Enduring Logics of Fungibility: A Decolonial Reading

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Abstract

Objectives or purposes
This paper examines the concept of fungibility within curriculum studies to analyze how racial violence is sustained through epistemic practices embedded in education. Drawing on the concept of fungibility as theorized in Black feminist thought—where enslaved Africans were rendered interchangeable commodities within racial capitalism (Hartman, 1997; Spillers, 1987)—I explore the enduring logic of coloniality and fungibility in shaping knowledge production and subjectivity in curricular practices.

Perspective(s) or theoretical framework
In previous work (Author, 2023), I have examined the intersection between Black feminist thought and decolonial theory, particularly through the frameworks of the coloniality of power, being, and gender (Quijano, 2000; Maldonado-Torres, 2007; Lugones, 2007). This paper continues by engaging multiple theoretical conceptions of social difference to interrogate the enduring structures of racial capitalism. Building upon the concept of “disrupting colonial pedagogies” (Author, 2023)—an umbrella term I use to describe interventions that challenge colonial logics—I argue that fungibility is not only a material condition but also an ontological and epistemic framework. Fungibility underwrites a system in which Blackness becomes a signifier for disposability, criminality, and death.

Methods, techniques, or modes of inquiry
Methodologically, the paper draws on taxonomies of ignorance (Tuana, 2006) and place-based studies in education to examine the enduring legacies of racial ignorance, particularly as shaped by the histories of slavery and racial violence. This framework enables a critique of how curriculum functions as a site where colonial knowledge is reproduced and racial violence is rendered intelligible—or invisible—through systemic acts of forgetting.

Data sources
Utilizing a place-based method of curriculum inquiry, I revisit a series of events in the southern United States in 2020 that collectively illustrate the persistent entanglement of race, violence, and knowledge production. This analysis draws on the long genealogy of racial terror in the U.S. South, from the Atlanta Race Massacre of 1906 to contemporary acts of extrajudicial violence (Alexander, 2012; Taylor, 2016). I examine how the fungibility of Black bodies continues to shape curricular discourse, intersecting with the active production of ignorance about whose histories are deemed legitimate within educational systems.

Results
The findings from this place-based curricular analysis reveal three interconnected patterns that demonstrate how the logics of fungibility, epistemic erasure, and coloniality continue to structure educational discourse, policy, and historical memory. Grounded in decolonial thought, these patterns expose how curriculum functions as a key site for maintaining the racialized and colonial architecture of knowledge production. The data show how Black life is rendered fungible—not only through curricular omission but through reductive inclusion. These practices strip Black knowledge of its specificity and disrupt its relational and resistant dimensions.

Scientific or scholarly significance
This paper contributes to curriculum theory by advancing a framework for understanding how racialized ignorance operates through curricular forms of fungibility. It shows that ignorance is not merely a byproduct of exclusion, but an active structure sustaining colonial knowledge systems. By integrating Black feminist, decolonial, and ignorance studies, the paper offers new tools for identifying and interrupting epistemic violence in educational practice.

Author

• Nathalia E Jaramillo, Kennesaw State University