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

Session Type: Symposium

Abstract

This session contravenes an unfortunate pattern in some historical studies of Black education, particularly those focused on the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries: whenever whites are seen to have participated in Black education – whether as administrators, financial donors, or state bureaucrats – the meaning and import of the education is retroactively framed entirely around these white participants’ intentions. This centering of white agency elides the complex agendas of Black and colonized peoples within these same educational settings. We perform a reversal of this pattern by highlighting the perspectives and agential activities of African American and colonized or “Third World” peoples vis à vis educational spaces traditionally presumed to have been designed and “controlled” by white individuals or white interests.

Sub Unit

• Division F - Historical Inquiry in Education

Chair

• Christopher M. Span, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Papers

• The Domesticated Archive and Teaching as Abolitionist Praxis - Vineeta Singh, William & Mary

• "...More Than Academic Interest...": Early 20th Century African American Educational Debates and Indian Anticolonialism - Malathi Michelle Iyengar, College of San Mateo

• Scholarship Invasion: Cold War Anxieties and Black Transnational Educational Alliances - Brenda N. Sanya, Colgate University