Deceiving Archives: The Reconfiguration of Anti-Black Representations in Education Research

• In Event: “Descriptive Adequacy” and the Overdetermination of Blackness: A Dilemma and Meditation in Language Education Research

Abstract

Methodological-analytical strategies of “reconfiguration” militate against the reproduction of anti-Black representations by reflexively rereading the archive through analytic categories formulated in relation to or produced through a synthesis with the representations and racial logics of the archive—analytic categories that provide for transgressive, disruptive, and rebellious (re)presentations and structuring principles, which, as Hanchard (2010) noted, is a means of “making theory anew” (p. 515). The present archive, which centers the contexts in and surrounding the slave ship and which is comprised mostly of journals or narratives of the formerly enslaved who experienced “Middle Passage,” ship’s captains, surgeons, and sailors, is perfused with representations of deceit, particularly those forms in which Africans are “stolen” and enslaved. In this genealogy, I reconfigure the archive by introducing the analytic category “white duplicity,” which aids a rereading of these anti-Black practices and representations to reimagine Black futurity in educational contexts.


White duplicity was inflicted on African traders convinced to come aboard slave ships only to be enslaved (e.g., Lambert, 1975), despite frequent contractual, ritual, linguistic, explicit, or implicit assurances against enslavement (e.g., Stanfield, 1788). White duplicity implies the negation of Black speakerhood and the obligation to nominally tell the truth that attends interactional roles. Yet, paradoxically, white duplicity can only function under some assumption that Black speakerhood is legitimate insofar as interpersonal deception is a complex speech act requiring participants who must be mutually recognized as real, effectual, and legitimate just in virtue of being an interlocutor during an act of deceit. In this sense, white duplicity has a sense of doubleness, since the affirmation of the legitimacy of Black speakers is entailed by an act of deceit which negates the speaker/person-hood of Black speakers.


I suggest that the enactment of discursive exclusion through acts of white duplicity is an object of the “will to non-knowledge" (Foucault, 1978, p. 55) relative to the truth of the contingency/relationality of the white speaking subject. Specifically, if, e.g., Black speakers merely imitated language like a parrot (as Hume claimed), then there would be an absolute difference between the white speaking subject and Black speakerhood that would preclude white duplicity. Discursive exclusions of white duplicity are only possible on the basis of the legitimacy of Black speakers, which is affirmed yet contradicted. This discursive exclusion dramatizes the very exclusion-of-Black-speakerhood that dialogically constitutes the white speaking subject. By indexing its origins and mode of reproduction, acts of white duplicity and their discursive exclusions index the contingency/relationality of the white speaking subject vis-à-vis the negation of Black speakerhood, which becomes an object of the “will to nonknowledge” (Foucault, 1978).


I discuss implications for educational contexts, where multi-level enactments of white duplicity and discursive exclusion reinforce the naturalization of the white speaking subject. This is true for both institutional contexts in which students may be rendered silent and in research that enacts discursive practices of white duplicity that devalue Black student communicators that might be replaced by “abolitionist” (Shange, 2019) approaches to education research.

Author

• Justin L. Pannell, University of Pennsylvania