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 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.

John Jacob Thomas’s mid-nineteenth-century career exemplifies the contradictions of the post-abolition period. A schoolteacher who authored Theory and Practice of Creole Grammar (1869) and Froudacity: West Indian Fables Explained (1888), he parsed, literally and symbolically, the grammar of freedom. What did it mean to be free in a world in which non-whiteness was synonymous with servitude, and in which blackness and intellect were considered to be oxymoronic? Thomas’s efforts to vindicate 'freedom’s children' – the successors of the generation of enslavement – shed light on conceptions of mimicry, respectability, and literary and political authority that continue to shadow our postcolonial moment.