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Author Biography

Katarina O’Briain, assistant professor of English at York University, lives in Tkaronto/Toronto on the treaty territory of the Mississaugas of the Credit First Nation and the traditional territories of the Anishinaabeg, Wendat, and Haudenosaunee peoples. This territory is part of the Dish with One Spoon Wampum Belt Covenant, an agreement of collective responsibility in protecting and caring for the land of the Great Lakes region. She is currently finishing her book manuscript, “Georgic Dispossessions: Poetry Across the Long Eighteenth Century,” which tracks the development and refusal of settler–imperial georgics from the eighteenth century to today.

Abstract

This essay offers suggestions for reading Phillis Wheatley as an early poet of environmental justice by tracing the figure of catastrophe that runs throughout her works. The essay recounts teaching Phillis’s early poems in an upper-level undergraduate seminar on “Ecocriticism: Environmental Justice Literature” as well as in a graduate seminar called “Global Georgics: Land and Labour Across the Long Eighteenth Century.” Looking closely at moments where she describes “pestilential vapors,” or when “Heav’n quakes, earth trembles, and the shores resound,” I argue that Wheatley’s carefully ordered heroic couplet poems speak calamity more than regularity, catastrophe more than gradualism. This pedagogical approach opens possibilities for reading Wheatley’s poetry in the context of recent Black and Indigenous critiques of notions of the Anthropocene that ignore colonial history (Kyle Whyte; Heather Davis and Zoe Todd; Janae Davis et al.); it also invites students to read her work alongside a range of anticolonial theory from Katherine McKittrick, Édouard Glissant, Leanne Betasamosake Simpson, Kathryn Yusoff, and many others as well as recent poetry, fiction, and writing from Craig Santos Perez, Tommy Pico, Shani Mootoo, and Jamaica Kincaid. Read in the contexts of these wider and longer histories, Wheatley’s poems invite readers to consider racial injustice alongside environmental degradation and speak also to the irreparable harms of colonial modernity both then and now.

Keywords

Phillis Wheatley, environmental justice, heroic couplets, catastrophe, pedagogy

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