J19: The Journal of Nineteenth-Century Americanists

Abstract:

This article contends that scenes and themes of education in Sutton Griggs's Imperium in Imperio deploy the threat of corporal punishment as a means of reincarnating antebellum plantation systems of surveillance and punishment in the postbellum school space. By copiously tracing the logic and references in a commentary on education by a parson early in the novel, the article shows that Griggs's book makes learning, violence, and space inextricable in Black Reconstruction life. Drawing on theorists like Hortense Spillers and Karen Sanchez-Eppler, who argue that violence on the body renders Black bodies legible, I suggest that Black education manifests itself through the same bodily terror that dictated life for enslaved persons. Griggs, I propose, depicts knowledge accumulation and dissemination as harmful to the Black populace not only physically but politically as well. With an eye towards the book's eponymous Black insurrectionary state, this article argues that the plantation's regime of intimidation, which continues to impose itself through the illusion of academic installation, might be overturned through a motivated manipulation of space.