The Biopolitics of Tutelage: Adapted Education and the Jeanes School in Early 20th Century Colonial Kenya

• In Event: Space, Affect and Education: Historicizing the Production of Differences

Proposal

This paper examines the biopolitics of tutelage in colonial education and considers implications for today. Focusing on colonial Kenya, the article analyzes how early 20th-century tutelary principles drew upon neo-Lamarckian evolution to “adapt” education to the “needs” of racialized populations. Analyzing tutelage as biopolitical reveals how pedagogies of modeling and demonstration became linked to notions of evolutionary growth and development, and how these produced racializing, exclusionary effects.

This article examines tutelary biopolitics as a history of the present (Foucault, 1991). Analytically, biopolitics refers to a mode of political authority seeking to manage life through the disciplining of bodies and regulating of populations (Foucault, 2003). Tutelary biopolitics eschews the raw exercise of power in favor of relations of guidance based on “natural” principles of development. Thus, tutelage is not analyzed as a concept, but instead a complex grid of objects, rules, and techniques that make certain tactics of governance possible (Foucault, 1991, p. 81). Tutelary biopolitics thus emerges in the 19th century as a composite of objects (the individual and population), allied theories and methods (statistical norms, structural laws of growth, and evolutionary time), and related tactics that take the management and improvement of “life” as their shared premise (Foucault, 2003, pp. 242–247; Rabinow & Rose, 2006; Schuller, 2018).

Methodologically, the paper analyzes colonial-era research, policy, and reforms as transnational discourses implicating colonial education in early 20th century Kenya, The analysis examines this archive as statements embodying epistemic rules and principles that empirically produced ‘the Native’ as both a colonial subjectivity and an object of knowledge (Foucault, 1991; Stoler, 2009). Analyzing the making of ‘the Native’ in terms of biopolitics makes visible how colonial-era pedagogies of modeling and demonstration were explained according to notions of evolutionary growth and development, and how these made ‘the Native’ a developmentally backward, racially distinct subjectivity who required tutelary forms of governance.

The paper examines the moment when “the Native” became an object of education policy and reform in colonial Kenya, one whose racially specific developmental “needs” required educational adaptation. Analysis of a transnational school reform (the Jeanes Visiting Teachers Program) from the postbellum U.S. South to Kenya Colony illustrates these tactics’ trajectories in colonial education. These include scaffolding “character” in those defined as developmentally behind, constructing community by parsing healthful environmental factors to be retained from degenerative factors to be eliminated, and modeling “sympathy” by assigning representatives from targeted populations to demonstrate its principles.

Tutelary biopolitics continues to animate contemporary transnational reforms, concealing the power it exercises by seeking to enact its principles through those it would govern. This is particularly evident in calls for “bottom-up” development in the global South, in which representatives of targeted populations still must model and articulate developmental norms and values as evidence they have been internalized as their own.

Author

• Chris Kirchgasler, University of Wisconsin–Madison