Throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, teachers, administrators, and policymakers fashioned a system of industrial education that attempted to transform Black and Indigenous peoples and land. This form of teaching—what Bayley J. Marquez names plantation pedagogy—was built on the claim that slavery and land dispossession are fundamentally educational. Plantation pedagogy and the formal institutions that encompassed it were thus integrally tied to enslavement, settlement, and their inherent violence toward land and people. Marquez investigates how proponents developed industrial education domestically and then spread the model abroad as part of US imperialism. A deeply thoughtful and arresting work, Plantation Pedagogy sits where Black and Native studies meet in order to understand our interconnected histories and theorize our collective futures.
"Plantation Pedagogy is as much a study in method as it is a landmark contribution to the fields of Black and Indigenous studies. Through her careful interrogation of key archival and scholarly texts, Bayley Marquez takes us on a journey through myriad and global geographies of slavery and settlement, offering an unflinching and fluid analysis of the intimacies of colonialist violence enacted upon Black and Indigenous peoples, lands, and waters. She brilliantly traces the pedagogical entanglements of colonialism and empire as manifested through boarding and technical schools, evidencing how they served as the proving grounds for the logics of US settler colonial and imperial projects across the Pacific and the Atlantic. At stake for Marquez is not a return or resuscitation of progressive or even critical pedagogies but rather a (re)assertion of Indigenous refusal, a decolonial and abolitionist politics that unmakes schooling as such, with the hopes of unearthing new stories of relationality, being, and liberation."—Sandy Grande, author of Red Pedagogy: Native American Social and Political Thought
"Marquez's book is likely to become a definitive work on racialized education in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Plantation Pedagogy is a major resource on how racial ideas about Blackness evolved and became transposed onto other racialized populations after slave emancipation. This is an important contribution."—Justin Leroy, Assistant Professor of History, Duke University
"I found my critical and historiographic assumptions consistently challenged. Plantation Pedagogy promises to make significant contributions to many fields."—Mark Rifkin, author of Speaking for the People: Native Writing and the Question of Political Form
