Six Degrees of Phillis Wheatley

Course Description

“Never has a single professional development opportunity so profoundly transformed my research, thinking, and teaching.” – 2021 student If you Google “Phillis Wheatley,” the widely reproduced engraving of her silhouette is easy to find. The image remembers the young (and at times, enslaved) poet sitting alone with pen in hand. It memorializes the writer at her craft, and it also fixes a lone, singular Wheatley in time. This course will introduce students to another story for the young poet and, by implication, a new story for early African American writing. Put differently, what if Wheatley is not by herself? What if she is an active interlocutor, friend, writer, and lover in various communities throughout New England, England, and elsewhere? What if she is part of a larger writerly community (with a nod to the work of Katherine Clay Bassard) of Black women and men too? The course pursues—with a careful certainty—the idea that Wheatley is not actually alone despite how she is portrayed. She is, in fact, part of various communities, and she speaks of them often in her letters. They are communities of friends who buy Wheatley’s book of poems, who live through a war, and who will have to mourn the loss of their friend. They are communities, too, that write, read, and leave behind a legacy in manuscript and in print. These legacies can be found in Cesar Lyndon’s account book, the meeting minutes of the Free African Union Society, the pamphlets and sermons of Richard Allen and Absalom Jones, and the correspondence of Prince Hall, among others. Led by the accessibility and popularity of Wheatley, students in this course will pay particular attention to the many forms that this early writing can and does take—to include account books, letters, and sermons; this writing is sometimes printed, but not always. What does this fact mean for our understanding of the “book” and its history to these communities of writers and readers?  The aim of the class is to ask new questions; to situate this writing amidst old, new, and different ways of reading; and to center the living of black women and men in the latter half of the eighteenth century. The course is particularly suited to students with a broad interest in early African American writing, but who may have little training or exposure to the subject.  In their personal statement, applicants are requested to describe the nature of their developing interests in this writing and to summarize briefly their interest in the field, current research, projects, and topics or issues that they would particularly like the course to address . 

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Advance Reading List

Preliminary Advices

Readings will be provided via Dropbox or Google Drive, and the course overview/syllabus that will be shared with admitted students indicates which texts will inform each day’s discussions. Below is a longer bibliography of suggested (albeit not exhaustive) reading.

Suggested Reading

Adéèkó, Adélèké. “Writing Africa Under the Shadow of Slavery: Quaque, Wheatley, and Crowther.” Research in African Literatures 40, no. 4 (Winter 2009): 1-24.

Andrews, Edward E. Native Apostles: Black and Indian Missionaries in the British Atlantic World. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2013.

Bassard, Katherine Clay. “The Daughters’ Arrival: The Earliest Black Women’s Writing Community.” Callaloo 19, no. 2 (1996): 508-18.

–––. Spiritual Interrogations: Culture, Gender and Community in Early African American Women’s Writing. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999.

Benard, Akeia A. F. “The Free African American Cultural Landscape: Newport, RI, 1774–1826.” PhD diss., University of Connecticut, 2008. ProQuest (3308227)

Brooks, Joanna. American Lazarus: Religion and the Rise of African American and Native American Literatures. New York: Oxford University Press, 2003.

–––. “From Edwards to Baldwin: Heterodoxy, Discontinuity, and New Narratives of American Religious-Literary History.” American Literary History 22, no. 2 (2010): 439-53.

–––.“Our Phillis, Ourselves.” American Literature 82, no. 1 (2010): 1-28.

–––.“Prince Hall, Freemasonry and Genealogy.” African American Review 34, no. 2 (Summer 2000): 197-216.

–––. “The Early American Public Sphere and the Emergence of a Black Print Counterpublic.” William and Mary Quarterly 62, no. 1 (January 2005): 67-93.

Brooks, Joanna and John Saillant, eds. Face Zion Forward: First Writers of the Black Atlantic, 1785-1798. Boston: Northeastern University Press, 2002.

Chiles, Katy L. Transformable Race: Surprising Metamorphoses in the Literature of Early America. New York: Oxford University Press, 2014.

Clark-Pujara, Christy. Dark Work: the Business of Slavery in Rhode Island. New York: NYU Press, 2016.

Connolly, Brian and Marisa Fuentes. “Introduction: From Archives of Slavery to Liberated Futures?” History of the Present 6, no. 2 (Fall 2016): 105-16.

Coughtry, Jay. The Notorious Triangle: Rhode Island and the African Slave Trade, 1700–1807. Philadelphia: Temple University, 1981.

Hardesty, Jared. Black Lives, Native Land, White Worlds: A History of Slavery in New England. Amherst: Bright Leaf, 2019.

Horne, Gerald. The Counter-Revolution of 1776: Slave Resistance and the Origins of the United States of America. New York: NYU Press, 2014.

Isani, Muktar Ali. “The First Proposed Edition of Poems on Various Subjects and the Phillis Wheatley Canon.” American Literature 49, no. 1 (March 1977): 97-103.

Parkinson, Robert G. The Common Cause: Creating Race and Nation in the American Revolution. Chapel Hill: UNC Press and the Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture, 2016.

Poirier, Noel B. “A Legacy of Integration: the African American Citizen—Soldier and the Continental Army.” Army History 56 (Fall 2002): 16–25.

Polgar, Paul J. “Race and Belonging in the New American Nation: the Republican Roots of Black Abolitionism.” In Race and Nation in the Age of Emancipations. Edited by Whitney Nell Stewart and John Garrison Marks. Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 2018.

Pybus, Cassandra. “Jefferson’s Faulty Math: The Question of Slave Defections During the Revolution.” William and Mary Quarterly (April 2005).

Quarles, Benjamin. The Negro in the American Revolution. Chapel Hill: UNC Press and the Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture, 1996.

–––. “Lord Dunmore as Liberator.” William and Mary Quarterly 15, no. 4 (October 1958): 494-507.

Sinha, Manisha. “To ‘cast just obliquy’ on Oppressors: Black Radicalism in the Age of Revolution.” William and Mary Quarterly (January 2007): 149-60.

Slauter, Eric. “Looking for Scipio Moorhead: An ‘African Painter’ in Revolutionary North America.” In Slave Portraiture in the Atlantic World. Edited by Angela Rosenthal and Agnes Lugo-Ortiz. New York: Cambridge UP, 2013.

Spires, Derrick R. The Practice of Citizenship: Black Politics and Print Culture in the Early U.S. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2019.

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Course Evaluations

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Course History