Toni Morrison’s Beloved: Plantations, Pedagogy and the Future of Digital Slavery

For scholars who study the history of slavery in the United States, the claim that slave plantations functioned like schools is controversial but hardly original. However, it can be challenging to find a similar level of interest, inquiry, or evidence to corroborate this claim in the scholarship and textbooks of many contemporary historians in the field of education. As such, the pedagogical effects of slavery are often underrepresented and the slave plantation as a formal and informal pedagogical space is undertheorized. Understanding the various institutions and environments that contribute to the development of teaching and learning remains important, particularly for those who write, study, or teach the history of American education and those who use digital platforms or cloud-based learning management systems such as Google Classroom. To encourage a more interdisciplinary approach to the history of education in the United States and elsewhere, some historians have recommended the novels and musings of writers such as Toni Morrison. This study uses a semiotic approach to reveal what one can learn when Morrison’s Beloved is revisited and mapped to illuminate its theoretical and pedagogical import for interdisciplinary scholars and practitioners in many fields, particularly education. As the slave master and pedagogue on the Sweet Home slave plantation, the character Schoolteacher develops a pedagogy for his pupil-nephews and pupil-slaves that is not too distant from the data extraction protocols used by many internet corporations and the academic systems that employ their digital services and infrastructure to facilitate and measure teaching and learning. The findings suggest that Morrison’s novel is an interdisciplinary tool that enriches one’s understanding of American literature and history while illuminating data extraction as a colonial and pedagogical imperative that informs slavery in the past and education in the digital future.