The Domesticated Archive and Teaching as Abolitionist Praxis

• In Event: Centering Black Agendas in the Historiography of Black Education: Decoupling Agency From Whiteness

Abstract

The Hampton Normal and Agricultural Institute (est. 1868) is widely regarded as the archetype of how “white architects” shaped black higher education to retain the antebellum socioeconomic order after Emancipation. Although most histories of Hampton start with the arrival of the American Missionary Association in 1865 or of retired Union general and founding president Samuel Chapman Armstrong in 1866, this paper argues that the school’s history properly begins in 1845 with black abolitionist Mary S. Peake’s clandestine school for black students. Rather than approaching these founders, or even the institution itself as a historical (heroic) protagonist, this essay examines Hampton as a “spatio-temporal event” (Massey 2005). Approaching the institution as a racial project as well as the product of (ongoing) interrelations and coexisting heterogeneity, I uncover the multiplicity of histories that coexist in the space of the Hampton Normal and Agricultural Institute. This treatment demonstrates how both the original curriculum of the school and the institutional origin narratives “domesticated” the radical political praxis of black higher education, while the multiplicity of meanings it makes visible indexes how Hampton and similar institutions effectively function as a palimpsest of racialized and gendered meanings.
Centering space in telling institutional histories allows for a move away from the teleological progress narratives of unfolding perfection favored by institutional boosters and towards a narrative that embraces contingency, multiplicity, and relationality as the primary characteristics of institutional history. It thus provides the plethora of U.S. colleges and universities confronting their “troubled racial histories” an alternative model for narrating their stories, retrieving the intellectual and political labors occluded by institutional histories written as the exploits of Founding Fathers (or mothers) and returning otherwise exceptionalized colleges and universities to the ‘real world’ as places embedded in a larger topography of racial capitalism. Rather than simply being a matter of archival and historical recovery that make the institutional archive more “inclusive,” these re-tellings can in fact embed anti-racist and feminist reading practices into the institution’s self-narration. Understanding archival and institutional spaces through the dialectic between geographies of domination and rival black geographies of liberation (McKittrick 2006) changes the nature of these sites, foregrounding their contested natures and opening them to future possibilities.

Author

• Vineeta Singh, William & Mary