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

ABSTRACT

This article engages in curriculum work regarding the theft of Black bodies and history/ies, the plundering of Black cemeteries, and sustained hegemonic efforts to use and reuse Black bodies for white/settler onto-epistemological advancements. In particular, this article draws from assemblages of violence and necropolitics to explore implications of postmortem racism on curriculum studies. By tracing the history of body snatching, we identify and discuss the problematic of snatching as a practice and connect it to the problematic of white/settler onto-epistemologies that remain (violently) connected to educational research. The implications of these problematics lead us to call for more wake work in embodying, decolonizing, and unsettling curriculum.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. Four terms with distinctively different meanings are deployed within this scholarship: body/ies (i.e., referring to human physicality), person (i.e., relating to the individuality of a living person), corpse (i.e., a dead body that has been buried), and cadaver (i.e., a dead body that is used to achieve medical knowledge).

2. We acknowledge that as a significant concept in cultural theory, assemblage remains a malleable—and generative—concept that shifts within various milieus. While Deleuze and Guattari (1987) suggested that (machinic) assemblages offered a framing for “bodies, actions and passions, an intermingling of bodies reacting to one another” (p. 88), many scholars such as Manuel DeLanda, Elizabeth Grosz, Jasbir Puar, and Alexander Weheliye have offered revisions of the concept that extend the boundaries of its multiplicity. That is, assemblages can be communal and agentic (DeLanda, 2006), dynamic and material (Grosz, 1993, 1994), affective and intersectional (Puar, 2007, 2012), and fleshy, physiological, and racialized (Weheliye, 2014).

3. Throughout our work, we write white/settler as such to connote the entanglement of whiteness and settler colonialism and the complex ways in which both, together and separately, cultivate assemblages of violence against Black and Indigenous peoples.

4. Following the lead of Costa Vargas (2018), we spell antiblackness as such to signal a difference between the broader and nuanced condition of blackness that exceeds Black history/ies.

5. In order to intercept the binary framing of dehumanization, Jackson (2020) offers the “concept of plasticity, which maintains that black(ened) people are not so much as dehumanized as nonhumans or cast as liminal humans nor are black(ened) people framed as animal-like or machine-like but are cast as sub, supra, and human” (p. 35).

6. While Morton supported polygenesis, we also acknowledge that most advocates of monogenesis—such as Charles Darwin—were horrifically racist and aggressively advanced eugenicist agendas leading to the formation of insidious racial hierarchies (Rose, 2009).

7. We acknowledge that spaces “holding” such artifacts (e.g., museums) commonly position particular people, such as Indigenous people, as no longer living (Bruyneel, 2021; Halcrow et al., 2021) and often hold human remains instead of repatriating them.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Bretton A. Varga

Bretton A. Varga, Ph.D., is an assistant professor of History-Social Science at California State University, Chico. His research works with(in) critical posthuman theories of race, materiality, and temporality to explore how visual methods and aesthetics can be used to unveil historically marginalized perspectives and layers (upon layers) of history that haunt the world around us.

Mark E. Helmsing

Mark E. Helmsing, Ph.D., is an assistant professor in the School of Education and Affiliate Faculty in the Folklore Studies Program and Department of History and Art History at George Mason University. His research considers how teachers and learners narrate and emplot different aspects of the past in our present. He also works within public pedagogy, historical culture, and vernacular histories to examine how people feel about the past and how the past makes them feel.

Cathryn van Kessel

Cathryn van Kessel, Ph.D., is an associate professor in the Department of Counseling, Societal Change, and Inquiry in the College of Education at Texas Christian University. Her research interests include social studies education, curriculum theory, philosophy in/of education, and teacher education. Specifically, she is interested in how the concept of “evil” and its manifestations function in relation to what individuals and communities experience in curricular and pedagogical contexts.

Rebecca C. Christ

Bretton A. Varga, Ph.D., is an assistant professor of History-Social Science at California State University, Chico. His research works with(in) critical posthuman theories of race, materiality, and temporality to explore how visual methods and aesthetics can be used to unveil historically marginalized perspectives and layers (upon layers) of history that haunt the world around us.

Rebecca C. Christ, Ph.D., is an assistant professor of Social Studies Education in the Department of Teaching and Learning at Florida International University in Miami, Florida. Her research interests include social studies education and teacher education—specifically focusing on genocide education. She is also interested in pedagogies of qualitative inquiry and in utilizing critical, postcolonial, poststructural, and posthuman theoretical concepts for inspiration and innovation within qualitative inquiry and pedagogical practice.