RETRACTION: The original version of this editorial introduction has been retracted. I apologize to readers and contributors, and take full responsibility for the misguidedness of centering the editorial difficulties of a white Christian woman in an issue devoted to racial justice.

Samara Anne Cahill

Editorial Introduction by Samara Anne Cahill
Editorial Introduction: Race, Religion, and Revolution in the Enlightenment
Cite: Cahill, Samara Anne. 2021. “Race, Religion, and Revolution in the Enlightenment (Editorial Introduction),” Studies in Religion and the Enlightenment 2 (2)
PDF

Ahmaud Arbery (February 23, 2020)
Breonna Taylor (March 13, 2020)
George Floyd (May 25, 2020)
Daoyou Feng, Hyun Jung Grant, Suncha Kim, Paul Andre Michels, Soon Chung Park, Xiaojie Tan, Delaina Ashley Yaun, Yong Ae Yue (March 16, 20210
Adam Toledo (March 29, 2021)
Daunte Wright (April 11, 2021)
Ma’Khia Bryant (April 20, 2021)
All deaths from the COVID pandemic

Christina Sharpe’s In the Wake: On Blackness and Being is a meditation on “the wake as the conceptual frame of and for living blackness in the diaspora in the still unfolding aftermaths of Atlantic chattel slavery.”¹ The wake is the legacy of the ships of the Middle Passage, but also the emotional and creative response of members of the Black diaspora to that legacy. Sharpe’s witnessing raises issues of continuing systemic racism, the violence that continues to be visited upon Black bodies and Black lives, and the weight of history on the present.

This special issue on “Race, Religion, and Revolution in the Enlightenment” was prompted by the wake of George Floyd’s murder by a police officer, and the recognition that a journal dedicated to the study of religion and the Enlightenment has a duty to give a platform to those living in the wake. History—and the imbrication of history and the present—cannot be ignored, and that is why the New York Times’ 1619 Project is so crucial as a corrective to mythologies of the national identity of the United States. That perspective is also why removing Confederate statues and those of other enslavers from public places of honor is not about destroying history, but about choosing how we understand, transmit, and teach histories.² There are many responses to the legacies of slavery. There is, for instance, the “community choir” of Ibram X. Kendi’s and Keisha N. Blain’s Four Hundred Souls: A Community History of African America, 1619-2019 as a landmark of public scholarship.³ There is the anger of watching the differential treatment of Black and white bodies by the police and by White House security on January 6, 2021. There is Amanda Gorman’s hopeful performance of her poem “The Hill We Climb” at the presidential inauguration on January 20. History is crucial not simply for social justice, but for a collective moral imagination.⁴

Yet part of answering Eugenia Zuroski’s call to undercut the imperialism of “academic intellectual authority” by answering the question “where do you know from” is admitting the limitations of one’s perspective.⁵ If the US nation has a race problem, so, too, does religion, and particularly US Christianity. The historical Jesus Christ was a Middle Eastern Jew; yet Christ is often depicted as a white man on Crucifixes, paintings, even in stained glass windows.⁶ Clearly, US Christianity must confront its own racist traditions.

This issue on “Race, Religion, and Revolution in the Enlightenment” begins with two contributions that examine the complex relationship between Christianity, particularly evangelism, and historical race relations.  Erica Johnson Edwards explores the role of Catholic priests in the Haitian Revolution and attends to the asymmetrical media portrayal of Haitian Catholicism and vodou. The Haitian Revolution is a particularly important touchstone for thinking about race and the Enlightenment, though for centuries it has been subject to silencing or misrepresentation through racist tropes.⁷

Next, Victoria Ramirez Gentry discusses the consequences of the long history of white Christianity for contemporary US evangelicals as well as for eighteenth-century Black believers such as Phillis Wheatley (Wheatley Peters after her marriage) and Quobna Ottobah Cugoano.⁸ In fact, Wheatley Peters has come to the forefront of eighteenth-century studies this year, particularly amidst calls to decolonize the leading eighteenth-century conference, the American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies (ASECS), which was held April 7-11, 2021 (virtually, due to the COVID pandemic). Wheatley Peters is the inspiration behind Honorée Fanonne Jeffers’ tour-de-force poetry collection The Age of Phillis (2020). Several contributors see Wheatley Peters as the primary touchstone for decentering white eighteenth-century studies not just as a matter of greater inclusiveness on the syllabus, but also as a formal and structural intervention for decolonizing the curriculum. Phillis Wheatley Peters comes to represent Black joy and survival but also what it means to live in the wake of slavery. Formally rigorous while also formally experimental, the fragmented collage of The Age of Phillis registers the labor, beauty, and suffering of Black lives in the wake of the Middle Passage. It also registers the failures of white Christianity to acknowledge that mourning or to acknowledge the full range of emotions that the wake calls forth. Indeed, Laura Stevens’s recent article about abolitionist rhetoric brought into sharp relief exactly what is excluded when righteous anger is occluded in favor of appeals to compassion or, worse, of imposing a particular kind of “happiness” onto the already oppressed. As Stevens points out in her study of William Warburton’s 1766 sermon, sensibility and compassion have featured centrally in studies of the intersection of “histories of emotion” and abolitionist rhetoric; what has received less attention are the “less gentle passions.” This lack of attention is perhaps because, if “pity invites action, outrage demands it.”⁹ Stevens’ is a searing argument about the limits and historical failures of white compassion and moral outrage.

Witnessing a full range of emotions is part of social justice. If there is mourning and anger, there is also community and creative production.  Some writers have focused on Afrofuturism as a temporal projection of optimism and freedom in response to historical oppression, as J. Ereck Jarvis observes—in his contribution to this issue’s Woman of Colour roundtable—of Brigitte Fielder’s recent and forthcoming work on “Black futurity.”¹⁰  Black hope, celebration, and beauty survive in the wake, as Ta-Nehisi Coates reminds us in “The Great Fire”—the special issue of Vanity Fair that he edited and which featured on its cover a picture of Breonna Taylor in a flowing blue gown.¹¹ As Coates powerfully declares, “To plunder a people of everything, you must plunder their humanity first.” Resistance to dehumanization includes the celebration of beauty and creativity—this is not frivolous: to create is to be human, to assert oneself to be human. There is, as Lindsey Stewart argues, a “politics” of Black joy.¹² Tamika Palmer, Breonna Taylor’s mother, celebrated her daughter’s life as one full of humor, family, and joy, of singing the blues, stalling out a motorcycle, and making chili.¹³

But emotions and imagination are not the only human activities that need to be expanded: conceptual and institutional infrastructures must also be questioned, diversified, and radically re-visioned. If, as Edna Bonhomme has argued, it is “through the thinking of the Enlightenment that science, the asylum, and prisons unveil their violent foundations,” and if the “radical and hopeful potential produced by Black literary and artistic traditions” offers a response to this history of dehumanization, then talking back to the Enlightenment is part of looking toward a more just future.¹⁴ This issue includes three roundtables addressing exactly this dynamic of reading the past and the possible in terms of each other. The first roundtable, “Talking Back to the Enlightenment,” centers the perspectives of a group of students, all women of color, studying eighteenth-century literature in the wake of the Black Lives Matter movement. Talking back is not only a rejection of received authority, it is also the human call for recognition. Thus the “Talking Back” roundtable examines the stakes of naming or failing to name (Noury); the influence of expanding the canon to include alternate texts and perspectives (Mindy Lin); the role of imagination in addressing the elisions of the historical record and school curriculum (Jasmine Nevarez); and the freedom and restrictions offered by Christian rhetoric to eighteenth-century writers of color such as Phillis Wheatley, Olaudah Equiano, and Ottobah Cugoano (Jessica Valenzuela).

Our second roundtable, on Honorée Fanonne Jeffers’s The Age of Phillis, addresses many of the same concerns as the “Talking Back” roundtable while focusing on how one text may be able to make a ground-shifting contribution to anti-racist eighteenth-century studies. Sam Plasencia examines the importance of “Black joy” and “critical fabulation” in a way that situates The Age of Phillis not just in the context of the eighteenth-century literature classroom but also at the cutting-edge of twenty-first-century archival interventions. Plasencia and Jenny Factor further analyze Jeffers’s profound intertwining of form and content to register the atemporal symmetries of Black diasporic experience. David Mazella considers the consequences of form at the levels of both the individual text and the publishing industry, leading to a consideration of the ethics of anthologization. Finally, JoEllen DeLucia addresses the racist hierarchies and discourses of the Enlightenment and the continuation of those historical influences at the curricular level. What happens, DeLucia asks, when we study “The Age of Phillis” rather than “The Age of the Augustans,” for instance? How do we think and feel differently in those physical (classroom) and intellectual spaces?

Our final roundtable is devoted to the pedagogical concerns raised by the novel The Woman of Colour (1808), which has become, in the last decade, one of the most important texts for discussing the intersection of race and gender in the decolonized eighteenth-century studies curriculum. Kerry Sinanan both introduces and concludes the roundtable, providing crucial bookends that situate the discussion of this influential text in relation both to geopolitical events such as the Haitian Revolution and to the intimate and individual impacts of slavery on mother and child. Rebecca Anne Barr considers the importance of decolonizing the romance genre, particularly the need to question the “generic consolation of regency romance” in light of the “theological ultimatum” offered by Olivia Fairfield, heroine of The Woman of Colour. J. Ereck Jarvis considers the question of bodies in the classroom—how does a white instructor talk about the racist legacies of the Enlightenment? Jarvis see Olivia as a figure of “Christian futurity” who is also a figure of “Black futurity” and hope. Mariam Wassif weaves together Critical Race Theory and romance conventions to argue that Olivia’s “Romantic subjectivity” actually “breaches imperial boundaries … even as it foregrounds the uneasiness of these transatlantic crossings.” Both Wassif and Misty Krueger highlight Olivia’s experience and legacy as a cosmopolitan transatlantic traveler. Krueger highlights the value of The Woman of Colour in making eighteenth-century syllabi less white while attending to the “racial disparity in women’s transatlantic travels.¹⁵

This acknowledgement of “racial disparity”—particularly in the realm of pleasurable consumption—is what caused The Woman of Colour to become a point of comparison for several commentators on the Netflix miniseries Bridgerton, the first adaptation-installment of Julia Quinn’s bestselling 8-part series of Regency romance novels. Why did Bridgerton ignore Haiti, for instance, as Alyssa Goldstein Sepinwall and Marlene L. Daut ask?¹⁶ This occlusion is particularly noticeable since the Haitian Revolution would have happened within the living memory of most people in Regency London. And why, despite its brief acknowledgement of slavery, did Bridgerton otherwise ignore the structural racism of eighteenth-century London (and the British Empire) and the consequences of colonialism?¹⁷ Why is the main love interest in Bridgerton—Simon Basset, Duke of Hastings, played by actor of color Rége-Jean Page—presented as symbolic eye-candy for heroine Daphne Bridgerton during a tea shop scene? The Duke becomes what Mira Assaf Kafantaris observes is an “image of the delectable Black man consuming the loots of transatlantic slavery and colonial plunder.”¹⁸ Commentators including Kafantaris, Jessica Parr, and Kerry Sinanan pointed out the inappropriateness of having a white woman—someone who benefits from the products of empire such as tea, china, muslin, and sugar on a daily basis—sexually objectifying a man of color during a time when Black enslaved people would have been the laborers who produced the sugar they were consuming.¹⁹ Daphne’s objectifying gaze becomes even more disturbing in retrospect after she sexually assaults the Duke. Sidney Mintz influentially examined the role of sugar in the formation of the modern world, but perhaps the modern romance novel even more so raises questions about the ethics of pleasure and consumption.²⁰ The seemingly frivolous and ephemeral may in fact reinforce the power dynamics between and within the colony and the metropole, the enslaver and the enslaved, those who are considered human and those who are considered consumable.²¹ Ongoing problems of structural racism have plagued the romance publishing industry, conventional romance narratives, and even the romance industry’s flagship organization, the Romance Writers of America.²²

Our issue on “Race, Religion, and Revolution in the Enlightenment” concludes with two reviews of the statue of the feminist political philosopher Mary Wollstonecraft recently installed at Newington Green. The statue raised controversy because its appearance—a slender, naked woman in chrome emerges from a whirling wave—seemed to suggest that a certain kind of female body represented feminism and that a woman’s body was the best way of commemorating Wollstonecraft’s intellectual influence. Representation matters and, as Rebekah Andrews and Miriam Al Jamil remind us, the art historical tradition of the female nude comes freighted with gendered asymmetries of the gaze (Al Jamil) and of the beauty standards (Andrews) that Wollstonecraft rejected and that continue to burden women even amid the frenzy of the modern urban world.  

To conclude, I offer my deepest thanks to all those who responded to the February 28, 2021 Facebook query about the scholarly consensus regarding capitalizing “Black” and “white.” Contributors included Margaret Doody, John Drabinski, Jennifer James, Amanda Louise Johnson, Shelby Johnson, David Latané, James Rovira, Jonah Siegel, Kerry Sinanan, and Miriam Wallace.²³ While capitalizing “Black” is becoming widely accepted, there are valid reasons for capitalizing or not capitalizing “white.” On the one hand, not capitalizing “white” runs the risk of erasing whiteness as a historical phenomenon; on the other hand, capitalizing “white” runs the risk of validating white supremacist usage.²⁴ Having weighed various arguments, the editorial team of Studies in Religion and the Enlightenment adopted the convention of capitalizing “Black” but not “white.” We thank all contributors for their labor, generosity, and thoughtful engagement. 

*

The editorial staff of Studies in Religion and the Enlightenment mourn with all those who have lost loved ones from the COVID pandemic and from racist violence against Black, Asian, Indigenous and all peoples of color in the United States.

ENDNOTES

[1] Christina Sharpe, In the Wake: On Blackness and Being (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2016), 2.

[2] For the purposes of this editorial I am bracketing criticisms of the 1619 Project, but they include: (1) the 1619 Project’s chronological slippages are pedagogically dangerous—Len Gutkin, “‘Bad History and Worse Social Science Have Replaced Truth’: Daryl Michael Scott on propaganda and myth from ‘The 1619 Project’ to Trumpism,” The Chronicle of Higher Education, March 10, 2021,  https://www.chronicle.com/article/bad-history-and-worse-social-science-have-replaced-truth?fbclid=IwAR1E0R8hDWRA1ZzaQAmtkdb9d0kQfhtFQhxradFD_AS53iesqQgyAcJwA9Y; (2) by focusing too much on race and slavery and by allowing journalists to bypass historians, the 1619 Project ignores the influence of class (and cross-racial class solidarity among workers) in the formation of the US—see a number of articles on the World Socialist Web Site (WSWS), but particularly the anthology The New York Times’ 1619 Project and the Racialist Falsification of History: Essays and Interviews, edited by David North and Thomas Mackaman (Oak Park, Michigan: Mehring Books, 2021); (3) the 1619 Project threatens to replace one “consensus history” with another—William Hogeland, “Against the Consensus Approach to History: How not to learn about the American past,” The New Republic, January 25, 2021, https://newrepublic.com/article/160995/consensus-approach-history?fbclid=IwAR2ZsNUQAGoEENswp7ekjcnZVdyvc-M76CyNC59xtpVscZl8UwI5s9cmQTU. A stark contrast to these informed critiques, the justly scorned 1776 Report was released on January 18, 2021. The Biden administration soon disbanded the 1776 Commission (January 20, 2021).

[3] Ibram X. Kendi and Keisha N. Blain, eds., Four Hundred Souls: A Community History of African America, 1619-2019 (New York: One World, 2021), xv.

[4] Alongside In the Wake a number of poetry collections have addressed the creative quest of crafting a Black diasporic identity within the occlusions and fragmentations of the archive and the dehumanization of slavery. These writers have chosen poetic expression to instantiate fragmentation, hybridity, the weight of the past on the present, and the pained relationship to water (a cleansing, purifying element while also being the ocean grave of so many enslaved ancestors transported on the Middle Passage). See M. NourbeSe Philip, Zong! As told to the author by Setaey Adamu Boateng (Middletown, Connecticut: Wesleyan University Press, 2008); Robin Coste Lewis, Voyage of the Sable Venus and Other Poems (New York: Knopf, 2017); and Honorée Fanonne Jeffers, The Age of Phillis (Middletown, Connecticut: Wesleyan University Press, 2020). A number of contributors to this issue discuss creative responses such as those mentioned above in terms of Saidiya Hartman’s concept of “critical fabulation.” See Saidiya Hartman, “Venus in Two Acts,” Small Axe, vol. 12, no. 2 (2008), 1-14. For a useful online introduction to Zong!, see Jenny Davidson, “Trauma and representation: NourbeSe Philip’s ZONG!” YouTube, February 21, 2021, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_3uOjbOC8zQ.

[5] Eugenia Zuroski, “‘Where Do You Know From?’: An Exercise in Placing Ourselves Together in the Classroom,” MAI, no. 5, “Feminist Pedagogies,” January 27, 2020, https://maifeminism.com/where-do-you-know-from-an-exercise-in-placing-ourselves-together-in-the-classroom/. For further resources on challenging racism in the long eighteenth century, particularly during the Romantic period, see the work of Zuroski, Manu Samriti Chander and other members of the Bigger 6 Collective who seek to “challenge structural racism in the academic study of Romanticism,” see https://bigger6romantix.squarespace.com/.

[6] For a helpful capsule history of how Jesus has increasingly been portrayed as blue-eyed and blond, see Anna Swartwood House, “The long history of how Jesus came to resemble a white European,” The Conversation, July 17, 2020, https://theconversation.com/the-long-history-of-how-jesus-came-to-resemble-a-white-european-142130. See also Edward J. Blum and Paul Harvey, The Color of Christ: The Son of God and the Saga of Race in America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2014). 

[7] On the historical silencing of Haiti and the Haitian Revolution, see Michel-Rolph Trouillot, Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History [1995], with a new forward by Hazel V. Carby (Boston: Beacon Press, 2015); on racist tropes of Haiti and the Haitian Revolution, such as “monstrous hybridity,” the “Tropical Temptress,” the “Tragic Mulatto/a,” and the “Colored Historian,” see Marlene L. Daut, Tropics of Haiti: Race and the Literary History of the Haitian Revolution in the Atlantic World, 1789-1865, Liverpool Studies in International Slavery, 8 (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2015); for a case study of Haitian Revolutionary Baron de Vastey and the politics of Black memory see Marlene L. Daut, Baron de Vastey and the Origins of Black Atlantic Humanism, The New Urban Atlantic (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017).

[8] “White Christianity” does not refer to all white Christians, some of whom may—as Gentry observes—practice anti-racist Christianity, but rather to the imbrication of American Christianity with white supremacism. See Robert P. Jones, White Too Long: The Legacy of White Supremacy in American Christianity (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2020).  “White Christianity” is, of course, certainly not limited to the United States. For a study of Christian racialization in early modern England, see Dennis Austin Britton, Becoming Christian: Race, Reformation, and Early Modern English Romance (New York: Fordham University Press, 2014).

[9] Laura M. Stevens, “‘Their Own Happiness’: The Ownership of Enslaved Africans’ Emotions in William Warburton’s SPG Sermon,” Eighteenth-Century Studies, vol. 54, no. 2 (2021): 285-305, 294-5.

[10] See also, Brigitte Fielder, “18th-century African American Literature and Community” (lecture, “Race, Whiteness, and Pedagogy in the long 18thc: An Online Teach-in”, UTSA Department of English and Mills College Center for Faculty Excellence, Zoom, August 6, 2020).

[11] Ta-Nehisi Coates, “Coates on Vanity Fair’s September Issue, The Great Fire,” Vanity Fair, September 2020, https://www.vanityfair.com/culture/2020/08/ta-nehisi-coates-editor-letter.

[12] Lindsey Stewart, The Politics of Black Joy: Zora Neale Hurston and Neo-Abolitionism (Evanston, Illinois: Northwestern University Press, forthcoming in 2021).

[13] Coates, “The Life Breonna Taylor Lived, In The Words Of Her Mother,” Vanity Fair, September 2020, https://www.vanityfair.com/culture/2020/08/breonna-taylor?itm_content=footer-recirc .

[14] Edna Bonhomme, “When Black Humanity Is Denied,” Public Books, January 18, 2021, https://www.publicbooks.org/when-black-humanity-is-denied/. Bonhomme’s article is a multi-volume review of three important recent books on the dehumanization of the Black community in scientific discourse, the asylum, and the prison: Zakiyyah Iman Jackson, Becoming Human: Matter and Meaning in an Antiblack World (New York: NYU Press, 2020); Therí Alyce Pickens, Black Madness :: Mad Blackness (Durham: Duke University Press, 2019); Nicole Fleetwood, Marking Time: Art in the Age of Mass Incarceration (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 2020).

[15] See also Misty Krueger, ed., Transatlantic Women Travelers, 1688-1843 (Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press, 2021).

[16] Alyssa Goldstein Sepinwall, “On Studios and Patterns of Erasure” in “Unsilencing the Past In Bridgerton 2020: A Roundtable, by Mira Assaf Kafantaris, Ambereen Dadabhoy, Alyssa Goldstein Sepinwall, Jessica Parr, and Kerry Sinanan,” Medium, January 9, 2021. On Bridgerton’s “Caribbean Problem” see Marlene Daut, “Why Did Bridgerton Erase Haiti?” Avidly, January 19, 2021, http://avidly.lareviewofbooks.org/2021/01/19/why-did-bridgerton-erase-haiti/?utm_source=pocket-newtab.

[17] On Bridgerton’s occlusion of the racial and economic dynamics of its historical setting—the events occur in 1813, between the abolishing of the slave trade in 1807 and the abolishing of slavery in 1833, see Patricia A. Matthew, “Shondaland’s Regency: On ‘Bridgerton,’” Los Angeles Review of Books, December 26, 2020, https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/shondalands-regency-bridgerton/ and Nina Metz, “Where did all that ‘Bridgerton’ money come from, and how do we feel about that?” Chicago Tribune, January 7, 2021, https://www.chicagotribune.com/entertainment/tv/ct-mov-bridgerton-conversations-about-wealth-0108-20210107-zs3ozfivefdizmj57ogpfyxjbe-story.html. On the “Black elite,” see Tressie McMillan Cottom, “The Black Ton: From Bridgerton to Love & Hip-Hop,” Medium, January 3, 2021, https://tressiemcphd.medium.com/the-black-ton-from-bridgerton-to-love-hip-hop-15a7d27b8de7.

[18] Mira Assaf Kafantaris, “Sugar and Consumption” in “Unsilencing the Past In Bridgerton 2020: A Roundtable, by Mira Assaf Kafantaris, Ambereen Dadabhoy, Alyssa Goldstein Sepinwall, Jessica Parr, and Kerry Sinanan,” Medium, January 9, 2021.

[19] “Unsilencing the Past In Bridgerton 2020: A Roundtable, by Mira Assaf Kafantaris, Ambereen Dadabhoy, Alyssa Goldstein Sepinwall, Jessica Parr, and Kerry Sinanan,” Medium, January 9, 2021.

[20]. Sidney W. Mintz, Sweetness and Power: The Place of Sugar in Modern History (New York: Penguin Books, 1986).

[21] On Bridgerton’s problematic depiction of race, class, sexual violence, and consent, see Aja Romano, “Netflix’s new Regency drama Bridgerton is as shallow as the aristocrats it skewers,” Vox, December 21, 2020, https://www.vox.com/22178125/bridgerton-netflix-review-regency-romance. For a discussion of how the producers glossed over the rape of a man of color by a white woman, see Eric Langberg, “‘Bridgerton’ is a swoon-worthy delight…with reservations, Medium, December 23, 2020, https://medium.com/everythings-interesting/bridgerton-is-a-swoon-worthy-delight-with-reservations-59051872aef5; Claudia Willen, “‘Bridgerton’ fans are criticizing showrunners for including a controversial rape scene and failing to address the lack of consent,” Insider, December 29, 2020, https://www.insider.com/bridgerton-rape-scene-criticism-julia-quinn-2020-12; Mernine Ameris, “‘Bridgerton Review: The Duke of Hastings Was My Early Valentine … and First Love is Hard,” Medium, January 28, 2021, https://mernineameris.medium.com/bridgerton-review-the-duke-of-hastings-was-my-early-valentine-and-first-love-is-hard-b64af3507a07; and PBJ, “Daphne Bridgerton raped her husband and why it’s important to not romanticize it,” An Injustice!, December 27, 2020, https://aninjusticemag.com/daphne-bridgerton-raped-her-husband-and-why-its-important-to-not-romanticize-it-638d8cbbd4ec.

[22] For the argument that “the version of history taught by romance novels has made it far easier for white supremacist arguments to be accepted by otherwise intelligent, well-read people,” see Elizabeth Kingston, “Romanticizing White Supremacy,” Elizabeth Kingston, April 2018, https://www.elizabethkingstonbooks.com/single-post/2018/04/15/romanticizing-white-supremacy. Kingston’s related article “Reclaiming Historical Romances,” appeared in the December 2018 issue of Romance Writers Report. For an analysis of the ongoing problem of racism in the Romance Writers of America (RWA) organization, particularly the suspension of Chinese American novelist and lawyer Courtney Milan from the RWA’s board in December 2019, see Mikki Kendall, “The Romance Writers of America racism row matters because the gatekeepers are watching,” Think, January 2, 2020, https://www.nbcnews.com/think/opinion/romance-writers-america-racism-row-matters-because-gatekeepers-are-watching-ncna1109151, and Constance Grady, “Bad Romance,” Vox, June 24, 2020, https://www.vox.com/the-highlight/2020/6/17/21178881/racism-books-romance-writers-of-america-scandal-novels-publishing.

[23] “Copy-editing question,” February 28, 2021, Facebook.

[24] See Kwame Anthony Appiah, “The Case for Capitalizing the B in Black,” The Atlantic, June 18, 2020, https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/06/time-to-capitalize-blackand-white/613159/. For a consideration of what is at stake in capitalizing “white” (not to do so threatens to reproduce whiteness as “unraced individuality”), see Nell Irvin Painter, “Opinion: Why ‘White’ should be capitalized, too,” The Washington Post, July 22, 2020, https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2020/07/22/why-white-should-be-capitalized/. For the argument that not capitalizing “white” is “an anti-Black act which frames “Whiteness” as both neutral and standard,” see Ann Thúy Nguyễn and Maya Pendleton, “Recognizing Race in Language: Why We Capitalize ‘Black’ and ‘White,’” Center for the Study of Social Policy, March 23, 2020, https://cssp.org/2020/03/recognizing-race-in-language-why-we-capitalize-black-and-white/.

Roundtable by Kerry Sinanan
‘The Wealth of Worlds’: Gender, Race, and Property in The Woman of Colour—A Roundtable on The Woman of Colour (1808): Pedagogic and Critical Approaches (Roundtable)
DOI: 10.32655/srej.2021.2.2.17
Cite: Sinanan, Kerry. 2021. “‘The Wealth of Worlds’: Gender, Race, and Property in The Woman of Colour—A Roundtable on The Woman of Colour (1808): Pedagogic and Critical Approaches (Roundtable),” Studies in Religion and the Enlightenment 2 (2): 53-56.
PDF

Abena, my mother, was raped by an English sailor on the deck of Christ the King one day in the year 16** while the ship was sailing for Barbados. I was born from this act of aggression from this act of hatred and contempt.¹

Towards the end of The Woman of Colour, Olivia Fairfield declines to entertain the idea of an offer of marriage from Charles Honeywood. Olivia’s first marriage to Augustus Merton has been annulled upon the discovery that his first wife, Angelina, whom he was told was dead, is in fact still alive, and they are reunited with Olivia’s blessing. Although Olivia is legally free to marry again, she refuses because of fidelity to her “first love,” Augustus: she cannot, she says, love another and considers herself to be “the widow of my love.” At the same time, Olivia insists that her constancy in loving Augustus is no threat to his true union with Angelina: “Heaven is my witness . . . that I consider Augustus Merton as the husband of Angelina, that for the ‘wealth of worlds’ I would not interrupt their happiness” (182). This particular phrase of Olivia’s, which Lyndon Dominique suggests is likely to be a quotation from Mark Akenside’s The Pleasures of Imagination (1774), takes on a particular resonance in a novel that rewrites the norms of gender, race, and property inheritance at the time of the Abolition Bill (1807). The phrase participates in the trope of romantic love as colonial conquest but inevitably suggests the actual plundering of empire that is less romantic. Olivia refuses the role of plunderer, of taking what is not hers even while she “loves” Augustus and the novel’s plot allows some restitution of the actual “wealth of worlds” that her father, a white Jamaican planter, has accumulated.

As a woman whose mother was the enslaved legal property of her planter father, and as a native of Jamaica, Britain’s most productive colony at the time, Olivia is all too well aware of what accumulating the “wealth of worlds” actually involves. Her linking of colonial wealth with romantic possession in order to rhetorically refuse both is also a refusal to participate in the yoking of property and of variations of Black and white female disposability that the novel examines in detail. As Saidiya Hartman notes in “The Belly of the World,” if the bequest of slavery is theft, and the enslaved “mother’s only claim—to transfer her dispossession to the child,” then Olivia verbally dispossesses herself here as a way to renounce her claims to Augustus.² In another sense, though, her phrase articulates a claim to her freedom outside of white marriage and white possession: she does not wish to possess at another’s cost. Her ideal of renouncing colonial wealth in reality, however, is not possible: by the end of the novel, she independently possesses the “wealth of worlds” in the form of her £60,000 fortune accumulated by her slave-owning father, and this enables her freedom from any form of white male patriarchy. And, so, even with Olivia’s freedom, as Hartman asserts, “The plantation is the belly of the world.” Between the womb of her mother and the plantation profits of her father, Olivia’s attempt to refuse “the wealth of worlds” registers the novel’s simultaneous reach for Black emancipation and awareness of the limits of freedom in a transatlantic world underwritten by the dispossession of Black mothers.

In the epigram above, Condé enacts what Saidiya Hartman calls the “critical fabulation” necessary to tell the histories of enslaved women.³ Hartman’s term names the methodologies needed to approach the archives of slavery, which do not record the lives of enslaved women from their point of view: it is an archive of absence and loss. In these conditions, the methodology that is needed requires both a critical attention to history and “laboring to paint as full a picture of the lives of the captives as possible” through narrative (fabula).⁴  The Woman of Colour may be read as an extended “critical fabulation” that wrestles with the demands of the romance plot and the realities of what Condé tells us of the experiences of enslaved women. The novel improbably, and violently, romanticizes Fairfield’s relationship with Marcia, telling us “She loved her master!” (54). Marcia’s consent is not sought and her desire is co-opted to make the plot’s beginning possible in the Romantic period. But this is also why Olivia’s verbal rejection of “the wealth of worlds” is significant, spoken as it is by an enslaved woman’s daughter. As Felicia Denaud asks, “But what if the mouth is just a belly by another name? What if partus sequitur ventrum, the law of enslavability, was just as much a claim to the mouth as it was to the womb?” ⁵ This law, originally forged in Virginia in 1662, decreed that all children born from enslaved woman would follow their mother’s condition: “offspring follows belly.”⁶ Olivia’s phrase interrupts the “wealth of worlds” to claim her freedom that is, initially, dependent on two white patriarchs. In the first instance, her father, Mr. Fairfield, grants Olivia her full status as his daughter, rather than making her his chattel, which he legally could have done and as many white men did with their Black children in the West Indies. Indeed, according to Olivia, Fairfield refuses to marry Marcia, her mother, because of “the prejudices which he had imbibed in common with his countrymen,” leaving Olivia in a precarious state after his death (55). In A Dark Inheritance, Brooke Newman traces the legal frameworks of colonial Jamaica, which incrementally defined whiteness in a chain of dispossessive acts. It is in Jamaica that “a genealogical concept of whiteness concerned with ancestral bloodlines came to determine the basis of local eligibility for the full rights and privileges afforded to British subjects”.⁷ And, by 1733, a voting act to “determine who should be deemed mulattoes” stipulated that “above three degrees removed in a lineal Descent from the Negro Ancestor Exclusive” gave voting rights to the person and moved them out of the category of “Mulatto”.⁸ The word removed captures the legal dispossession of life and rights from Black mothers that creates whiteness. Olivia, at one degree “removed” from Marcia, remains far away from the rights of a white subject and closer to the realm of property, according to Jamaica’s racist laws. And Olivia acknowledges this closeness to her correspondent Miss Milbanke: “The illegitimate offspring of his slave could never be considered in the light of equality by the English planters” (53).

Between the danger of uncertain freedom in Jamaica following the death of her father, and his will’s provision that she must marry her English cousin, Olivia wishes for independence: “Had my dear parent left me a decent competence, I could have placed myself in some tranquil nook of my native island” (56). This cannot be: the “tranquil nook” that Olivia dreams of is a fantasy for the daughter of a slave in eighteenth-century Jamaica, and so Fairfield’s arranged marriage for his daughter is her only hope of any freedom. Via this arrangement, not only does Fairfield attempt to “secure his child a proper protector” but he also ensures the transmission of a substantial fortune to his nephew, the son of his deceased sister. While Olivia is not herself enslaved, via her, the plantation profit is returned to the metropole, and Olivia remains what Hortense Spillers defines as a “captive body”, her love for Augustus notwithstanding.⁹ Following the dissolution of her marriage to Augustus, Olivia once more loses her (father’s) fortune to the next male heir, Augustus’s mercenary brother George. In return for promising never to take legal action to reclaim her dowry, George agrees to only “fifty pounds every three months” (149). The “wealth of worlds” has successfully been reappropriated by white patriarchy.

In a further divestment following Augustus’s reunion with Angelina, Olivia declares that “the jewels which had been presented to me on my marriage by Mr Merton, it was my firm resolve to give to Mrs Augustus Merton,” underlining that she is not able or willing to possess anything in England as the daughter of an enslaved woman (149). Single once more, Olivia manages to find the “tranquil nook” she desired in Jamaica in the Wye valley, “a very snug habitation” (158). Although it is not as quiet as she had imagined, she hopes that her poverty, combined with her “race” will ensure her isolation: “a woman of colour will not be a courted object” (158). In this precarious, unprotected state, dependent on the word of George Merton and on not being “courted,” Olivia is set to remain and the novel insists on showing us how Fairfield’s will fails to protect Olivia precisely because she is a woman of color in a slave-owning society: while she is not chattel, at this point she remains prey to white male possession.

One of the many remarkable aspects of The Woman of Colour, however, is that the plot does find a way through the legal network of white slave owning to give Olivia her fortune and her freedom, independent of male control. Her uncle, Mr. Merton, dies and wills Olivia the return of the fortune she had lost following the ending of her marriage to Augustus. By regaining the money accumulated from her father’s slave owning, Olivia simultaneously remains within the network of inheritance and disrupts it forever because she will never marry and have her own children. In a world in which, as Hartman says, “the reproductions of human property and the social relations of slavery were predicated upon the belly”¹⁰ this is what Brigitte Fielder names, “a radical reproductive choice”that attempts to halt the plundering of the “belly” by plantation economics.¹¹ As an unmarried, unreproductive woman, Olivia will have some force in Jamaica: she is returning to an island in which the white settler population was diminishing as free Black people continued to push for the rights of “white men”.¹² She will be an independent, free woman of color who will put under pressure the fictions of racialized taxonomies forged in Jamaican law.

With her “wealth of worlds” untethered from her father’s plantation, Olivia has circumvented the power of Jamaican officials who alone “held the power to determine who was a slave and who was free, who was black and who was white, and who could invoke a right to the English common law inheritance and who could not”.¹³ The plot of the novel has turned English inheritance back upon itself to deliver Olivia the money, and it will, she tells us at the novel’s end, go towards the amelioration of her people. In this way, she becomes the mechanism for delivering reparations, returning some degree of profit and freedom to those from whom it was stolen. As Fielder argues, “Olivia ultimately returns to a black Atlantic community intending to take up the work of racial uplift”.¹⁴ This uplift is manifold: Olivia will not produce inheritors of white property; she may well liberate her father’s property in those she repeatedly acknowledges as her “kin”; she will forge multiracial alliances beginning with Dido, a Black woman, and Miss Milbanke, a white woman; and she will be in a position to forge an alternative self-sustaining community outside of white profit, possibly through land ownership.

In the most utopic reading of the novel’s end, Olivia’s maneuvers between the possessions and dispossessions licensed by white slave ownership signify the possible end of the plantation as “the belly of the world” and the reappropriation of it as a site for emancipation, as it was in Haiti. If this sounds too optimistic, the novel offers only a puncturing of plantation-based primogeniture with the future possibilities yet to be plotted. And yet Haiti offers the real alternative that The Woman of Colour will only tentatively suggest.¹⁵ As Grégory Pierrot asserts: “The fact remains: Black Caribbeans and Americans had achieved precisely that which the entire Atlantic world conspired to prevent,” and in doing so, it eradicated not white people, but it “did indeed eradicate whiteness” in its 1805 constitution that declared that “all Haitians, no matter their complexion and origins, were Black”.¹⁶ This assertion sits in a direct opposition to Jamaica’s forging of legal whiteness: its entire legal framework might be erased by a Black constitution. And Olivia can be read as part of this Black Atlantic reversal. Olivia refuses possession in a novel which breaks the usual “reward” of a husband to allow her virtue “to be its own reward,” and the “wealth of worlds” might be replaced by a nonprofit, feminine-centered, multiracial community that defines itself as Black.

ENDNOTES

[1] Saidiya Hartman, “The Belly of the World: A Note on Black Women’s Labors, Souls,” Souls 18, no.1 (2016): 166–173.

[2] Maryse Condé, I, Tituba. Black Witch of Salem (London: Faber and Faber, 2000), 1.

[3] Saidiya Hartman, “Venus in Two Acts,” Small Axe 12, no. 2 (2008): 1-14, 11.

[4] Hartman, “Venus in Two Acts,” 11.

[5] Felicia Denaud, “Renegade Gestation: Writing Against the Procedures of Intellectual History,” Black Intellectual History: A JHI Forum (October 23, 2020), Section I, https://jhiblog.org/2020/10/23/renegade-gestation/.

[6] See Jennifer L. Morgan, “Partus sequitur ventrem: Law, Race, and Reproduction in Colonial Slavery,” Small Axe 22, no. 1 (2018): 1–17.

[7] Brooke Newman, A Dark Inheritance. Blood, Race, and Sex in Colonial Jamaica (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2018), 6.

[8] Newman, 20.

[9] Hortense Spillers, “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe: An American Grammar Book,” Diacritics 17, no. 2 (Summer 1987): 64–81, 67.

[10] Hartman, “The Belly of the World,” 168.

[11] Brigitte Fielder, “The Woman of Colour and Black Atlantic Movement,” Women’s Narratives of the Early Americas and the Formation of Empire, edited by Mary McAleer Balkun and Susan C. Imbarrato (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016), 171–185, 183.

[12] Newman, 15.

[13] Newman, 20.

[14] Fielder, 183.

[15] In my reading of the novel, Haiti remains a silent but persistent presence in the Black Atlantic world in which The Woman of Colour was written. As Michel-Rolph Trouillot argues in Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History, Western historiography, and in turn Western political systems, sought to suppress the significance of the Haitian Revolution that overthrew French colonial rule to establish the first free Black republic in a series of rebellions against white enslavers between 1791–1804: “The general silence that Western historiography has produced around the Haitian Revolution originally stemmed from the incapacity to express the unthinkable, but it was ironically reinforced by the significance of the revolution for its contemporaries and for the generation immediately following.” Michel-Rolph Trouillot, Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History (Boston, Massachusetts: Beacon Press, 1995), 97.

[16] Grégory Pierrot, “Black Revolutionary Violence: The Luxury of Ethical Thinking from a Temporal Distance,” The Funambulist 25, “Self-Defense” (September–October 2019): 30–34, 34.

Roundtable by Misty Krueger
Teaching The Woman of Colour and Transatlantic Women —A Roundtable on The Woman of Colour (1808): Pedagogic and Critical Approaches (Roundtable)DOI: 10.32655/srej.2021.2.2.16
Cite: Krueger, Misty. 2021. “Teaching The Woman of Colour and Transatlantic Women —A Roundtable on The Woman of Colour (1808): Pedagogic and Critical Approaches (Roundtable),” Studies in Religion and the Enlightenment 2 (2): 51-52.
PDF

In 2015, I first taught a special topics course at The University of Maine at Farmington (a small, public liberal arts university) I called “Transatlantic Eighteenth-Century Women.” I have since taught the course two more times and have added it to my English department’s recurring curriculum. This course focuses on long eighteenth-century women writers who traveled transatlantically and the women travelers they portray in their writings. I wanted students to see that British and American women not only wrote transatlantic tales but also traveled in a space that has been coded as male and masculine. The course, and that very idea, inspired me to edit a volume of essays on transatlantic women travelers, which includes an essay by Octavia Cox on The Woman of Colour—a text I had not even heard of when I first designed the course. Once I read this novel, though, I realized that it was a perfect fit for my class.                                                           

The novel begins with a woman’s transatlantic journey that is not typically portrayed in British and American literature—that of a woman of color’s travel from the Caribbean to England and back. Often, transatlantic narratives focus on women traveling from England, the Americas, Africa, or Europe to the Caribbean and to British, Spanish, French, or Dutch colonies. Sometimes the travelers return to their homelands, thus engaging in two-way transatlantic travel. Oftentimes, narratives show that travel only operates one way, as in the case of white women settling in colonies with their families, or enslaved women of color ripped from their families and homelands and transported to plantations. In such narratives, women’s involuntary travel points to a lack of autonomy, but it particularly reveals the racial disparity in women’s transatlantic travels, for white women had a freedom not afforded to women of color. White women had the potential to return home, wherever it may be, but Black women did not.

The Woman of Colour intervenes in the corpus of involuntary transatlantic women’s travel narratives. Olivia, the daughter of an enslaved woman of color and a white enslaver (thus making her a free woman of color), travels to England to start a new life, but she ultimately shows how little control she has over her own life. While Olivia’s travel may seem to be voluntary because of the style of the epistolary narration, it is not. Her trip is intended to be a one-way journey for her to marry her white cousin, who controlled her inheritance and thus her life, and settle in England. However, calling England home does not end up being a real possibility for Olivia, and her tale begins and ends with travel to and from Jamaica, which gives students a chance to see two-way transatlantic travel and to think about travel as the bookends for a text that depicts free women of color who travel to England.              

Adding Woman of Colour to my syllabus allowed my students to compare Olivia and Dido (Olivia’s Black Jamaican servant who travels with her to England) with other characters in the course, including Imoinda from Aphra Behn’s Oroonoko (1688) and Phillis Wheatley (1753–1784), who were stolen from their homes in Africa, enslaved, and then praised by everyone around them. The Woman of Colour afforded my students an opportunity to think more about how race and autonomy work in women’s transatlantic travel texts and to build on what they saw in Unca Eliza Winkfield’s The Female American (another text that is framed as a true story but whose author is unknown, as there is not a historical record of a person named Unca Eliza Winkfield). The Woman of Color also does things The Female American does not: its smart, sympathetic heroine criticizes racism; the novel portrays a range of white Englishmen and women’s attitudes toward and treatment of people of color; and it addresses intersectional diversity among women of color in its portrayal of Olivia and her darker-skinned servant, Dido, whose skin color and dialect distinguish her from her mistress. The novel thus places Olivia between two racial categories (white and Black) but closer—in terms of class and social status—to her white relatives.                                                                                  

In examining Olivia, Dido, and the Mertons (Olivia’s white English relatives who control her inheritance, to which she can only gain access by marrying one of them) in terms of race and class, I could further have a conversation with students about the virtual absence of women of color’s perspectives and voices in British and American canonical literature. I added The Woman of Colour to my revised syllabus because I realized that my syllabus was too white. I included The Female American, supposedly written by a biracial author-protagonist, but of course we cannot verify the author of that text. I included poetry by Phillis Wheatley and biographical material about her life, as well as white authors who created Black, Indigenous, and People of Color (BIPOC) characters, such as Imoinda from Aphra Behn’s Oroonoko and the creole women discussed in Leonora Sansay’s Secret History; Or, the Horrors of San Domingo (1808), but that was not enough either. I realized that I needed to cut more white writers from my syllabus, as well as texts focused on white women, to make more room for narratives featuring, if not written by, women of color. I cut Anne Bradstreet’s and Mary Rowlandson’s writings, as well as excerpts from white women’s travel journals, and in their place, I added The Woman of Colour. I also used The Woman of Colour to set up a discussion of two other texts I had not taught before, Lucy Peacock’s “The Creole” (1786) and Jane Austen’s “Sanditon” (1817)—Austen’s only work that includes a character of color.

Along with my students, I imagined how The Woman of Colour could show readers the potential for Austen’s narrative. Austen died before she could finish her book, but my students and I could not help but wonder if the experiences of Austen’s Miss Lambe, a young “half-mulatto” inheritress from the West Indies, would turn out in any way to resemble Olivia Fairfield’s.¹ Thus, The Woman of Colour could be considered a prototype for Austen’s tale: we know that Olivia was welcomed into English society because of her financial circumstances, and in Austen’s would-be-novel, Miss Lambe, too, was sought after by the Denhams for her “large fortune.”² Strangely enough, The Woman of Colour inspired me (an Austen scholar at my core) to introduce my students to an Austen text in a course where I could not imagine finding a place for Austen. While The Woman of Colour brought me back to a white writer—which is still problematic—teaching it before “Sanditon” gave Austen’s text a kind of depth I do not think it would have had otherwise in this course. Ultimately, I see The Woman of Colour as a text that opens students’ eyes to what came before it and what follows it. It is a work I will continue to teach in both my transatlantic class and other courses.

ENDNOTES

[1] Jane Austen, Sanditon, ed. Kathryn Sutherland (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019), 64.

[2] Jane Austen, Sanditon, 42.

Roundtable by Rebecca Anne Barr
From Romance to Decolonial Love in The Woman of Colour —A Roundtable on The Woman of Colour (1808): Pedagogic and Critical Approaches (Roundtable)
DOI: 10.32655/srej.2021.2.2.13
Cite: Barr, Rebecca Anne. 2021. “From Romance to Decolonial Love in The Woman of Colour —A Roundtable on The Woman of Colour (1808): Pedagogic and Critical Approaches (Roundtable),” Studies in Religion and the Enlightenment 2 (2): 41-44.
PDF

In 2019–20, during the squalls of socioeconomic crisis that preceded the global pandemic, academics across the United Kingdom took industrial action to protest cuts to pensions, increases to workloads, and the increasing casualization of higher education. Before lockdown emptied universities, the escalating strike halted teaching in many places. Classrooms were quiet, picket lines less so. As precarity and casualization disproportionately affects Black, Asian, and Minority Ethnic (BAME) scholars, academic equality is also a racial issue.¹ Writing on the tragic and untimely death of historian Thea Hunter, whose adjunct status deprived her of access to adequate health care, Adam Harris notes that casualized labor is “often described as akin to a form of slavery . . . [but] Thea, a scholar of rights, slavery, and freedom, would have [said] . . . that is not the case. It is more like the lowest rung in a caste system, the one that underrepresented minorities tend to call home.”² If academia frequently relies on the labor of underpaid minorities, it trades on a phantasm of equal intellectual opportunities, which ironically helps sustain a reality of racialized hierarchies. Before America’s Black Lives Matter movement reignited a long-overdue reckoning with structural racism, issues of academic decolonization and British universities’ confrontation with the legacies of slavery, were combining to make 2020 an important moment to read The Woman of Colour.

As a Romantic-era fiction that satirizes the myth of enlightened Englishness and reveals the prevalence of white hostility, The Woman of Colour offered an ideal opportunity for a “teach out”: a learning event which analyzes a contemporary problem through an academic text.³ In its heroine, Olivia Fairfield, the novel concerns the living legacy of slavery and its transformative effect on romantic conventions. If romance threatens to “awaken a form of aesthetic or emotional response without a correspondent sense of responsibility,” Woman of Colour holds both its heroine and its reader to a rigorous sense of accountability.⁴ Systems of morality and pleasure exert competing pulls from the outset. Olivia’s religious conscience and “kindred claims” impel her to remain in Jamaica to proselytize and “meliorate” the enslaved. “But,” she laments, “my father willed it otherwise—Lie still then, rebellious and repining heart!”⁵ No “mere state machine,” her “heart revolts” (59) at the prospect of the marriage arranged by her white planter father. The projected union between Olivia and her cousin, Augustus Merton, aims at assimilating the financial and sexual products of Caribbean slavery into the libidinal system of (white) marriage: sentiment smoothing over violence.

Irrespective of professed benevolence, the novel shows how white paternalism brutalizes the dutiful protagonist: she is oppressed and estranged by both her filial obedience and her own desire. Olivia’s sanctioned love for Augustus proves inherently harmful. As Olivia’s mother, Marcia, is disavowed by the man she “loves,” so her daughter is likewise traduced by her husband, Augustus, who remains in thrall to the irradiating whiteness of his first wife, Angelina. Though she becomes besotted by Augustus’s goodness, Olivia is consistently aware of his ambivalence and the insufficiency of his desire, his distance, and lack of intimacy. His praise of Olivia’s “noble and dignified soul” palls beside his rapturously erotic reminiscence of Angelina’s “transparent skin of ivory” (102). Augustus’s rationalized acceptance of Olivia (and her dowry) bespeaks both a white savior complex and a fundamental incapacity for romantic reciprocity with a Black woman: “I must rescue her from a state of miserable dependence . . . my heart does not beat with the rapture of passion—How can I assail her with professions of love, whilst conscious that heart can never more feel that passion?” (102–104).⁶ As Western “economies of attraction . . . resemble more or less the economies of attraction of white supremacy,” Black and colored women are not merely deprecated but disposable.⁷ The novel thus illuminates the racial inequalities of love, providing an historical instance of what Averil Y. Clarke pungently calls “race-based romantic deprivation”: educated Black women marrying later and more rarely than their white peers and having fewer children because of adverse circumstance and reduced opportunity.⁸ These “symptoms of black women’s disadvantage in romance and marriage and racial inequality in the distribution of love” are clear in Olivia’s experience in England.⁹ Despite her superior intelligence and moral acuity, Olivia’s social position is marginal: as a wife, emotionally deprived; as a feme sole, subject to racist remarks and sexual objectification.

Despite her vulnerable status as a woman of color in England, Olivia attempts to assert “sexual citizenship”—that is, a claim to social protection from sexual violence and the liberty to choose whether to marry or reproduce.¹⁰ Since conventional romance “charts the heroine’s liberation from oppressive circumstances and the resolution of difference with a move into domesticity,” England should provide the locus for marital liberation.¹¹ Instead, The Woman of Colour “rewrites the heterosexual love plot”: a Caribbean women’s “antiromance” which “rethinks alternative ways of belonging to the nation by shifting the focus to the sexual complexities of dwelling at home and abroad.”¹² Once Augustus is reunited with the hyperfeminine Angelina, Olivia rejects a proposal from the milksop Honeywood. Quashing the prospect of interracial marriage and the consolations of sentiment, her decision also conveys a bracing skepticism about white men of feeling. But rather than tragedy or self-sabotage, Olivia’s refusal is resistance. The “Dialogue between the Editor and A Friend” robustly dismisses objections that the heroine ought to have received the hedonic dividends of romance. Having failed to “reward” Olivia “even with the usual meed of virtue—a husband!” the editor insists that “there is no situation in which the mind . . . may not resist itself against misfortune, and become resigned to its fate” (189, emphasis added).

Students’ responses to the ending confirm the continuing power the “happy ending” still exerts. Does the novel deliberately foreclose (Black) women’s sexuality, they ask, consigning Olivia to a sexless unhappily-ever-after in the West Indies? Here, I think, the novel challenges readers, asking us to take seriously the explicitly religious form of love and self-fulfillment Olivia elects. As Brigitte Fielder rightly argues, the “insistence on remaining single involves a radical reproductive choice, as women of color’s childbearing was often dictated (and even forced) within the white patriarchal system of enslavement. Olivia ultimately rejects the social reproduction of Englishness, whiteness, and empire, and embraces kinship with the African diaspora of the colonies.”¹³ But in its theological ultimatum, The Woman of Colour also poses a powerful argument for decolonial love.¹⁴ Defined by Joseph Drexler-Dreis as an expression of a faith which “calls and actualizes liberation,” decolonial love frees Olivia from love under the sign of white supremacy.¹⁵ By rejecting England, “not only as a physical referent in a political and economic sense, but also as a narrative or epistemological referent,” Olivia recognizes that libidinal relations within a colonial framework are frozen “into hierarchical patterns of domination.”¹⁶ What might read as resignation is recalibrated by that reflexive “resistance against misfortune”: failure is reconfigured as emotional opportunity, a new beginning rather than plot termination. She anticipates a “communion with and participation in God’s gratuitous love . . . [but most] specifically love concretized as solidarity with the oppressed . . . a praxis that moves toward liberation.”¹⁷ The novel thus proffers a distinctly theological response to colonial modernity, arguably born from evangelical Christianity. Returning Olivia to the West Indies, the novel suggests that “love is made concrete in history” not through the gratifications of the romance plot but through the labour of care for others: “struggles to reveal and shatter the structures of colonial modernity” which will remake the conditions for love itself.¹⁸

Reading The Woman of Colour in a time of gathering crisis counsels against comforting fictions of economic and libidinal fulfilment, of falling in love as a quick fix for prestige and cultural capital. As the success of the “postracial” TV series Bridgerton confirms, twenty-first-century readers are hungry for the generic consolations of regency romance. But The Woman of Colour transcends such ersatz imaginings by being the real thing in all its discomforting refusals. In light and humorous prose it deftly reveals the ways in which romantic narratives and forms of love are inherently racialized in the eighteenth century (and beyond). It subverts romance’s affirmation of personal happiness and individual fulfilment and chooses the jouissance of struggle. If pedagogy sometimes depends on imaginative pleasure to generate academic engagement, The Woman of Colour forces readers and educators alike to question our investment in “happy endings”, and to ask what forms of narrative might be compatible with love and respect.

ENDNOTES

[1] BAME is an acronym of “Black, Asian, and Ethnic Minorities,” and its usage is contested. However, the University and College Union (UCU) used it as a primary diagnostic in its survey on academic conditions (https://www.ucu.org.uk/media/10899/Precarious-work-in-higher-education-May-20/pdf/ucu_he-precarity-report_may20.pdf), and it thus provides some insight into racial and ethnic disparity. See in particular 14–18 which details specific forms of precarity (fixed-term, hourly paid, zero hours, etc.) by race, ethnicity, and gender.

[2] Adam Harris, “The Death of an Adjunct,” The Atlantic, April 8, 2019, https://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2019/04/adjunct-professors-higher-education-thea-hunter/586168/.

[3] See Eric Joyce, “From Teach-In to Teach-Out,” Center for Academic Innovation, University of Michigan, accessed January 7, 2021,

 https://ai.umich.edu/blog/from-teach-in-to-teach-out-recap-of-the-academic-innovation-forum-on-broadening-the-university-of-michigan-community/.

[4] Corinna Russell, Romance and the Ethics of Response, 1765–1837 (unpublished PhD thesis, University of Cambridge, 2004) 7.

[5] Lyndon J. Dominique, ed., The Woman of Colour (Orchard Park, NY: Broadview Press, 2008), 55–6. All subsequent citations of the novel will be noted parenthetically.

[6] Coined by Teju Cole; the term defines self-serving interventions and philanthropy by white people for nonwhite people. See Teju Cole, “The White-Savior Industrial Complex,” The Atlantic, March 12, 2012,

https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2012/03/the-white-savior-industrial-complex/254843/.

[7] Junot Diaz, “Junot Díaz on ‘De-colonial Love,’ Revolution and More” (keynote presentation, Facing Race Conference, 2012), accessed October 31, 2020, https://www.colorlines.com/articles/junot-diaz-de-colonial-love-revolution-and-more-video.

[8] Averil Y. Clarke, Inequalities of Love: College-Educated Black Women and the Barriers to Romance and Family (Durham, N.C: Duke University Press, 2011), 4.

[9] Clarke, Inequalities of Love, 21.

[10]. See Donette Francis, Fictions of Feminine Citizenship: Sexuality and the Nation in Contemporary Caribbean Literature (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), 4.

[11] Francis, Fictions of Feminine Citizenship, 4–5.

[12] Francis, Fictions of Feminine Citizenship, 6.

[13] Brigitte Fielder, “The Woman of Colour and Black Atlantic Movement,” in Women’s Narratives of the Early Americas and the Formation of Empire, eds. Mary McAleer Balkun and Susan C. Imbarrato (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016), 171–185, 183.

[14] Joseph Drexler-Dreis, Decolonial Love: Salvation in Colonial Modernity (New York: Fordham University Press, 2019), 4.

[15] Drexler-Dreis, Decolonial Love, 3.

[16] Drexler-Dreis, Decolonial Love, 1.

[17] Drexler-Dreis, Decolonial Love, 4.

[18] Drexler-Dreis, Decolonial Love, 4.

Roundtable by Kerry Sinanan
Introduction—A Roundtable on The Woman of Colour (1808): Pedagogic and Critical Approaches
DOI: 10.32655/srej.2021.2.2.12
Cite: Sinanan, Kerry. 2020. “Introduction—A Roundtable on The Woman of Colour (1808): Pedagogic and Critical Approaches,” Studies in Religion and the Enlightenment 2 (2): 39-40.
PDF

The Woman of Colour (1808), an epistolary novel by an anonymous author, remained out of print until 2008 when an authoritative, detailed new edition by Lyndon J. Dominique was published with Broadview. Featuring Olivia Fairfield, the daughter of an enslaved woman and her white “master,” the novel takes the reader from Jamaica to England. Olivia is sent to marry her white cousin Augustus Merton to whom she will bequeath £60,000 in return for being protected and assured of her freedom. As the daughter of an enslaved woman, remaining in Jamaica would be precarious, and, during her time in England, Olivia gains full independence and the wealth that enables her to return to Jamaica a free person. The plot is structured as a packet of letters that, like its antecedent Samuel Richardson’s Pamela (1740), has been published by a fictional editor. Unlike Pamela, The Woman of Colour contains no editorial “preface.” Instead we have a concluding dialogue in which the fictional editor tells “a friend” that the purpose of the novel is to show how “virtue, like Olivia Fairfield’s, may truly be said to be its own reward.”[1] And so The Woman of Colour explicitly resituates eighteenth-century female virtue in an independent, legally unmarried woman—a woman of color, who leaves England for her home in Jamaica to pursue a better life. While the novel remains in many ways trapped within the plot conventions and gendered norms of the Romantic period, it simultaneously rejects them and offers trajectories of emancipation that unsettle gender, race, and nation. This double movement in the novel unsettles white hierarchies of moral superiority and liberal ideals exposing them to be less immutable than they appear.

The power of the novel, then, lies in the promise it holds to reach forward into a more multicultural future in which gender and race might not be such oppressive structures as they are in 1808. The very title, The Woman of Colour, is what many women today choose as a term that designates a politically conscious identity that is both defined by and resistant to whiteness. The term woman of colour came to prominence in the 1977 at the National Women’s Conference when The Black Women’s Agenda was being brought forward. As Loretta Ross explains in an interview,

All the rest of the “minority” women of color wanted to be included in the “Black Women’s Agenda.” Okay? Well, [the Black women] agreed . . . but you could no longer call it the “Black Women’s Agenda.” And it was in those negotiations in Houston [that] the term “women of color” was created. Okay? And they didn’t see it as a biological designation—you’re born Asian, you’re born Black, you’re born African American, whatever—but it is a solidarity definition, a commitment to work in collaboration with other oppressed women of color who have been “minoritized.”²

Dominique’s detailed critical introduction suggests that the anonymous author, indeed, is likely to have been herself a woman of color. The author is thought to be Ann Wright, who was likely completing the novel just as the bill to abolish the British slave trade passed in 1807. Crucially, as Dominique tells us, the term “people of color” would, in eighteenth-century Britain, have been understood “to refer to specific groups of free people in the Americas—the gens de coleur in Haiti and free mixed-race and Negro North Americans, and mixed-race freedmen and women in Caribbean outposts” (21). The invocation of Haiti must have been fundamental to the term woman of colour as the liberatory consequences of the Haitian Revolution, and its second constitution, adopted in 1805, reverberated throughout the world. Dominique provides strong evidence that proposes, albeit inconclusively, that the author of the novel was Ann Wright, the mixed-race daughter of an English planter, Andrew Wright. Ann married a free man of color, Francis Maitland, in England in 1808 after her father’s death. Within this possible context, then, the title The Woman of Colour suggests a reforming multiracial, political solidarity, extending from the colonies as they fought for freedom to the morally stultified metropole.

In 2019, I set up a Facebook group called “Woman of Colour,” named after the novel. The group was intended to gather those of us in eighteenth-century studies and beyond who were teaching Woman of Colour and other texts that deal with enslavement, race, whiteness, and transatlantic histories. It was clear through discussion threads on the Facebook group “18thc Questions Quick Link,” and also at recent conference panels at ASECS meetings on the novel, that Dominique’s edition has made The Woman of Colour much more central to our teaching and research in intersecting areas of eighteenth-century studies. Important critical interventions have built on Dominique’s work. Notable examples include from Brigitte Fielder, “The Woman of Colour and Black Atlantic Movement” in Women’s Narratives of the Early Americas and the Formation of Empire (2016), and Victoria Barnett-Woods, “Models of Morality: The Bildungsroman and Social Reform in The Female American and The Woman of Colour” in Women’s Studies (2016).                               

In the Facebook group “Woman of Colour,” the novel has become a site of multidisciplinary, academic solidarity and a hub for questioning the boundaries of disciplines and canons in the long period as many of us seek to “unwhiten” our syllabi and offer students texts that highlight the centrality of colonialism and enslavement to the period. This roundtable offers thoughts from a few of us on how we are teaching the novel and how it enables our incorporation of multidisciplinary approaches from Black Studies, gender studies, Critical Race Theory, and transatlantic historiography that both expose the endurance of slavery’s legacies and offer us the tools that eighteenth-century studies very much needs.

We dedicate this roundtable to British citizens who are descendants of the Windrush generation currently being illegally deported by the British government to Jamaica and the Caribbean.

ENDNOTES

[1] Lyndon J. Dominique, ed., The Woman of Colour (Orchard Park, NY: Broadview Press, 2008), 189. All subsequent citations of the novel will be noted parenthetically.

[2] Lisa Wade, “Loretta Ross on the Phrase, ‘Women of Color.’” The Society Pages, March 26, 2011, accessed January, 11, 2021. https://thesocietypages.org/socimages/2011/03/26/loreta-ross-on-the-phrase-women-of-color/

Roundtable by Joellen Delucia
Enlightenment in The Age of Phillis—The Age of Phillis (Roundtable)
DOI: 10.32655/srej.2021.2.2.11
Cite: Delucia, Joellen. 2021. “Enlightenment in The Age of Phillis—The Age of Phillis (Roundtable),” Studies in Religion and the Enlightenment 2 (2): 35-38.
PDF

During one of the earliest conversations in our reading group, we spent time considering the title of Jeffers’s collection, The Age of Phillis. For our group primarily comprising teachers and scholars of eighteenth-century British and American literature, the title instantly evoked the names of classes we had both taken and later taught: “The Age of Reason,” “The Age of Enlightenment,” “The Augustan Age,” and “The Age of Johnson.” Of course, these standard frameworks were designed to mark a range of different shifts in the history of aesthetics and the history of ideas. “The Age of Enlightenment” or “The Age of Reason” often traces a movement from a theistic worldview toward what David Hume famously called “the science of man”; “The Augustan Age” tracks a revival of ancient Greece and Rome as aesthetic models for an increasingly commercial and democratic eighteenth century; and “The Age of Johnson,” using Samuel Johnson as a model, charts the rise of the professional author. The Age of Phillis disrupts these standard narratives and invites scholars and teachers to rethink how the study of the eighteenth century is structured. What does the eighteenth century look like when we center the experience of Phillis Wheatley Peters instead of Enlightenment philosophy, neoclassical poetics, or Samuel Johnson? What happens if instead of teaching Wheatley Peters as the conclusion of a unit on, say, Enlightenment rights discourse that begins with Thomas Paine or Mary Wollstonecraft, we instead start with her?

When we encountered a group of poems in the middle of the collection organized under the heading “Book: Enlightenment,” we began to sketch out some rough answers. This section itself is exemplary of how Jeffers’s collection as a whole invites teachers and students to remix and rethink not just the Wheatley Peters archive but the archive of Enlightenment. Indebted, as she acknowledges in her notes to Henry Louis Gates, Jr.’s The Trial of Phillis Wheatley: America’s First Black Poet and her Encounters with the Founding Fathers,¹ Jeffers begins with two epigraphs, the first from Thomas Jefferson’s Notes on the State of Virginia (1785) and the second from Immanuel Kant’s Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and the Sublime (1764-65): 1) “Religion indeed has produced a Phyllis Whately [sic], but it could not produce a poet” ; 2) “The Negroes of Africa have by nature no feeling that rises above the trifling”.² Beginning with Jefferson and Kant’s racist assessments of the aesthetic capacities of both Wheatley Peters and Africans, Jeffers explores in this section how the systemic racism built into Enlightenment philosophy diminished Wheatley Peters’s art. This set of poems on Enlightenment also raises new questions about the “paradox of Enlightenment,” making an important contribution to twenty-first-century conversations about the tensions within Enlightenment philosophy and Enlightenment aesthetics exemplified in works such as Simon Gikandi’s Slavery and the Cutlure of Taste (2011), Sankar Muthu’s Enlightenment Against Empire (2003), Karen O’Brien’s Women and Enlightenment in Eighteenth-Century Britain (2009), and J. G. A. Pocock’s Barbarism and Religion (1999–2015).³ 

The six poems within “Book: Enlightenment” contrast the brutal abstractions encouraged by Enlightenment systems with the lived experiences of Anton Wilhelm Amo and Dido Elizabeth Belle Lindsay, in addition to Wheatley Peters. The first poem in the collection is written in the voice of Amo, the German-African philosopher, who taught at the Universities of Halle and Jena (places still associated with Kant and German idealism) but later in life returned to West Africa. In the poem, Jeffers speculates that Amo’s return was, at least in part, because his “colleagues” refused to confront the philosophical import of the physical world, which the Amo of Jeffers’s poem describes as “a query of material and skin” (61). Amo’s poem is followed by “Illustration: Petrus Camper’s Measurement of the Skull of a Negro Male.” This poem is written in the voice of Camper and inspired by, as Jeffers notes, Elizabeth Alexander’s poem “The Venus Hottentot,” which puts the voice of George Cuvier, the doctor who dissected and then cast the body of Saartjie Baartmann, in dialogue with Baartmann’s own voice, which is absent from the archive. Like Cuvier’s treatment of Baartmann, Camper’s callous probing and classification of a Black man’s skull, “illustrates” (to borrow from the poem’s title) the unfeeling nature of scientific inquiry during the Enlightenment. Jeffers turns Kant’s assessment of Africans in his Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and the Sublime on its head and makes the reader doubt the humanity and capacity for feeling of the European philosophers and scientists responsible for creating the taxonomies and classification systems that structure Enlightenment thought. 

Written in the voice of Kant, the next poem entitled “The Beautiful and the Sublime” sets the philosopher’s famously inflexible routine alongside the rigid racial hierarchies that emerged from Enlightenment science and philosophy:

first the keen whites

                        [I rise]

then the mean yellows

                        [I bathe and dress]

then the savage reds

                        [I break my fast]

then the trifling blacks

                        [I take my sweet walk]

the lowly apes at the last

[lonely contemplation]

first the keen whites

                        [I rise]

When contrasted with his desire to generate universal systems, such as the aesthetic hierarchy he sets forth in the treatise Jeffers quotes in the epigraph, Kant’s existence in Könisberg registers as dangerously particular and insular. His solitary routine and limited lived experience contrasts sharply with the deleterious and universal racial classification systems developed by Kant in his work on aesthetics and, perhaps most famously, Carl Linnaeus in Systema Naturae (1735). Jeffers’s critique of Kant drives home the irrationality inherent in systems created by provincial white European thinkers to structure “objective” or abstract understandings of a global world. Jeffers returns readers to Kant’s work on aesthetics, reminding us that his aesthetic theory not only gendered the beautiful and sublime but also, like Montesquieu and David Hume before him, used national characters that he knew very little, if anything, about to determine the capacity of individuals to feel and create. His work sorts out those European nations who are drawn to the sublime (German, English, Spanish) from those who prefer the beautiful (French, Italian) and then uses these assumptions to assess the capacities of people in the Americas, Asia, and Africa. For example, in the same passage of Kant’s Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and Sublime that Jeffers cites in her epigraph, Kant refers to Hume’s assertion that “among the hundreds of thousands of Africans who have been transported elsewhere . . . not a single one has ever been found who has accomplished something great in art or science,” and concludes that race and geography determine one’s “capacities of mind.”⁴ Ultimately, Kant’s conclusion emerges as a “ridiculous” and “trifling” racist assessment issued by someone who knew very little about the world outside Könisberg.⁵   

The next two poems shift to Enlightenment law and Dido Elizabeth Belle Lindsay and her uncle William Murray, Lord Mansfield, Chief Justice of the King’s Bench, who famously ruled in both the Somerset and Zong cases. The unnamed speaker in the first poem, “Portrait of Dido Elizabeth Belle Lindsay, Free Mulatto, and Her White Cousin, The Lady Elizabeth Murray, Great-Nieces of William Murray, First Earl of Mansfield and Lord Chief Justice of the King’s Bench,” reacts to the 1779 portrait of Dido Elizabeth Belle Lindsay and her cousin Lady Elizabeth Murray, asking readers to “forget [h]istory. She’s a teenager” (60). The speaker appeals to readers and asks them to see the joy and beauty that has captivated viewers of this portrait outside the oppressive structures of Enlightenment, pleading with readers to “Let her be. / Please.” (67). The subsequent poem, “Three Cases Decided By William Murray,” ” places Lord Mansfield, Dido Belle Elizabeth Lindsay’s uncle, in history and in Enlightenment, juxtaposing three cases: the real Somerset and Zong cases for which he wrote decisions and an imagined interior conflict between the private and public Lord Mansfield. The three contrasting voices in the poem (plaintiff, defendant, and judge) reveal the self-interest and emotions that are often channeled through abstract notions of justice. The first section is written in the voice of the Somerset defendant Charles Stewart, a Scottish merchant who purchased James Somerset in Virginia and then transported him to England. Somerset escaped, claiming his freedom on British soil; then Stewart captured and imprisoned Somerset, claiming him as property purchased in Virginia. The speaker in the next section is the plaintiff in the Zong case, Gregson, one of the Liverpool enslavers who sued to be recompensed by the group’s insurance company for the Africans they had thrown overboard during their forced migration. Historians and other scholars have long wondered how Lord Mansfield’s recorded affection for his niece may or may not have impacted his ruling in these cases. Instead of answering this question, Jeffers in the final section of this poem depicts the contradictions Mansfield must have lived with, giving us the fictional trial of “The Public Lord Mansfield v. The Private William Murray, 1787.” Acting as both the defendant and plaintiff, Mansfield leaves behind debates about common and positive law, appealing to natural law: “Dido has become my child. / . . . . Let me protect / my kindred if you will cover / your own. / Natural law will stay: / morality and bones” (70). Mansfield’s refusal to reconcile his public and private selves and his appeal to natural law points to inconsistencies within the Enlightenment legal system, the failure of abstract Enlightenment ideas and principles, and the system’s inability to account for material reality and lived experience.

Jeffers returns to Thomas Jefferson in the final poem of “Book: Enlightenment.” In “Found Poem: Racism,” Jeffers rearranges Jefferson’s racist account of the differences signified by white and black skin color in his Notes on the State of Virginia. She breaks a group of lines at “beauty,” “difference,” and “colour” emphasizing the connection between racist Enlightenment aesthetic hierarchies and his assessments of Phillis Wheatley Peters and her work. Jeffers’s rearrangement of Jefferson’s essay into verse also transforms his essay from an Enlightenment treatise into an aesthetic object to be assessed by readers as he assessed and then dismissed Wheatley Peters and her poetry. Instead of an object of beauty or feeling, Jefferson’s essay emerges as a testament to his failure to feel as well as his inability to apprehend beauty and acknowledge Wheatley Peter’s contributions to the poetry and thought of his era. As a group, the poems in “Book: Enlightenment” testify to the way in which we still live with the consequences of the Enlightenment’s systemization of law, nature, and aesthetics. By using these poems in our classrooms and in our scholarship, we can make sure our interlocutors better understand the history of these enduring Enlightenment frameworks as not just generators of rights and equality but also as part of the architecture of systemic racism. I hope that reading Jeffers will inspire teachers and scholars to retire the familiar frameworks that have structured study of the eighteenth century and embrace a new “Age of Phillis.”

ENDNOTES

[1] Henry Louis Gates, Jr., The Trials of Phillis Wheatley: America’s First Black Poet and her Encounters with the Founding Fathers (New York: Civitas Books, 2003).

[2] Honorée, Fanonne Jeffers, The Age of Phillis (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2020), 59. Subsequent references will be cited parenthetically in the text.

[3] Simon Gikandi, Slavery and the Culture of Taste (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2011); Sankar Muthu, Enlightenment Against Empire (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003); Karen O’Brien, Women and Enlightenment in Eighteenth-Century Britain (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009); J. G. A. Pocock, Barbarism and Religion, 6 vols. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999–2015).

[4] Immanuel Kant, Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and the Sublime and Other Writings, eds. Patrick Frierson and Paul Guyer (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 58-59.

[5] Ibid, 58.

Roundtable by David Mazella
The Age of Phillis and Collage —The Age of Phillis (Roundtable)
DOI: 10.32655/srej.2021.2.2.10
Cite: Mazella, David. 2021. “The Age of Phillis and Collage —The Age of Phillis (Roundtable),” Studies in Religion and the Enlightenment 2 (2): 32-34.
PDF

As I told our group at one of the first meetings, I was approaching Jeffers’s poems as someone who had taught Wheatley Peters to undergraduates, but without much success. Wheatley Peters seemed to cause (I seemed to cause) a mix of discomfort and strained, dutiful attention in my “diverse” classes featuring mostly white authors. Students sometimes expressed frustration, too, at the disconnect between the tragedies, losses, and displacements summarized in the biographies and the formal constructions and tone of the poetry. My attempts to provide context also fell flat. The parallels to Pope and the bare biographical summaries did not help. Introducing responses to her from poets like Amiri Baraka and the Black Arts Movement made things even less comfortable, because I had not made any connections between those poets, their situations, and their poetics in our class.

Reading, teaching, then reflecting on and discussing Jeffers’s The Age of Phillis has helped me understand how much I was shortchanging Wheatley Peters’s poetry, and it gave me a better grasp of Jeffers’s own poetics: the first step was trying to understand the earlier poet’s biography, as partial and fragmented as it is, in its fullest social implications. Jeffers’s research and commentaries reconstructed the earlier poet’s life and experiences as an active member of Boston’s Black community, free and enslaved; as a person who lost one family, lived with another, and then attempted to create her own family with the husband whose name she chose to assume; and as a kind of public curiosity but also correspondent with both public figures (e.g., George Washington and Samson Occom) and members of her own local and religious networks. Seeing her operating within and between these networks made an enormous difference in the way the earlier poems could be read and then interwoven with Jeffers’s own poetic reconstruction of her life and work. This interweaving is how the “critical fabulation” theorized by Hartman begins to supply the missing connections of Wheatley Peters’s fragmentary documentary record. Jeffers takes Wheatley Peters’s life seriously enough to imagine the child’s existence prior to her abduction and the fully grown woman who survived enslavement and found attachment and perhaps even romantic love amidst a precarious freedom. Biography does not solve all interpretive problems, but the problem of regarding her perpetually as a dependent young girl certainly limits our view of her entire poetic career.

Reading Jeffers’s poems reminded me of how some poets and poems really blossom under our attention when isolated and placed in anthologies, and others are ill served. The Age of Phillis really demonstrates how inadequate those anthology-based readings have been for a subtle, understated poet like Wheatley Peters. 

Instead of the flat, compartmentalized narration of a life and context, and a dutiful chronological march through the most familiar poems, in The Age of Phillis, we plunge in media res into an invocation of the “Mother/Muse,” who is conjured up in her “Prologue” via an epigraph from Langston Hughes: “This is a song of the genius child / Sing it softly, for the song is wild” (2).¹ Then, we are transported to a scene of an African mother and daughter in a poem whose title, “An Issue of Mercy #1” hangs on the most notorious line of Wheatley Peters’s best known and least comforting religious poem, “On Being Brought from Africa to America”: “‘Twas mercy that brought me from my Pagan land.”² 

Jeffers’s point of entry, in her opening poem “An Issue of Mercy #1,” gives us a newly imagined view of that “Pagan land,” as seen through the eyes of the child rather than the young poet:

Mercy, girl,

What the mother might have said, pointing

at the sun rising, what makes life possible.

Then, dripped the bowl of water,

Reverent, into oblivious earth.

Was this prayer for her?

Respect for the dead or disappeared?

An act to please a genius child? (3).

In a scene that hinges on the hardest, least intelligible word in an eighteenth-century poem that confidently asserts a “fortunate fall,” mercy in Jeffers’s “Issue” becomes the exclamation of an exasperated African mother, whose rituals and ceremonies are registered but only partially understood by the young girl. Nonetheless, this young girl, “a genius child,” will soon enough be regarded as “dead or disappeared.” Was the mother’s prayer for her? The young girl will never find out.

Mercy, what the child called Phillis

Would claim after that sea journey.

Journey.

Let’s call it that.

Let’s lie to each other. (3)

Jeffers’s narratorial voice takes command here and makes mercy the term that the earlier poet “would claim after that sea journey” (my emphasis). Jeffers’s stress on the poet’s “claim” upon our moral judgment transforms our understanding of the term “mercy” in Wheatley Peters’s poem, so that it sheds its appearance of servility or compliance. Instead, Jeffers helps us view Wheatley Peters’s assertion that “mercy” had brought her to America is an act of mature reflection of the older toward the younger self. It is an act of self-forgiveness, from someone old enough to understand how she has been stolen from and lied to. To produce this alternative reading of mercy, however, Jeffers suggests how profoundly the earlier poet’s story had been truncated from its first moments of circulation and publication.

Jeffers’s poetics goes beyond quotation and rises to the level of collage, which I think of as an antianthology. Elements of Wheatley Peters’s history, her conflicting strands of biography, the key words and phrases of her poems and letters can be detached from a sometimes lying historical context and muddled historical record and remade and reconfigured to show something of the epic journey of “a genius child” who grew up to sing her own soft but wild song.

ENDNOTES

[1] Jeffers’s “Prologue” takes its epigraph from Hughes’s poem, “Genius Child,” in The Collected Poems of Langston Hughes, ed. Arnold Rampersad and David Roessel (Knopf, 1994), 198.

[2] Phillis Wheatley, “On Being Brought From Africa to America,” in Complete Writings, ed. Vincent Carretta (New York: Penguin Classics, 2001), 13.

Roundtable by Jenny Factor and Sam Plasencia
The Age of Phillis in Forms, Found and Free—The Age of Phillis (Roundtable)
DOI: 10.32655/srej.2021.2.2.9
Cite: Factor, Jenny and Plasencia, Sam. 2021. “The Age of Phillis in Forms, Found and Free—The Age of Phillis (Roundtable),” Studies in Religion and the Enlightenment 2 (2): 27-31.
PDF

In The Age of Phillis, Honorée Fanonne Jeffers takes on a work of Black poetic lineage, engaging in a process of matriarchal reclamation that makes scholarship sing. Jeffers’s more traditional prosodic engagement deftly echoes the literary ages in which the book occurs: the masterly and capacious eighteenth-century couplets (and centos) of a Pope or Dryden and the globally prescient pantoums and villanelles that evoke an oral tradition. Yet in addition to the couplets, villanelles, pantoums, and centos of the volume, Jeffers tells a story of embodiment through a more experimental use of form that must be held alongside the fixed forms as one of the most important genealogical engagements of the volume. 

Poetic form—when used as part of a more complicated and nuanced aesthetic project—is not about skillful shapes and received forms alone, but it is rather about a conversation between poetic embodiment and content. In the case of Jeffers’s Phillis, the use of form, at its very essence, works through some of the same struggles that pervade any historical reading of Wheatley Peters herself—namely, how to build a robust story and vibrant sense of an author’s original living body in spite of history’s persistent lacunae about her life and the relationship between her life and her art.¹ Here, the imagined body is the space the form and content are truly co-constitutive. Rhythms and shapes of breath, joy, politics, and oppression infuse the line lengths and shapes of these more experimental poems. 

For example, the poem “mothering #1” is written in twenty-three lines that fluctuate between two and five syllables, mimicking the erratic and shallow inhalations of the titular Gambian mother who is out of breath from the exertion of birthing. In the following section, “The Transatlantic Progress of Sugar in the Eighteenth Century” is written in three eight-line stanzas that each start with one word or character and from there unfurl, with each subsequent line extending slightly further than the previous one. The complete poem takes up one page and takes the form of three ninety-degree triangles. These triangles may be an allusion to the triangle trade wherein Black men and women were kidnapped from Africa and transported to the Americas where their labor produced raw goods that were then shipped to England to be manufactured, which were then dispersed back across the Atlantic and down to Africa to be traded for more Black men and women. The unfurling shape of the stanzas also evokes a paracord whip that sits coiled on its user’s hip until it is used, at which point it extends outwards. That a poem about the massively successful sugar trade takes the form of an unfurling whip reminds readers of the violence that propelled eighteenth-century economies. 

Some of the experimental poems in the volume repeat titles, such as “An Issue of Mercy #1,” “An Issue of Mercy #2,” and “An Issue of Mercy #3,” or “mothering #1,” and “Mothering #2.” The use of repeated titles gives the impression of these poems serving as drafts or variants of one another—an issue powerfully connected to the scholarly afterlife of Phillis Wheatley Peters’s own poetry in which one can never be certain when handling variants that may have appeared alternatively in letters, periodicals, and broadsides, of which version Wheatley Peters most approved, or even whether Wheatley Peters herself was given final authorial say over the more enduring book form of her own work.¹ The poems that hearken to the theme of mercy also serve as a kind of kaleidoscopic thesaurus, echoing directly one of the most controversial lines in Wheatley Peters’s most anthologized poem (“Twas mercy brought me from my Pagan land”).  With each new use of mercy, Jeffers complicates and ironically deploys this challenging word. 

In the two “mothering” variants, Jeffers signals the entanglement of race, violence, and archival recordkeeping by capitalizing the m in the second mothering poem, which is about Susannah Wheatley, but not in the first, which is about Wheatley Peters’s mother. The transatlantic system of enslavement and its extant paper trail are both reasons why we know of the particular being Susannah Wheatley and why we do not know of the African woman who birthed the girl who was later renamed Phillis Wheatley. The distinction in capitalization also disrupts the historicist inclination to overvaluate those for whom we have names: Jeffers gives Wheatley Peters’s mother pride of place in The Age of Phillis. For example, Wheatley Peters’s mother is the imaginative subject of the prologue, “Prologue: Mother/Muse,” where she is titularly aligned with—and positioned as—a muse. She is a central figure throughout the first major section, “Book: Before,” and is reflected back on in other poems throughout the collection. Indeed, mothering is a significant through line in Jeffers’s work. In these ways, the now unknowable woman for whom we have no proper noun reverberates through the text.  

Jeffers also invents and then repeats forms, as with the twenty-five “Lost Letter[s],” the three “Fragment[s],” and four “Found Poem[s].” The “Lost Letter[s]” make key contributions to Jeffers’s engagement with what is unknown in Phillis’s lived experience. These letters are generally invented verse epistles that Jeffers imagines may have once existed—such as a lifelong correspondence between Wheatley Peters and Obour Tanner, based on the existence of extant letters indicating that they shared a friendship and perhaps a church, and a letter between Susannah Wheatley and Samuel Occom, based on a surviving reply from Occom to Wheatley that implies her opinion about Phillis’s manumission. The “Fragment[s]” often contain direct quotations from Wheatley Peters collected works. Like the recent erasure poems of Robin Coste Lewis, these “fragments” make the existing texts sound out in new ways that honor the absence written into them. The “Found Poems” usually tie eighteenth-century historic events together with contemporary twenty-first-century social history, tearing into legal documents and journalism to do so.

In our reading group, we noticed that Jeffers’s found poems usually concluded one of the volume’s ten sections. For example, the first section of The Age of Phillis, “Book: Before,” ends with “Found Poem: Detention #1,” which is a versification of Warren Binford’s interview for the New Yorker about the border camps in Texas.² More specifically, it is a poetic rendition of the interviewer’s inquiry into how many children were imprisoned by othe facility and Binford’s answer, which detailed the overcrowding, filth, and sadness of the “warehouse” (17). Ending “Book: Before” with this found poem is a poignant critical choice. Most of this book takes place in West Africa: it imagines what it might have meant for a Gambian mother and father to have a baby girl, describes prayer rituals, and narrates the little girl as a toddler—walking to the village with Yaay (the Wolof word for “mother”) while eating mango. Put differently, the first half of this book (six pages) imagines a time before the conquest and enslavement that tore this Gambian family apart. The poem on the seventh page is titled “Fracture,” and it narrates the present-tense event of existential rupture: “the men arrive” (13). The second half of “Book: Before” (six pages) is divided between three one-page poems (the father’s “moan,” the mother’s “entreaty,” and the child’s middle passage) and then ends with the three-page found poem on the contemporary detention of children. 

Jeffers’s decision to follow the African child’s middle passage with a found poem on immigration detention offers a transnational, transhistorical, and intersectional analysis of power. First, the juxtaposition draws attention to how white supremacist governments forced migration from one continent for their financial profit and also stall migration from other continents for profit. Secondly, it demonstrates that the apparatuses of enslavement in the United States persist despite the fact that de jure enslavement was abolished. Third, Jeffers’s poetic assembly transhistoricizes racialized violence in order to demonstrate how technologies of power originally practiced on enslaved Africans are now being practiced on Latinx communities. In these ways, Jeffers presents contemporary immigrant detention camps—a booming for-profit, spin-off industry of mass incarceration—as a reiteration of the racialized technologies and relations of power that organized the economies and politics of enslavement. She echoes this alignment of racial violence by concluding the second section, “Book: Passage,” with “Found Poem: Detention #2,” which versifies a Washington Post report by Michael Brice-Saddler on a seven-year-old Guatemalan girl who died while in the custody of the US Border Patrol. Jeffers thus compounds multiple registers of repetition—thematic, titular, formal, and conceptual—in order to demonstrate how enslavement is the blueprint for our current state-sanctioned forms of detention and death. As Christina Sharpe might describe it, such repetitions and reverberations are what it means to live in the wake of slavery, a “disaster” that is “deeply atemporal…always present.”³ 

One of Jeffers’s most fascinating forms challenges readers to become conscious of both the privileging practices and the social ecologies of their own acts of reading. These two three-column contrapuntal poems were likely modeled after the multicolumn, multidirectional syncopated sonnets of Tyehimba Jess, who popularized the form in his recent collections Olio (2016) and Leadbelly (2005).⁴ Jess’s two books also use archival materials to make poetry of the lives of African American artists in history. Two of these multicolumn poems are found in The Age of Phillis. The first, “The Mistress Attempts to Instruct Her Slave in the Writing of a Poem,” is organized into three columns. The left and right columns each contain an extra line at the top comprised of just a name: “Phillis” initiates the left column and “Susannah” begins the right column. In between them is a column wherein each line is italicized, in brackets, and ranges between two and five syllables. This poem’s structure invites readers to play with the order of reading. You can read by prioritizing each column: read from top to bottom and left to right, or reverse that order and start at the bottom. Alternatively, you can prioritize lines: from left to right and top to bottom or in reverse. You could even read from right to left, top to bottom or bottom to top. The complexity of these multiple arrangements and how they shape the poem’s meaning is intensified by the note that prefaces the poem: “This verse to the End is the Work of Another Hand. / –Addition by Phillis Wheatley at the bottom of ‘Niobe in Distress’” (53). This preface calls into question the center column of italicized and bracketed phrases: are these—as in the lost letters—internal thoughts? If so, whose? Susannah’s? Or are these the distressed thoughts of the “Niobe”?

The second contrapuntal poem, “chorus of the Mother-Griotte,” is even more complex. It’s found in the section entitled “Muses: Convening,” in which Jeffers, following the titular allusion to the Greek sister goddesses, assembles seven women’s voices, including the Yoruban water deity Yemoja and Ona Judge, a Black woman enslaved by Martha Washington. “Chorus of the Mother-Griotte” is the second poem in the section, preceded by Yemoja and succeeded by an enslaved mother named Isabell. “Griotte” refers to the “Griots,” a highly respected traveling group of oral historians in West Africa—storytellers, singers, poets, and musicians who reposit and performatively share history. As with the Griots, this poem tells a history that comprises many histories: of a girl “who was sold,” stood “naked in the corner,” and marched through the “door of no return” (92). As with the first contrapuntal poem, Jeffers makes use of three columns; however, in this poem, the text is further divided into five three-line segments. Each grouping is preceded by a short phrase, centered above the middle column: “amnesiac wood,” “sailing knot to knot,” “jealous sharks,” “on the battlefield,” and “in God’s name.” For example, the first grouping is as follows:

                                                amnesiac wood

nostrils of girls                        who was bought                      uncle’s hand

guts on the air                         who was old                            defeated man

history’s charnel                     I say                                        trader’s silver

While each grouping might still hold the possibility of a multidirectional reading experience, Jeffers controls her reader’s movement through the use of short poetic lines that anticipate—or perhaps introduce or frame—each three-line grouping. These framing lines force the reader to move from top to bottom and make readers contend with each grouping before moving on to the next. 

“Chorus of the Mother-Griotte” is another beautiful example of how Jeffers intertwines structure and content: this poem’s arrangement bespeaks a certain kind of historical movement that is both punctuated and indefinable. Jeffers represents the passing of time and experience as demarcated by violence: the knots that tie African wrists during transport, the sharks who follow slave ships, the battlefield that brought death but not Black liberation (in 1775 and 1862). What is so brilliant about the poem is that in the final analysis, the passing of time and poetic segments is itself an illusion. What we actually get is a history of repeated antiblack violence. Calvin Warren calls this temporality “Black Time”: “a time without duration; it is a horizon of time that eludes objectification, foreclosing idioms such as ‘getting over,’ ‘getting through,’ or ‘getting beneath.’”⁶  Black time is marked by a “horizon of violence” that “fractures the vectors of temporality” into “an infinite array of absurdities, paradoxes, and contradictions.”⁷ (59). In “The Mistress Attempts to Instruct Her Slave in the Writing of a Poem,” if Jeffers invites the reader to engage in the intricacies of reading an incomplete history with our own insights and perspectives, Jeffers’s “Chorus of the Mother-Griotte” draws the line. At last, in controlling the direction of our reading, Jeffers reminds us that some facts do not leave room for apologist interpretation. Jeffers’s contrapuntal poem embodies this temporality and performs its fracture through the line-breaking, punctuating articulations of violence. This history of fracture, expressed in fragments and visual splinters, is shattering. There is perhaps no better word to describe the intellectual, psychic, and emotional experience of reading the many formal experimentations of Jeffers’s The Age of Phillis.

And yet, what is most surprising is how the sheer formal inventiveness connects with archival virtuosity to also impart a sense of possibility and freedom verging on joy. In the final coda to The Age of Phillis, Jeffers connects her own book’s project to that moment when, as a child, she was first introduced to Phillis Wheatley. She writes:

To my teachers, the eighteenth-century poet Phillis Wheatley was the first of the firsts, a beacon for black children . . . . Neither of my parents liked (or respected) her poetry much, but that wasn’t the point. The point was loyalty to the race, to African American men and women.  

This “loyalty to the race” and to undoing the injustice of forgetting a potent African American foremother seems to drive Jeffers toward a project steeped in formal virtuosity, both fertile and lively. Alongside structural and formal echoes from Tyehimba Jess and Robin Coste Lewis, Jeffers engages in a powerful citational praxis, seeding her poems with lines shared from a century and a quarter of African American and Afro-Caribbean poets and their poetries: Elizabeth Alexander, Gwendolyn Brooks, Lucille Clifton, Rita Dove, Nikki Giovanni, Robert Hayden, Langston Hughes, A. Van Jordan, June Jordan, Audre Lorde, M. NourbeSe Philip, Natasha Tretheway, and Afaa Michael Weaver—all of whom are explicitly credited in the volume’s extensive endnotes. Claiming Wheatley Peters as root to a powerful family tree, Jeffers’s formal engagement breathes possibility and intellect, vulnerability and strength, linguistic tour de force and Enlightenment racial consciousness into the lacunae that remain in Wheatley Peters’s own story. As a result, The Age of Phillis brings Wheatley Peters’s life and poetry into connection with the African American poetries of the present day. In this sense, it is Jeffers herself who is serving as griotte across three centuries, and we are the ones to whom Wheatley Peters is revealed and her legacy healed. 

ENDNOTES

[1] For more on Wheatley Peters’ subject position and her art, cf., Tara Bynum, “Phillis Wheatley’s Pleasures: Reading Good Feeling in Phillis Wheatley’s Poems and Letters,” Commonplace: the journal of early American Life, accessed March 13, 2021, http://commonplace.online/article/phillis-wheatleys-pleasures/.

[2] Vincent Carretta, Phillis Wheatley: Biography of a Genius in Bondage, (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2011), 48-50, 80-85, 213.

[3] Isaac Chotiner, “Inside a Texas Building Where the Government is Holding Immigrant Children,” New Yorker (June 22, 2019).

[4] Christina Sharpe, In the Wake: On Blackness and Being (Durham: Duke University Press, 2016), 5.

[5] Tyehimba Jess, Leadbelly ( Seattle: Wave Books, 2005) and Olio (Seattle: Wave Books, 2016).

[6] Calvin Warren, “Black Time: Slavery, Metaphysics, and the Logic of Wellness” The Psychic Hold of Slavery: Legacies in American Expressive Culture, edited by Soyica Diggs Colbert, R. J. Patterson, and Aida Levy-Hussen, 55–68 (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2016), 56.

[7] Warren, “Black Time,” 59.

Roundtable by Sam Plasencia
The Black Radical Tradition in The Age of Phillis—The Age of Phillis (Roundtable)
DOI: 10.32655/srej.2021.2.2.8
Cite: Plasencia, Sam. 2021. “The Black Radical Tradition in The Age of Phillis—The Age of Phillis (Roundtable),” Studies in Religion and the Enlightenment 2 (2): 22-26.
PDF

Honorée Fanonne Jeffers’s The Age of Phillis (2020) is the culmination of nearly fifteen years of research on the eighteenth-century enslaved poetess Phillis Wheatley, who was manumitted in 1773 and married John Peters, a Boston grocer, five years later. In “Looking for Miss Phillis,” the essay that concludes this collection of ninety-nine individually titled poems, Jeffers explains that she wrote this book because she got tired of waiting for someone to write a biography of Wheatley that discussed her “free lineage,” including the family, customs, and cosmologies that informed her life before enslavement.¹ All existing biographies, including Vincent Carretta’s carefully researched Phillis Wheatley: Biography of a Genius in Bondage (2011), begin their treatment of Wheatley “at the Boston Harbor in 1761, with her disembarking a slave ship” (174). And what of her marriage to John Peters? Jeffers asks why literary historians “have entrusted the story of Phillis Wheatley and John Peters to a white woman [Margaretta Matilda Odell] who may have made assumptions about Wheatley’s husband, assumptions that might not just be wrong, but also the product of racial stereotypes” (173). What if Wheatley wasn’t a “sycophant” (180)? What if John Peters wasn’t a “hustler” who abused and then abandoned Wheatley (180)? The extant archives do not support these depictions of Wheatley or Peters, and the only evidence of Odell’s authorial claim to being a “collateral descendant” of the white Wheatleys is her claim itself. 

We literary historians have thus put a tremendous amount of trust in Odell’s authority—and yet there are ample reasons to question it. Besides the obviously racist ways in which Odell interprets a Black man who aspires for more than day laboring and her oxymoronic romanticizing of Phillis’s privilege while enslaved by John and Susannah Wheatley, Jeffers’s painstaking investigation of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century print records suggest that Odell may not have even written the biography. Advertisements for Odell’s book, printed by the publisher George W. Light in a periodical he was also responsible for publishing, listed the Memoir without attributing it to an author. What’s more, these advertisements appeared alongside advertisements for another Wheatley biography—Memoir of Phillis Wheatley—accredited to B. B. Thatcher, a Boston lawyer who published two books on Native Americans and creative work in Godey’s Lady’s Book. Repeated advertisements for the two memoirs continued to omit Odell’s name. Some forty-plus years later, an anonymous footnote to volume 7 of Proceedings of the Massachusetts Historical Society (1877) announces Odell as the author of the memoir, represents Thatcher as having edited it, and denies the existence of a second biography. Jeffers assembles a catalog of questions and possibilities in response to this confusing archival record—indisputably demonstrating that more research is needed and that, in the meantime, “the responsible, professional course of action would be to cease using Odell as a primary source for Wheatley Peters’s life” (180). 

In The Age of Phillis, Jeffers does just that. The result is a portrait of a daughter loved by her parents, traumatized by the transatlantic slave trade, ensnared in—and aware of—the complex affective relationships bred by enslavement, committed to a lifelong friendship with another enslaved woman, excited by the swirling discourses of liberty, enamored by John Peters, and above all, consistently determined in love and life. One of Jeffers’s enduring legacies will be her insistence that we stop referring to this African poetess by her enslaver’s name and instead call her Phillis Wheatley Peters, the name of her choosing. 

In, through, and around the retelling of Phillis Wheatley Peters’s life, Jeffers weaves the stories, people, and philosophies of the late eighteenth century. The resulting collection portrays an intercontinental age, stitched together by the trades in Black bodies and racialized discourses (scientific, political, and religious). By positioning Wheatley Peters at the center of this epoch, Jeffers draws seemingly disparate worlds and spheres into the same orbit: Gambia and Boston, Yemoja and Christianity, the illustration of the British slave ship Brookes and letters from the Indigenous Christian missionary Samson Occum, Ona Judge (enslaved by Martha Washington) and the “Portrait of Dido Elizabeth Belle Lindsay,” African prayers and the eighteenth-century sugar trade, the door of no return and descriptions of ravenous wolves in the tower of London, and Jeffersonian race science and the Kantian sublime. In these ways The Age of Phillis assembles the sights, sounds, tastes, smells, and touches of the Black diaspora as African-descended persons mingled with eighteenth-century art, philosophy, trade, tourism, families, and more.

What follows are some insights that emerged from a group of scholars engaging in a semester-long slow read of Jeffers’s work. We were inspired by an online teach-in on “Race, Whiteness, and Pedagogy in the Long 18th Century” held in August 2020 and by the Society of Early Americanists’ (SEA’s) announcement of a Common Reading Initiative on The Age of Phillis, organized by Tara Bynum, Patrick Erben, Brigitte Fielder, Michelle Bachelor Robinson, and Cassander L. Smith. At every stage of our reading, we were enthralled and challenged by this poignant work, and in lieu of a more traditional book review, we share with you here some of our observations on method, structure, and content.

Critical Fabulation

 We were struck by Jeffers’s method, her beautiful weaving of historical fact and speculation, which reflects the kind of creative and scholarly blending that Saidiya Hartman has termed “critical fabulation.” For Hartman, this form of narrativizing enables the researcher of enslaved persons to “tell an impossible story and to amplify the impossibility of its telling.”² In Jeffers’s work, critical fabulation takes a plethora of forms. One particularly striking and recurring form is the lost letter. The Age of Phillis contains twenty-five “lost letters”—imagined correspondences based on extant letters between Phillis Wheatley Peters and Susannah Wheatley, Samson Occom, Obour Tanner, and John Peters. In these poetic renditions of interpersonal exchanges, Jeffers typographically represents the epistle’s text in standard type and intersperses the writer’s thoughts in italics. In these italics, we hear Susannah Wheatley vitriolically insult Samson Occom as a “drunk painted creature” (55), Nathaniel Wheatley dismiss his mother’s desire to manumit Wheatley Peters in light of the money that “white men would pay to hear and touch” her (113), Wheatley Peters articulate the pain of missing her family (57) and admit that she does “know” her African name but lies and says she doesn’t (77). In these affective vignettes, readers encounter the performative niceties of a traditionally private form (letters) punctuated by uncouth, or unsafe, truths (thoughts). The melding destabilizes the presumption that letters express true thoughts and thus reminds us of “what cannot be known,” even when archival records survive.³ These lost letters are thus both speculative ventures into the mind of eighteenth-century figures and critical disruptions of historicist presumptions about knowability.  

At other times, Jeffers’s critical fabulation is more cautious, as in the poem “Phillis Wheatley Peruses Volumes of the Classics Belonging to Her Neighbor the Reverend Mather Byles.” From the outset, the narrative voice conjectures through conditional statements: “I hope that the days Phillis walked / across the street or around the corner / to explore the reverend’s library, / she was escorted by Mary or Susannah” (47). Other lines describe how the “reverend might” have quizzed her (47), and they again express “hope” that if Wheatley Peters was left alone with the reverend, “there was no danger” and he “was a gentleman” (48). In such poems the unnamed speaker assumes the position of questioning researcher, grappling with what’s left of the historical record to understand archival omissions. At times, this grappling comes in the form of conditional verbs. At other times, it comes through questions that may never be answered, such as when the speaker of “Fathering #2” asks: “Or was it the husband who purchased / the little girl? I’ve thought on this for many / years: how might a wife, a respectable, / white lady, go down to the docks / and complete a fleshy transaction?” (43). In these poems, Jeffers makes use of conditionals to imagine behaviors, events, and even spaces—like in the poem “Desk of Mary Wheatley, Where She Might Have Taught the Child (Re)named Phillis to Read.” This method enables Jeffers to move seamlessly between the scales of personal and political, letter and epic journeys, all while undermining these distinctions both formally and thematically.

The work Jeffers does here with and through critical fabulation is reminiscent of Hartman’s most recent work, Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments: Intimate Histories of Riotous Black Girls and Troublesome Women, and Queer Radicals (2020), which was published less than two months before Jeffers’s The Age of Phillis. Though Hartman writes in prose and Jeffers in verse, both thinkers make powerful use of speculation to represent Black women whose intimate histories have been lost, expunged, or were never recorded. Informed by rigorous archival research, these texts hover between historicism and creative writing, disrupting the disciplinary boundaries that began coagulating in the late eighteenth century and that have since aided and abetted the institutionalized erasure of Black lives and voices. 

Black Joy

As someone who routinely teaches early African American literature to undergraduates, I am perpetually frustrated by how easy it is for students to talk about Black death when they are, as I have learned, virtually silent on matters related to Black life. Questions about Black pleasure, survival tactics, mutual aid, and family seem to fall on deaf ears while there is always a queue waiting to speak on the travesty of enslavement and the breaking of families. Put differently, students can see and recognize how Black persons in the long eighteenth century were socially dead whether they were enslaved or free: powerless, generally dishonored, and alienated from  birth.⁴ But they cannot, to borrow Jared Sexton’s formulation, see the social life of social death or the ways through which peoples of the Black diaspora have made a way out of no way.⁵ 

What makes Jeffers’s text so powerful is that she deploys critical fabulation to portray the social life of social death. Take for example the speculative “Free Negro Courtship #1” and “Free Negro Courtship #2,” in which the first-person speaker tells us how they imagine the courtship between Phillis Wheatley and John Peters unfolding. Nestled into the “Book: Love,” amidst lost letters in which Susannah Wheatley urges Wheatley Peters “never to marry or bear / children” these poems offer the excitement of budding love (121). “I like to dream,” begins the narrator in the first of the two poems, “that Phillis and John stepped / in a time that didn’t pay mind / to the sounds of Boston” (125). In the imaginative space of the poem and the literal page on which it is printed, Black sociality, desire, and pleasure are given precedence: the lovers’ discourse is represented as a “sanctuary,” John Peters’s is “impatient . . . to touch the kinks beneath her cap,” “a sister” may have been “sought out” to intercede on his behalf and pass along a letter, and this same sister may have given “John a sign that Phillis / was allowing him to court her” (125). Although the specter of enslavement looms in the background, such as when John Peters “wished in vain for gold to give her, / the bride price to press his suit, / as he might have across the water,” the focal point is Black love and courtship (125). The focus on social death is again refused in “Free Negro Courtship #2,” when the narrator states, “I’m unafraid of watered memories, / but this is a poem in which tragedy / can’t be invoked” (127). The reader is then taken to “the side alley off Queen Street” where, for “the first time, a careful kiss / between two sets of black lips” took place (127). In this space “Phillis and John” stood, “breathing together” (125). These are moments of stolen life, which Fred Moten has recently described as acts that fugitivity cut through the fabric of anti-blackness.⁶ These poems remind us that Wheatley Peters laughed, loved, desired, and felt pleasure, excitement, and hope—before, during, and after enslavement. 

Jeffers thus intertwines representations of trauma with the social life of social death. We’re invited to bear witness to Wheatley Peters’s baptism and her friendship with Obour Tanner (whom she addresses as “Sister of My Nation”). We learn about the muses who may have inspired her and undoubtedly inspired Jeffers. We watch her walk the streets of London and visit “that place of curiosity / in the Tower” of London (107). In “Book: Liberty,” we read of her marriage to John Peters and their physical enjoyment of each other. In “Catalogue: Revolution,” we read “Fragment #3: First Draft of an Extant Letter” from Wheatley Peters to George Washington, in which her italicized and crossed-out thoughts express her inalienable freedom and censure him for vacillating between tyrant and gentleman “depending on his moods or his money” (139). And we bear witness to love letters between Phillis and John, who was imprisoned for debt—he didn’t abandon her. In poetically rendering the fullness of Wheatley Peters’s life, especially with John Peters, Jeffers challenges, simultaneously, the homogeneously tragic renditions of enslaved women and the Odellian tale of a privileged servant destroyed by a bad marriage. 

Jeffers also focalizes Black merriment, love, and companionship in ways that extend beyond Wheatley Peters. For example, she writes a poem on the “Portrait of Dido Elizabeth Belle Lindsay, Free Mulatto, and Her White Cousin, the Lady Elizabeth Murray, Great-Nieces of William Murray, First Earl of Mansfield,” wherein “the lowest are taller” and Dido is “full of girlhood” (66–67). In another poem, “Illustration: A Mungo Macaroni / A Black Englishman of Sartorial Splendor,” Jeffers celebrates a man who, within the white archival record, remains only as satire: “I confess,” he says, “I am vainglorious. / I snatch after life / as I please, bespoke / or nothing else— / thrills loosed / from silver collars” (109). “Silver collars” refers to the decorative, dog-like collars wealthy English women and men forced their enslaved persons to wear. This man, loosening pleasure from the aesthetic technologies of antiblackness, paradigmatically exemplifies Moten’s notion of “stolen life.” Though no extant letters from Obour Tanner to Wheatley Peters exist, Jeffers imagines them back into being and with them the comfort only one enslaved woman could offer another. “My Dearest Sister,” Tanner writes, “Spell me how you wish, for you have saved me. / Before your letter, no one gave a care for my name” (78). Tanner tells of the day she met Wheatley Peters, on the pier, as “naked, shivering brethren” were marched off ships. Triggered, she “dropped [her] basket of dinner fish” but found comfort in Wheatley Peters, whose “breath / calmed and we stood with no explanation” (78). In another letter, Tanner reminisces of “the gold my mother wore / around her neck and in her ears” (153). This friendship is a refuge, a space of safety, comfort, and shared history. And while much of that shared history is traumatic, the act of sharing it is relieving, a space of social life carved through the fabric of social death. 

The Age of Phillis is a body of work born of the Black Radical Tradition and is thus itself a testament to and manifestation of Black life. The text is rife with intertextual references to a long tradition of Black artists and activists. At one register are all the Black writers of Wheatley Peters’s age whose lives, unrecorded thoughts, and printed words are woven across the book: Phillis Wheatley Peters, Obour Tanner, Anton Wilhelm Amo, Lemuel Haynes, Belinda Sutton (who petitioned the courts for old age pension), Felix (an unidentified Black man who petitioned the Massachusetts General Court for freedom), Crispus Attucks (a Black and Indigenous man killed during the Boston Massacre), Salem Poor (who fought in the Revolutionary War), and Harry Washington (a fugitive from enslavement who escaped to Novia Scotia). Then there are all the Black artists cited by way of epigraphs: Langston Hughes, Countee Cullen, Robert Hayden, Lucille Clifton, Paul Lawrence Dunbar, Margaret Walker, and Marcus Rediker. There are also intertextual homages made to Black artists whose work thematically and structurally marks The Age of Phillis: Dionne Brand, M. NourbeSe Philip, Robert Coste Lewis, and Tyehimba Jess, to name just a few. To these literary, political, theological, and philosophical thinkers could be added the names of countless others whose existences inflect the text—stretching it backwards to precolonial Africa and forward to today. I’ve just scratched the surface of what this book has to offer scholars and instructors. But in all the ways I have described, and so many more I have yet to learn, The Age of Phillis is a love letter to African traditions, diasporic histories, and Blackness. 

ENDNOTES

[1] Honorée Fanonne Jeffers. The Age of Phillis. (Middletown: Wesleyan University Press, 2020), 186.  All subsequent citations will be notes parenthetically.

[2] Saidiya Hartman, “Venus in Two Acts,” Small Axe, 26, Vol. 12, No. 2, (June 2008): 1-14, 11.

[3] Hartman, “Venus in Two Acts,” 4

[4] Orlando Paterson, Slavery and Social Death: A Comparative Study, Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1982.

[5] Jared, Sexon, “The Social Life of Social Death,” Tensions Journal 5 (Fall/Winter 2011): 1–47.

[6] Fred Moten, Stolen Life (Durham: Duke University Press, 2018).

Roundtable by Jessica Valenzuela
Voices of the Past, Present, and Future: How Eighteenth-Century Black Writers Reshape Twenty-First-Century Academia —Talking Back to the Enlightenment: Practicing Anti-Racist Teaching and Learning in Eighteenth-Century British Literature (Roundtable)
DOI: 10.32655/srej.2021.2.2.7
Cite: Valenzuela, Jessica. 2021. “Voices of the Past, Present, and Future: How Eighteenth-Century Black Writers Reshape Twenty-First-Century Academia —Talking Back to the Enlightenment: Practicing Anti-Racist Teaching and Learning in Eighteenth-Century British Literature (Roundtable),” Studies in Religion and the Enlightenment 2 (2): 20-21.
PDF

To study US history, one must reopen wounds from the past trauma that has seeped down from generation to generation, inflicting pain on individuals of the Black community. The same discrimination remains an ugly scar that is ever present in today’s social climate. This cycle of hatred has evolved over time, rooted in the transatlantic slave trade. Studying the writings of Black authors—such as Phillis Wheatley, Olaudah Equiano, and Ottobah Cugoano—is necessary to reshape academic discourse. These writings serve as important foundations for progressive acts toward racial justice. In an attempt to incorporate more Black voices into class curricula, members of academia have an important role in deciding who will be included on course reading lists and research activities. If students and teachers want to shape an inclusive space, they must hold conversations and discuss not only the root causes of racial discrimination but also how it has affected the current social climate in the United States. It is important to consider Black voices of the eighteenth century because students should be made aware of why the past is connected to racial discrimination in the present and why these issues perpetuate themselves. Wheatley, Equiano, and Cugoano each contribute to this dialogue. These writers were able to defend themselves, often writing with tropes like the “noble Negro” and using scriptural passages as a means of disproving the slander spewed by white egotistical male theorists like Immanuel Kant and David Hume.¹

Wheatley uses religious rhetoric to make her writing palatable for an eighteenth-century audience in her poem “On Being Brought from Africa to America.” Wheatley’s last couplet is a word of caution: “Remember, Christians, Negros, black as Cain, / May be refin’d and join th’angelic train,”² reminding believers who hold prejudice against Black individuals that they are seen as equals to white people in God’s eyes. This subtle jab works well with Wheatley’s argument because she uses Christian rhetoric familiar to her readers as a source of agency; she exposes racial discrimination and situates herself within more human terms. Since I believe that discourses on the civil justice of the Black community should remain a part of academic discussion as a means of addressing racial injustices, Wheatley’s written contribution serves as a vital source of support and a touchstone for educators and readers.

Following Wheatley, Equiano and Cugoano were not afraid to use the “noble Negro” trope or their audience’s expectations about religion and identity to their advantage. These writers utilized Christian scripture as a means of disproving proslavery advocates by repositioning God’s message for racial equality in their narratives. In Equiano’s Narrative, he states, “Might not an African ask you, ‘learned you this from your God . . . do unto all men as you would men should do unto you,’” a passage from Matthew 7:12 that he directs toward the perpetrators of the slave trade.^[3] Equiano uses the word of God and is given agency by calling out Christian slave traders on their inhumane acts toward enslaved individuals and by exposing the blatant hypocrisy taking place. Similarly, Cugoano’s Thoughts and Sentiments is a personal account of his life in which he relies on the Christian doctrine to support his narrative. Cugoano states that it is “the incumbent duty of all men of enlightened understanding, and of every man that has any claim or affinity to the name of Christian, that the base treatment which the African Slaves undergo, ought to be abolished; and it is moreover evident, that the whole, or any part of that iniquitous traffic of slavery, can no where, or in any degree, be admitted, but among those who must eventually resign their own claim to any degree of sensibility and humanity.”^[4] Based on his reasoning, persons engaging in the slave enterprise cannot claim to be humane, nor, through Cugoano’s linking this argument to Christianity, can they claim to be Christians. Similar to Wheatley, Cugoano and Equiano use religious rhetoric to co-opt the language of slavery and instead use it for abolitionism and personal liberation.

Given the brave choices made by these writers, it is our job as academics to give back agency to the eighteenth-century voices that have been drowned out by white supremacy. Our job is to break that mold and address the voices that have been marginalized and disregarded for centuries. I believe that through honest conversations about American history, students are able to understand how the past has shaped the current social climate and racial injustices.

ENDNOTES

[1] Ayanna Jackson-Fowler, “Phyllis Wheatley, Olaudah Equiano, and Ottobah Cugoano: Legacy of the Noble Negro,” in Transatlantic Literature of the Long Eighteenth Century, ed. Kamille Stone Stanton and Julie A. Chappell (Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2011), 51–64. This article gives an overview of the term, using Wylie Sypher’s apt phrasing: it is “the African who united the traits of the white man, so that he might not be repulsive . . . and the traits of the Negro, so that he might arouse pity.” For more from Sypher, see Sypher, Guinea’s Captive Kings: British Anti-Slavery Literature of the XVIIIth Century (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1942).

[2] Phillis Wheatley, Phillis Wheatley: Complete Writings, ed. Vincent Carretta (New York: Penguin Books, 2001).

[3] Equiano, Interesting Narrative, 190.

[4] Ottobah Cugoano, “Thoughts and Sentiments on the Evil and Wicked Traffic of the Slavery: And Commerce of the Human Species, Humbly Submitted to the Inhabitants of Great-Britain, by Ottobah Cugoano, A Native of Africa,” in Black Atlantic Writers of the Eighteenth Century: Living the New Exodus in England and the Americas, ed. Adam Potkay and Sandra Burr (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1995), 129–58, 130.