Teaching Phillis Wheatley (Peters) as a Working Artist

Authors

Lenora Warren, Cornell UniversityFollow

Author Biography

Lenora Warren is a scholar of Early American and Early African American Literature with a focus on literatures of abolition, insurrection, and the politics of resistance. Her book Fire on the Water: Sailors, Slaves, And Insurrection in Early American Literature, 1798-1886 was published with Bucknell University Press in 2019. Her work has also appeared in Atlantic Studies, Literary Imagination,XVIII New Perspectives on the Eighteenth Century, Leviathan and Readex Report as well A New Companion to Herman Melville. She is currently working on a book on the legacy of Phillis Wheatley in works of Black women writers in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the relationship between artmaking, joy, and resistance.

Abstract

In recent years, the challenge of teaching the poetry of Phillis Wheatley (Peters) has been managing my students’ expectations of what constitutes “representative” African American literature and coming to a more comprehensive idea of constitutes both “political” and black art. In managing some initial confusion around Wheatley’s muted response to her enslavement I have landed on presenting Wheatley’s insistence of her work as a poet as “labour” to be the most interesting tact to take with students. For Wheatley it is the imperative of becoming a poet that allows her access to what might be seen as a more vital version of freedom, one that refuses to map onto any specific sense of identity and one that instead draws strength from both stolen moments of creativity and the belief in her work as work.

As our students, specifically those pursuing English and other Humanities degrees, face a job market that increasingly devalues creative work, in this essay I will argue that for an enslaved poet such as Wheatley to pursue the work of poetry provides not just a useful teaching moment about the value of artistic labor, but an opportunity to have our students consider how the term labor itself categorically shifts our sense of what does and does not count as “real work.” Drawing on the experiences of teaching both recent work of on Wheatley by Tara Bynum, David Waldstreicher, and Wendy Raphael Roberts, and scholarship of Nicholas Brown, I will discuss the ways in which Wheatley’s position as both an enslaved woman and a working artist raises vital questions on their own future positions in the labor market.

Keywords

pedagogy, phillis, Wheatley, Peters, art, labor, gender, poetry. college teaching, close reading

Recommended Citation

Warren, Lenora (2025) "Teaching Phillis Wheatley (Peters) as a Working Artist," ABO: Interactive Journal for Women in the Arts, 1640–1830: Vol.15: Iss.2, Article 14.
http://doi.org/10.5038/2157-7129.15.2.1474
Available at: https://digitalcommons.usf.edu/abo/vol15/iss2/14