Schooling as Plantation: Racial Capitalism and Plantation Legacies in Corporatized Education Reform in Liberia

Abstract

This article merges the frameworks of Black feminist geography, coloniality, and racial capitalism to examine corporatized educational reform in Liberia. It argues that corporatized schooling exhibits the logics, politics, and economies common to the West African plantation. Throughout, I focus on the case of the Liberian Education Advancement Program (LEAP), a recent educational reform, to demonstrate how corporatized schooling (1) perpetuates plantation logics that label communities and geographies in Africa as “in crisis” or “without” and therefore in need of technopolitical solutions; (2) implements racialized, precarious, and surveilled plantation-style labor regimes; and (3) perpetuates production processes and forms of extraction that commodify and homogenize education for the benefit of global capital. By recognizing LEAP as mirroring plantation systems, the article exposes the ongoing racialized violence that lies at the foundation of corporate schooling in Liberia, while highlighting how “thinking with the plantation” can reveal acts and instances of resistance and decolonial life.