Bayley J. Marquez is from the Santa Ynez Band of Chumash Indians and an Assistant professor in the Department of American Studies at the University of Maryland. She is also an affiliate faculty with both the Harriet Tubman Department of Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies and the Consortium for Race Gender and Ethnicity. Her research centers on settler colonial theory, the history of education, abolitionist university studies, and critical ethnic studies.
In particular, Marquez has focused on the racial narratives and colonial pedagogies disseminated by white educators in schools for Black and Indigenous students in the United States. Her recent book, Plantation Pedagogy: The Violence of Schooling Across Black and Indigenous Space, explores the ways in which colonial educators in the 19th and 20thcenturies built a pedagogy that was inherently tied to enslavement and land dispossession. Marquez argues that the violence of slavery and settlement were intimately connected, as plantations could not have existed without access to stolen Indigenous land, and plantation pedagogy not only sought to changed Black and Indigenous peoples, but also their relationship with land. Marquez traces the development of this pedagogical model within the United States and its expansion internationally as a tool in the US imperial project.
Plantation Pedagogy is a well-timed book, given the current attacks on Black history and Critical Race Theory studies within the United States. In a blog for the University of California Press, Marquez reflects on the controversy in 2023 over Florida’s state standards for African American history, which promotes the narrative that slaves benefited from the skills they acquired while enslaved. Marquez explains that this is a part of a much larger history of slavery apologism which she traces in her book – one which must be taken seriously and resisted, rather than dismissed as an artifact of the past.
Contact:
Email: bmarquez@umd.edu
Select Works:
Plantation Pedagogy: The Violence of Schooling Across Black and Indigenous Space. Oakland: University of California Press, 2024.
“The Black Model Minority: Slavery, Settlement and the Genealogy of the Model Minority.” Du Bois Review: Social Science Research on Race, 19 no. 1 (2022): 129-145.
““No Women Involved:” Settler Colonial Racial Grammars in Black and Indigenous Education.” Feminist Formations 33 no. 3 (2021): 116-139.
Co-authored with Juliet R. Kunkel. “The Domestication Genocide of Settler Colonial Language Ideologies.” American Quarterly 73, no.3 (2021): 461- 482.