The Refusal to Learn: Marronage Beyond Recognition in the History Classroom

• In Event: (Non)Learning Racial Literacy in and Outside of the History Classroom

Abstract

This paper is a theoretical intervention to addresses those moments when students of color refuse to learn in the history classroom. Instead of framing students of color as the problem and needing to conform, the problem becomes the teacher’s attempts to engage students of color and to incorporate black and brown bodies and minds into an exclusionary repressive system. What if the refusal is understood not as a refusal to learn, but as a refusal of the repressive state?
This paper asserts that the study of marronage pushes disciplinary inquiry in the classroom to account for student experiences of negation. Marronage refers to maroon communities that developed throughout the African diaspora in the Caribbean, South America, and the Southern regions of the US during the systemic enslavement of African peoples. The genealogical traces of marronage offer examples of turning away from and fleeting moments of generating something else. Marronage pushes the history classroom at two levels: on an ideal curricular level (as classroom content), and on a material level (the history classroom as a contested geographic space of power and knowledge).
I acknowledge that I have no authority over this intellectual space of marronage. Through my experiences as a queer Japanese American cis-male, the assimilationist strategies that my Japanese American community adhered to pre- and post-World War II did not work for me. I saw myself refracted through intersectional negations in the self-loathing that comes through internalized racism and homophobia. This paper is a reflection of my own orientation towards marronage as both considering an ideal of liberation and the material realities of communities negotiating with dominant society.
The first section theorizes marronage as a form of negative dialectics through the refusal to learn as a negation of the negation, a refusal of a prior refusal. This refusal to learn is contextualized within a school system serving the reproduction of a capitalist white supremacist state. The following sections articulate marronage as negative dialectics within three disciplinary spaces: epistemology, geography, and history.
Marronage as epistemology addresses the negation of bodies of knowledge. The concept of marronage allows us to think about students’ refusal to learn differently, and for students to have an additional epistemological thread upon which they might build. If we think about that refusal as a form of marronage, where can marronage go?
Marronage as black geography becomes an engagement of the abject, of dismal swamps and fallow terrain in relation to white capitalist geographies. Framing marronage as black geography allows students and teachers to rethink the classroom space as a contested geography over power and knowledge.
As historic case studies, marronage offers Benjaminian dialectical images that offer the possibility of breaking through what we take as given. Marronage as history moves beyond a romanticized ideal, emphasizing the negotiation between the ideal and the material, between the power of the dominant state surrounding hidden spaces of autonomy and creative sovereignty.

Author

• Tadashi Dozono, California State University - Channel Islands