Middle Passages: Lessons in Racial Subjection at the Hampton Institute and Carlisle Indian Industrial School

Abstract:This essay argues that the historically Black Hampton Institute (1868) and the Carlisle Indian Industrial School (1879) are crucial sites to investigate how US political, territorial, and economic conquest were sutured to the project of emancipation after the Civil War. Rather than focusing on these schools’ manual education, I turn to their newspapers, the Southern Workman and Indian Helper, to demonstrate how they developed techniques of discursive representation, rooted in Black fungibility, that made racial subjection appear as racial emancipation in the postbellum period. These newspapers were framed as both tool and evidence of students’ subjective transformation. Instead of providing authentic evidence of Black and Native transformation, however, they provide a glimpse into how Hampton’s and Carlisle’s representations of racial emancipation drew on discursive techniques created in the material and symbolic violence of transatlantic slavery’s Middle Passage. The essay concludes by demonstrating how a trio of boarding school stories (1900) by the Yankton Sioux author Zitkala-Ša provides a nascent critique of the ways in which Indian boarding schools produced Native fungibility as a technique of white domination in the context of postbellum US imperialism.