On Being Brought from Africa to America to London: Teaching Phillis Wheatley in the Former Heart of Empire

This essay considers the transatlantic workings of different national formations anti-Blackness and colonial whiteness across several centuries, by taking 1773 London publication Phillis Wheatley's Poems on Various Subjects, Religious Moral in relation to teaching poetry 2019. The recognition Wheatley received her careful negotiations with conditional white British benevolence must be understood alongside both continual disavowals ongoing historical robust, widespread antiracist resistance, which are often dismissed as foreign problems imported from United States. In this context, studying dramatizes threat a dehistoricized exceptionalism that upholds model diasporic Blackness viewed solely American, rather than convergent Britishness. A conscientious pedagogy requires attention shifting resilience encountering adaptive environments can masquerade tolerant civil well colonial, eugenicist, bio-essentialist strain feminism. Finally, challenges curriculum classroom placed into wider setting hostile structures UK higher education still attempts delegitimize Black intellectual traditions, stifle field studies, undermine emergence, vitiate perseverance, scholars.