and the Incarnation from the time of his conversion to Catholicism in 1866 onwards, and the exposition of the faith in the Mass became his life’s central activity when he joined the Jesuits in 1868. His sermons deserve to be read as ardent yet stylish examples of the genre as well as for their relevance to Hopkins as poet and to Hopkins as original thinker. This chapter examines the liturgical context of the sermons and ways in which they relate to the context of Victorian preaching and Jesuit homiletics. Hopkins’s sometimes baroque preaching style was not always orthodox, running counter to the simple language advised by Jesuit preaching manuals. In the texts of his sermons, it is nevertheless possible to find moving autobiographical testimony to Hopkins’s psycho-spiritual struggles, as well as his desire to empathize with his congregants’ lives and work.

This chapter explores a history of ideas and hopes about freedom in late- sixteenth-century Sevilla through the lives and affairs of enslaved and liberated Black people who lived in a central parish of the city in this period. In particular, the analysis explores ideas about freedom of an enslaved Black woman named Felipa de la Cruz who penned two letters to her absent husband beseeching him to send funds for her liberation from slavery. The chapter explores the varied conversations and fractured memories about paths to liberation from slavery among free, enslaved, and liberated Black populations in Sevilla and the mutual aid practices that sometimes spanned vast distances across the Atlantic world. Assembling diverse archival materials that catalog how hundreds of free and liberated Black men and women crossed the Atlantic Ocean as passengers with royal licenses on ships also reveals spheres of communication between free Black residents of Sevilla with kin and associates in the Spanish Atlantic world, especially through relays of word of mouth and epistolary networks. In other words, enslaved and free Black residents of late sixteenth-century Sevilla were often members of a nascent Black lettered city and participated in informal relays of word of mouth.

This chapter investigates the many faces of cultural production in the Merovingian kingdoms. As this is supposed to be a period of decay, it is crucial to understand the full range of evidence, including the manuscript and associated palaeographical evidence, libraries, the evidence for lay literacy and bureaucratic culture, and the visual and artistic practices that facilitated communication and display. Through these, we can determine that the Merovingian world had its vibrancy and creativity but also that changes in tastes, resources, and organisation meant that much direct evidence has been demonstrably lost.

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.

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.

This chapter explores how early prose writers made use of intertextuality, from the emergence of prose until the classical age. First, it considers the earliest writers, especially early Greek mythographers and philosophers, who faced the challenge of dealing with the authoritative world of epic poetry. To inherit this credibility, they could either acknowledge its importance or reject it. In many cases, they tried to improve upon the poets or kept their narratives up to a certain point before swinging in another direction. Second, the chapter studies the developments in the classical age and focuses especially on Herodotus, who cites poets, but never prose writers, favourably. Harsh attacks are reserved for those predecessors whose work was recognised as significant and thus as a direct competitor.

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.

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.

In its broadest sense, book history is concerned with all the media – electronic, printed, handwritten, oral – in which dictionaries have been preserved and circulated. Lexicography began at a particular point in the development of the book, and many topics in the global history of lexicography are book-historical topics. One of the most fundamental of these is the distinction, seen in western and non-western traditions alike, between dictionaries which are made to support ready reference, and dictionaries which are made to support slower, more thorough, study. Another is the distinction between the dictionary text as a single entity, and the body of lexicographical material as a repertoire from which different selections can be made on different occasions. Another is the dependence of the textual structure of the dictionary as we know it on the physical structure of the codex (as opposed to scrolls, clay or wooden tablets, and other media). These topics are of evident continuing relevance to the compilers, publishers, and users of dictionaries in electronic form.

The world population growth curve shows a kink from 100 BCE to 200 CE. It occurs in all major populated regions: China, Mesopotamia, Mediterranean, and (least of all) in India. Graphing of population doubling times over time shows utter discontinuity. It looks as if Earth’s carrying capacity for humans reached a limit that no increase in technology could overcome, but by 400 CE a unique breakthrough occurred. An exponent value in “T-function” fits to population data before and after the kink shifts in a way that suggests a crucial change in innovation practices. From isolated innovators, humankind shifted to moderate interaction over space and time, due to literacy. A sudden increase around 400 CE in ability to make use of written records is implausible, yet it remains the only conceivable way to explain the kink in world population growth curve.

Chapter 7 distills from the empirical studies their implications for emoji theories overall and for their applicability to the educational and healthcare realms. The studies have borne a number of concrete implications for emoji theory in general, including how they fit in with communication theories, including nonverbal aspects. Several theoretical notions are developed as well, generalizing them from previous chapters, including the apparent function of emoji as “annotators” of meaning, not just conveyors of prosodic or gestural features in writing. Another notion is that of episodic meaning, whereby the placement of an emoji in the episodes that constitute a message adds to it semiotically. Emoji grammar is thus more appropriately characterized as an episodic grammar.

Using both the Petcoff and Palaganas studies as a point of departure, this chapter looks at the more general educational implications of bringing emoji into pedagogical practices. The underlying premise is that emoji not only are highly understandable images, aiding learning but also can create a positive environment, making teaching and interaction congenial and open to all learners, no matter their backgrounds or learning capacities, since emoji give them an equal voice. Emoji allow for a destigmatized approach, especially for disadvantaged learners who might not be able to adequately speak for themselves. Emoji are a psychological conduit that can easily open up lines of interaction to virtually everyone. Once this is achieved, any subject matter, from English to mathematics, can be imparted broadly through any type of learning style.

Chapter 2 summarizes the findings of a research project conducted by Petcoff in which she explores using emoji as a viable literacy and postsecondary writing teaching tool. Her work chronicles the teaching situation in a Texas community college, whereby an integrated reading and writing project was devised in which students attempted to demonstrate mastery of State-mandated literacy content areas using both traditional writing and the emoji code. The project provides data-driven findings that allow for the exploration of semioliteracy as a teaching approach, as well how the shared meanings of emoji by students constitute an unconscious semiotic domain. The Petcoff study offers opportunities for further research with similar groups of learning, via iconographic tracking and rendered ecologies with a particular focus on advancing literacy within the framework of first-year and postsecondary writing instructional efforts. Parallels between semioliterate qualities used in reading and writing instruction and healthcare, as well as healthcare professional education, are discussed at the conclusion of the chapter.

The historical relationship between semiotics and healthcare is explored in Chapter 3. The authors look specifically at the link between education and healthcare communications that is established by the use of emoji in such communications. The semioliterate nature of healthcare and its implications for respective education are explored, particularly as these relate to early diagnoses based on physical signs and symptoms. Parallels are then drawn between the semioliterate qualities of emoji in the Petcoff study (Chapter 2) and the potentiality of emoji as an effective doctor-to-patient healthcare communicative tool. The chapter concludes by considering how the emoji code can be inserted into traditional healthcare professional education settings, so as to show students how effective it can be in practitioner–patient interactions.