“Salt preserves”: A curriculum of salt in The Autobiography of Mary Prince

In the US curriculum, The History of Mary Prince (Prince, Citation1831) is an under-recognized account of Black enslavement and the salt industry in the 19th century. Mary Prince, a Black enslaved woman and salt laborer, is the author of the earliest known anti-slavery, anti-colonial autobiography written by a self-manumitted Black woman. Bermuda, the place of Prince's story, serves as an alternative to the American continent as a center of Black enslavement and salt as an alternative object to the sugar and cotton of the curricular imagination in studies of Western colonization. With salt as its organizing material, this article responds to the call from Christina Sharpe's (Citation2016) In the Wake to foreground Prince's autobiography with parts of my own autobiography, in which salt serves as an extension of, and an addition to, Sharpe's notion of "wake work." Thinking of curriculum as the study of educational experience (Pinar, 2004/Citation2012) and using Prince's narrative as a primal scene, I examine Prince's consciousness of salt through wake-fullness. This enables me to explore saltings as told from the coordinate middle of the Black Atlantic and to uncover a postcolonial theorization of coloniality, its knowledge, and racial capitalism through the oedemic, excoriating, and extimate workings of salt on the Black body.