Snatching Bodies, Snatching History/ies: Exhuming the Insidious Plundering of Black Cemeteries as a Curriculum of Postmortem Racism

• In Event: (Mis)Educating (Black) Sexed and Gendered (Some)Bodies

Abstract

This paper draws from necropolitics (Mbembe, 2019) to explore implications of postmortem racism (Blakely & Harrington, 1988) on curriculum studies. Specifically, we exhumed history/ies of Black cemeteries relating to the plundering of Black bodies for the advancement for white epistemologies and academic institutions. By theorizing these insidious plunderings as a curriculum of postmortem racism, we ask: (1) How might the excavation of these deceptive histories further illuminate ways that chattel slavery continue to shape all aspects of U.S. society? (2) How might (re)positioning these precarious histories be generative in reckoning with the history of antiblackness in the United States?

Authors

• Bretton A. Varga, California State University - Chico

• Mark Helmsing, George Mason University

• Cathryn van Kessel, University of Alberta

• Rebecca Christ