Phillis Wheatley Peters’ fugitive poetics of freedom

The enslaved eighteenth-century poet Phillis Wheatley Peters has often been understood as a mimetic mouthpiece for her white enslavers. Here, through close readings of poetry and letters, I understand work the fugitive imaginings freedom in contemporary Black studies scholarship, finding complex poetics textual catachresis irony that elude understanding audience. Through subtle references to an alternative African past, subsumed American regime slavery yet ongoing poetic imaginary, constructs way out enslavement without reference future, but rather opening past. Living during US Revolutionary War, period intense belief political establishment ideal Peters’ ability flee into catachrestic past constitutes radical movement against homogenising operation America’s foundation. Tracing movements Fred Moten, Saidiya Hartman, Alexander Weheliye pushing beyond limitations theorised by Jean-Luc Nancy, define ‘freedom from Freedom’. This essay redefines very beginning literature philosophy Freedom.