My Bibliographic Review

        The Atlantic Slave Trade forged the abolition movement of the 1770s in England and in its colonies.  As a result, a repressed, silenced community of black readers and white readers in Boston, Massachusetts would be energized by antislavery debates in the streets and churches there, yet a soft voice with a patriotic heart, named Phyllis Wheatley, would be heard and gain worldwide acclaim. As different countries vied for monopolistic control of the slave trade venture, enslaved Africans, like Phyllis Wheatley made up the centerpiece of the then emerging Atlantic economy. My bibliographic review calls attention to the infamous Phyllis Wheatley, an early writer and poetess of the Black Atlantic, whom effectively brought together diverse populations of people. As author Henry Louis Gates Jr. argues, in the wake of the Cartesian or John Locke philosophy, the subject of black writing was used as an argument for the intellectual enslavement of contemporary blacks. Writers like Phyllis Wheatley became test cases for antislavery and pro-slavery movements as well as monogenic and polygenic racial positions. While former United States of America president, Thomas Jefferson’s disparaging comments on Phyllis Wheatley’s artistic creativity echoed such a claim, the English antislavery writer Thomas Clarkson’s Essay on the Slavery and Commerce of the Human Species (1786) refuted it by defending Wheatley’s work. These early encounters in black literature can be seen as an ongoing process of cultural encounters with Anglo-American languages and ideologies. My essay will trace the rhetorical processes by which black writers, such as Phyllis Wheatley, shape and are shaped by Anglo-American discourses, between black and white writers in the late eighteenth century.

Many writers have collaborated to bring a developing paradigm of thought on the rise of the slave narrative. Paula Bennett similarly considers the shifting nature of such boundaries for Phyllis Wheatley. In Phyllis Wheatley’s Vocation and the Paradox of the ‘Afric Muse’, she articulates the increasing complex position, the coming of the American Revolution placed upon Wheatley. Creatively, it has everything to do with “conservative” and “radical” readings of Wheatley’s poetry, Bennett argues that this political crisis in the British Empire actually disrupted the alliances she had built upon in England during her stay there in the early 1770s.  This forced Phyllis Wheatley to create in her later work a “more complex, pluralistic sense of audience” than before. In Wheatley’s poems she repeatedly alludes to her African origins of present-day Senegal-Gambia.  Yet according to the reading by Bennett, Phyllis Wheatley redeems her oppressive state by making it her source of a religious response to God, and by making God identified as her freedom and sublime (Shields, “Struggle” 230-31; 252-67). It gives her the power to liberate her speech, as she uses her religious beliefs to authorize her pursuit of her vocation.  

Consequently, as poetess she argued against the slave trade and slavery itself when she resided in Boston, Massachusetts of the 1770s. There was much less difficult than overcoming racist failure recognize the fundamentally equal humanity of its African residents, like Phyllis Wheatley. Author, Muhktar Ali Isani agrees, that Wheatley’s arrival back to the American colonies, thus had made extraordinary usage out of being a poet and slave to attract attention to her work. Like some of her contemporaries, such Oladuah Equiano, her poetry was utilizing public opinion of overcoming tyranny. But as Mr. Isani points out, the outbreak of revolution, had “shifted the arena of the cultural crisis from the public sphere of print discourse and polite conversation to the battlefield, and in so doing brought forward old gender barriers”(187). In agreement, Bennett tells us that  “in spite of the demurrers of writers like Abigail Adams and Mercy Otis Warren, the American Revolution understood as a military crisis gave priority to masculine heroics; it did so by reconstructing a separate sphere for women and women’s expression”(17). I believe it resulted in the feminized understanding of virtue.

In conclusion, the world of cosmopolitan friendship envisioned by authors Paula Bennett and Muhktar Ali Isani display her soft, gentle heart of revolutionary poems. But as a woman poet, she is undoubtedly restrained but hopeful for her country. She does not know what her future will give her, and she is diplomatic in her friendships with her friends of England and her friends in the Colonies, but she was also keenly aware of the limits of friendship amid the contingencies of nature and history. It matter little that Phyllis Wheatley may in fact have had few memories of her life in Africa, but her poetic construction of recollection, her validation of the power of memory for the Afric muse, may have in fact energized her prophetic voice. Her declaration of African origin, coming as a rhetorical disruption of the conversation of the British tradition, enabled her consequent post-colonial skepticism about “British Glories”. Phyllis Wheatley: Christian, poetess, mother and wife used her spiritual transformations for the rhetoric of her faith in her people.

My Bibliographic Review will have the following readings and more:

1. "Gambia on My Soul": Africa and the African in the Writings of Phyllis Wheatley

Author(s): Mukhtar Ali Isani

Source: MELUS, Vol. 6, No. 1, Oppression and Ethnic Literature (Spring, 1979), pp. 64-72

Published by: The Society for the Study of the Multi-Ethnic Literature of the United States (MELUS)

Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/467520 .

Accessed: 02/05/2011 03:25

2. Phyllis Wheatley's Vocation and the Paradox of the "Afric Muse"

Author(s): Paula Bennett

Source: PMLA, Vol. 113, No. 1, Special Topic: Ethnicity (Jan., 1998), pp. 64-76

Published by: Modern Language Association

Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/463409 .

Accessed: 02/05/2011 03:18

3.

 Re-membering America: Phillis Wheatley's Intertextual EpicAuthor(s): Robert KendrickSource: African American Review, Vol. 30, No. 1 (Spring, 1996), pp. 71-88Published by: Indiana State UniversityStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3042095 .Accessed: 02/05/2011 03:23

4. Author(s): Hilene Flanzbaum

Source: MELUS, Vol. 18, No. 3, Poetry and Poetics (Autumn, 1993), pp. 71-81

Published by: The Society for the Study of the Multi-Ethnic Literature of the United States (MELUS)

Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/468067 .

Accessed: 02/05/2011 03:19