New Geographies of Black Education: Literacy in the 1823 Demerara Rebellion

• In Event: New Directions in Black Educational History

Abstract

We begin in 1823, where the intersection of literacy, religion, and rebellion reveal a novel geography of Black educational history. At Bethel Chapel, in the colony of British Guiana, a congregation of enslaved worshippers turned their place of faith into a site of organized resistance, by planning what became one of the largest slave rebellions in the British West Indies. Known as the Demerara Rebellion of 1823, colonial responses to the revolt signaled a deep-seated fixation and fear around enslaved literacy. Thus, the rebellion ultimately exposed what would become a broader colonial pattern of literacy suppression, and the conflation of education and resistance throughout the Atlantic world. Despite this rich history, and the growing interest in transnational and place-based histories of Black education, the political and pedagogical dimensions of enslaved literacy in Guyana remain underexplored. Using Caribbean scholar Michel-Rolph Trouillot’s framework on historical silences, this research examines colonial court trial transcripts to critically assess how colonial authorities and enslaved people themselves framed the role of literacy in the insurrection. Preliminary findings suggest literacy proved crucial to enslaved people’s transformation of religious, colonial spaces of education into pivotal sites for building autonomy, forging social networks, and developing shared strategies of resistance. By situating the Demerara Rebellion within a broader wave of 19th-century religious-based uprisings in the British West Indies and the U.S. South, this narrative highlights the repurposing of religious education and spaces as a diasporic tactic of organized resistance. Thus, this paper deepens our understanding of literacy as foundational to the informal, subversive educational practices that shaped the diasporic history of Black education, showing how pedagogical resistance could emerge from spaces not traditionally recognized as educational. In doing so it invites a reconsideration of British Guiana as both a crucial, and underexplored, site for theorizing the geography of Black educational history.

Author

• Darien Dey, Harvard University