Very few educational institutions loom as large in American educational history as the Hampton Normal and Agricultural Institute. Established in Virginia in 1868, the school embraced a pedagogical model—the Hampton Model—focused on industrial education and training centering on recently emancipated African Americans. The school’s pedagogical origins were based in missionary and US imperial educational work in Hawai‘i. The Hampton Model’s impact was global. It would be adopted in industrial educational programs directed at Indigenous communities in the US West, US colonial possessions in the Pacific such as the Philippines, and places in Africa where US influence was strong, such as Liberia.
Numerous scholars have observed that the Hampton Model did very little to teach industrial education and instead was focused on holding African Americans, Indigenous communities, and people caught in US imperial policy in a status of second-class citizenship and firmly placed in a White-dominated racial hierarchy. Considering the Hampton Model’s impact on the schooling experiences of non-Whites inside and outside the US, many scholars have looked at its comparative impact and colonial global dimensions. However, few works have theorized and named the full devastating impact that the Hampton Model had on a global scale. Enter the work of Indigenous scholar Bayley J. Marquez in Plantation Pedagogy: The Violence of Schooling Across Black and Indigenous Space.
In this study, Marquez examines the educational experiences of Black and Indigenous students during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. With a focus on the Hampton Model, she specifically investigates how White educators and reformers viewed what she calls “slavery and settlement” as educative processes central to teaching Black and Indigenous communities. Marquez also situates the school as a seminal location of interaction between Black and Indigenous communities inside and outside the US. Plantation Pedagogy acknowledges how previous scholarship has identified the connection between settlement and slavery and the schooling experiences of African American and Indigenous communities but has paid less attention to how intertwined these forces were in the education of these groups (p. 11). Taking this a step further, Marquez argues, “Education, the formal institutions that encompass it as well as hegemonic notions of education in ‘America,’ is integrally tied to enslavement and settlement and their inherent violence towards land and people, what I call teaching slavery and settlement” (p. 8). This teaching and its proliferation are central to Marquez’s book.
Plantation Pedagogy’s assertion about the teaching of slavery and settlement rests on archival material of the White reformers and educational leaders across the globe who promoted and embraced the Hampton Model. Marquez pays close attention to the evidence and voices from these educational centers to draw a clear picture of the true intent and focus of their model of industrial education (p. 11), looking in particular at sites such as the Hampton Institute, Tuskegee Normal and Industrial Institute, and Carlisle Indian Industrial School to demonstrate what educational reformers taught Black and Indigenous people as well as what they said about them as learners (p. 9).
Rather than taking a conventional chronological approach, the narrative structure of Plantation Pedagogy follows a “water current” framework, where each of the three parts of the book correspond with a “current of colonialism” to show how plantation pedagogy became a powerful educational philosophy that flowed throughout the world.
Part One, which entails the introduction and chapter 1, sets out the foundation and tenets of plantation pedagogy. According to Marquez, two central tenets of plantation pedagogy are “(1) the plantation is educative through proximity to whiteness and (2) labor, as a form of teaching, functions thought the idealization of the productive use of land” (p. 35). Said pedagogy sought to reform Black and Indigenous peoples, “through proximity to whiteness, labor, and the productive use of land.” (p. 25-26) Marquez convincingly shows the tenets at work throughout a globe-spanning survey that includes the US South and West, Hawai‘i, the Philippines, and Africa with a focus on Liberia. Given the global flow of plantation pedagogy within the bounds of colonial violence, Marquez’s “water currents” framework to describe the spread of the Hampton Model is very apt (p. 18).
In “Part Two: Plantation Pedagogy in the Currents,” covering chapters 2-4, Marquez’s central thesis and theoretical framework shines as she demonstrates how the teaching of slavery and settlement attained its full global reach in the early twentieth century. She examines how plantation pedagogy mapped onto US racial, settler, and imperial projects, showing how the teaching of slavery and settlement greatly shaped the boarding school movement in Indian Country, colonial education for native Hawaiians and Filipinos, and industrial educational projects in Liberia. Regarding the boarding school movement, plantation pedagogy was tied to displacement of Native land as it worked in concert with the General Allotment Act of 1887 and other legislation that made displacement official national policy (p. 61, 72). Marquez also shows how in In Hawai‘i and the Philippines, plantation pedagogy justified chattel slavery and sought to make island plantations of both foreign lands despite slavery being outlawed there. There, in the Pacific, proximity to whiteness and training in manual labor were promoted as redemptive and civilizing (p. 104).
Chapter 4, “Atlantic Currents,” the book’s standout chapter, examines the Booker Washington Institute of Liberia during a time of anti-colonial struggles in Africa. It explains how plantation pedagogy was recreated and proliferated by White philanthropists and Tuskegee graduates and administrators, illuminating the strength of Marquez’s plantation pedagogical framework and use of colonial currents. Whereas industrial education models and plantation pedagogy elsewhere were mainly spearheaded by White educators and reformers, Liberia was a more complex story. There, African Americans were viewed as the best agents for transmitting plantation pedagogy in Africa, given their history of enslavement and exposure to the plantation as an educational vehicle (p. 107). However, in many respects the mission of the Booker Washington Institute in Liberia came into direct conflict with a central tent of plantation pedagogy: that one’s redemption required proximity to Whiteness. Marquez does not run from this contradiction but accounts for it. As Marquez discusses, other theories such as settler-colonialism would be inadequate to describe the contradictory and confusing nature of the Booker Washington Institute in Liberia (p. 127). However, by utilizing plantation pedagogy as theory, Marquez allows readers to account for this contradiction. In other words, the reinvention of the plantation as educational was so powerful that it transcended space, time, and demographics. This is the power of educational theory.
Part 3, titled “Plantation Pedagogy as a Technology of Settlement” and covering chapters 5-7, discusses the material manifestations and technological expansion of plantation pedagogy, which entailed repurposing the slave cabin into multiple forms of the teaching cottage as a teaching space, teacher training site, and agricultural experiment station. In this section, Marquez explains how many industrial schools also operated as normal schools or had teacher training programs. Focusing on teacher training at Hampton and Tuskegee, Marquez demonstrates how proximity to Whiteness made teachers into transmitters of plantation pedagogy regardless of their race. In fact, teachers were explicitly viewed as technological units employed to expand settlement and exposure to Whiteness (p. 203). This section ends by describing how industrial school circulars and agricultural experiment stations promoting farming and land policy were directly influenced by slavery; thus, plantation pedagogy intended to transform land modeled after the slave cabin and plantation.
The book’s concluding chapter ends with a critique of the “learning by doing” pedagogy prevalent in contemporary schooling practices and policies, where she sees plantation pedagogy still at work today. Because plantation pedagogy and industrial education were so bound up in the notions of preparation for life and racial uplift, Marquez calls us to question the very notion of civic education in the US. More importantly, she takes educational scholars to task for their tendency to make their work prescriptive or end with only a curriculum in mind. As she states, “Changing forms of pedagogy does not change the material ways that slavery and settlement are woven into educational systems even it if might do other things, like challenge antiblack and colonial epistemologies” (p. 205). Thus, Marquez encourages a more truthful response from educators and educational scholars in abolition/decolonization work. She writes, “A politicized response to plantation pedagogy cannot only counter the transformation of people and the way they think about and engage in the world but must engage with the materiality of space and land in projects that seek to center Black and Indigenous futures” (p. 205). Planation Pedagogy ends with a blunt call for all to be truthful of what abolition/decolonialization work can and cannot do in schools. Some may view the conclusion as frustrating or dystopian; however, I encourage readers to take solace in the way Marquez’s work demonstrates that education does create space and transforms land and people. There is hope in that transformative power.
Plantation Pedagogy is a powerful book that sheds light on the intersection of educational studies and Black and Indigenous studies. The work adds enormously to canonical works by history of education scholars such as James D. Anderson, Adam Warren, and K. Tsianina Lomawaima, as well as the emerging scholarship of Derek Taira, Helen Heran Jun, and Kim Warren on the notions of educational racial uplift. Marquez illuminates the power of theory in history of education scholarship and convincingly shows the utility of applying educational studies to other fields and disciplines such as American studies and geography. More importantly, the book is an important reminder for educational scholars to refrain from calling their work liberatory if it does not actually engage in people’s lived material conditions. This work is groundbreaking and necessary for anyone interested in the transmission of educational theories, history of education, and the convergence of Black and Indigenous studies.
