2

This article presents the theoretical bases for a semiotics of race, or raciosemiotics, and sets out to analyze race as sign—a product of discourse. The first section provides a brief review of the principles of a theory of semiotics rooted in a raciolinguistic approach, allowing us to investigate the co-naturalization of language, the body, and race. In the second section, the article draws on an ethnographic study of “raciosemiotic labor” (Smalls 2020)—that is, the (de)construction of the meaning in discourse of the racial categories “Black” [Noir] and “African”—conducted in Paris by a young anti-racism activist from Cameroon. The analysis shows how, by bringing to bear a range of phonetic, corporal, and discourse markers, the racialized subject deconstructs the apparent naturalness of race and produces an alternative model of “Blackness.” The article concludes by reaffirming the contribution of racial semiotics to the analysis of language practices in sociolinguistics, and to the understanding of the relationships between race, racialization, and racism.