Curriculum as Control: Moral Governance, Mistranslation, and the Surveillance of Afro-Jamaicans, 1830–1880

• In Event: Reimagining Education: From Colonial Control to Transnational Mobility

Abstract

This paper analyzes nineteenth-century British colonial education in Jamaica as a project of racial governance and epistemic mistranslation. Drawing on inspectorate reports, missionary correspondence, and legislative records, it argues that curriculum functioned not as uplift but as containment—disciplining Black intellect, recoding desire, and legitimizing moral hierarchies. Afro-Caribbean educational aspiration was translated into signs of deviance and deficiency. Grounded in Black critical theory, postcolonial linguistics, and discourse analysis, the study shows how colonial schooling rendered Afro-Jamaican life visible only to regulate it. This work contributes to education history and decolonial curriculum studies by tracing how imperial power persists through the grammar of failure, the language of virtue, and the disciplinary scripts embedded in colonial schooling.

Author

• Faith D. Northern, New York University