All Learning Happens in the Flesh: Performance and the History of Black Education

• In Event: 61.021 - New Directions in Black Educational History

Abstract

Performance has historically been central to African American educational life. Performance not only in a practical sense (staged acts and modes of Black cultural expression), but also in the sense that African American teachers and students were hyperaware of their physical bodies in relation to white authority and power in the social structures of schools. This had implication for bodily comportment and the ways Black people negotiated power in education, how they literally (and discursively) moved through space. This paper asserts that performance studies (Brooks, 2006; Conquergood, 2002; Moten, 2017) has critical implication for how we think about the history of African American education at a conceptual level; it also provides useful tools for expanding the aperture of historical methodologies (Burke, 2005; Schneider, 2001) for this specific field of study.

If “performance is the resistance of the object” (Moten, 2018), then critical inquiry on African American education, and the liberatory traditions therein, might seriously consider the necessity of attending to Black embodiment. While Black performance is a generative unit of analysis for the history of African American education overall, this paper highlights Carter G. Woodson’s partnership with schoolteachers and their implementation of Negro History Week between 1926 and 1950.

During this weeklong celebration in February, African American school communities staged ceremonies of “Black formalism” (Perry, 2018) that were fundamentally a critique of the American school’s curriculum as well as Black subjugation in the world. This paper considers the “embodied learning” that took place during these iconic celebrations by close reading key scenarios: students reenactments of the Haition Revolution, the ritualized singing of the Negro National Anthem, etc. As one student recalled, “In the vague background of the blackboard décor and off-key singing, there was always an implied “conceptualist” claim upon the imagery of Negro History Week. […] The supervisors of institutions like Virginia Avenue Elementary School knew that the black body is more than raiment and black life itself vastly more substantial than [George Washington] Carver’s peanuts” (Baker, 1995, p. 53). Embodied learning generally refers to the ways in which Black students subjectivities (their embodied realities) were brought into a relation with the historical narratives and lessons they learned through Negro History Week’s pedagogy; its renewed visual culture, rituals, and deep engagement with Black aesthetics.

The paper draws on archival material from Woodson’s personal papers at Emory University, collections on the Association for the Study of Negro Life and History, individual Black schoolteachers, historical newspapers, and a variety of oral history collections. More than a historical chronology of Negro History Week, this paper models what it means to think about performance in the historical transcript of Black education while also attending to embodiment in transient, everyday moments of Black schooling.

Author

• Jarvis Ray Givens, Harvard University