Slavery’s Afterlife in Black Education: Foucauldian Architectonics and the Discourse of Racial Surveillance and Pedagogy

Increasingly, theories of signification are introduced to advance fugitive pedagogy in black education, digital culture, and beyond. However, scholars seldom question the dialogic thinking that substantiates many of these positions. Nonetheless, the algorithms and agents that control advanced technology and digitalization continue to trouble many of our presuppositions about Bakhtinian dialogism and texts. As a result, this paper argues that fugitive pedagogy may be too quiescent as a discourse and paradigm for understanding the character of black education and surveillance in the digital age. Digitalization not only rearticulates and reproduces various forms of racial surveillance, but it also extends the afterlife of racial chattel slavery in education. Using Foucauldian architectonics as a paradigm, this paper explains why discursive parasitism and panopticism are more comprehensive as a discourse for illuminating and explicating why so many of the challenges that black education faced in the past persist in the digital age.