Dismantling Bio-oppression: Resurgent Negritude and Afrocentric Education as a Counter to Racial Capitalism

Afrocentricity discourse has mapped Blackness onto the global intellectual landscape. Yet this paper argues for the fusion of Negritude within Afrocentricity and Black Studies to serve as a resurgent positionality and vital force for implementing Afrocentric education in Black geographies. In this paper, I reclaim Negritude—not as nostalgic culturalism, but as a co-constitutive node in the network of Black collective memories—necessary for the reclamation of Black personhood and dignity. I mobilize the concept of epidermal mining (the somatic extraction of Black bodies) to demonstrate how the dominant system siphons profits, resources, and skills from Black bodies while marking them as inferior. I theorize this extraction as "bio-oppression"—a framework tracking the biopolitical violence that commodifies the Black body while rendering it as surplus. I propose a resurgent Negritude reimagined as living praxis. Finally, I hinge my recovery project on an integrative liberation triad: psychological reclamation, somatic reinhabitation, and material self-sufficiency. Altogether, I ground Negritude as an Afrocentric anchor in classroom practice, paving the way for a praxis-oriented decolonial approach to finally suture the colonial wounds that "flag independence" has left open.Keywords: bio-oppression, epidermal mining, resurgent Negritude, Afrocentric education, somatic re-inhabitation