ABSTRACT
Teaching Atlantic world slavery and race in the high school and undergraduate classroom has always been problematic. First is the problem of American exceptionalism how often the antebellum US case study is taken to stand for slavery and race throughout the Atlantic world and, more broadly, for global slavery due to the availability of source material in English. This new pedagogy, when used in the United States, will help to, as Joy Leighton puts it, break down the old dichotomies of North versus South, white versus black. The perception and agency of the performing racial body is subtly illuminated by an examination of whiteness on the margins. Many students struggle between adopting an open-minded stance and policing each other for potentially racist speech. Teaching explicitly black history can ghettoize and marginalize topics, leading students to consider that the findings are not universally relevant, that they are only for and by students from minorities.
