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Phillis Wheatley: The Consensual Blackness of Early African American Writing Phillip M. Richards It is no accident that early black writing is an Enlightenment phenomenon. The first African writers of the Anglo-Atlantic world turned their appropriated Europeanized consciousness back upon the West itself. Through them, the West saw itself mirrored in African eyes. Eighteenth-century travel narratives often featured an exotic traveler whose reports represented Western culture from a foreign vantage. From this perspective, the taken-for-granted realities of early modern society revealed their nature as the creation of a particular society in a certain time and place. This convention points to an important enlightenment “truth” elaborated by eighteenth-century French and Anglo-Atlantic thinkers such as Montesquieu in The Persian Letters, Swift in Gulliver’s Travels, and Tom Paine in Common Sense. Not only are our society’s most basic truths social fictions, but we acquire self-consciousness by stepping out of our accustomed social position and viewing ourselves from the standpoint of the other. Through his or her strangeness, the other becomes a vehicle by which we know and define ourselves. As eighteenth-century explorers and travelers mapped new territories, they discovered not only new worlds, but themselves. Given this situation, black writers would have been invented had they not eventually appeared. In British North America, this act of invention took place and shaped the art that African Americans eventually produced. Historically speaking, black writing in the Anglo-Atlantic world emerges as literate blacks turn their attention to poetry, preaching, and oratory in lateeighteenth -century New England. Soon after mid-century, the religious tracts of Lemuel Haynes, the poetry of Phillis Wheatley, and the sermons and verses of Jupiter Hammon join a burgeoning New England pamphlet literature promoting revivalist enthusiasm, responding to the horrors of the Revolution as it had to the French and Indian War, as well as commenting on the eventual 248 Phillip M. Richards separation between Great Britain and her colonies. Black literary personae set forth the social structures, values, and rituals that created order amidst American and African American society in the tumult of Revolutionary and post-Revolutionary life. Black writing emerged as black writers undertook the sustained task of setting forth the consensual worldview by which their culture lived. In doing so, the first African American writers measured members of the white Anglo-Atlantic world by its own standards, and extended the implications of its central ideologies. At the heart of early-eighteenth-century black expression was a preconceived language of sentiment, which had emerged first among white writers— often in execution sermons and narratives in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries (Howard). This language appropriated the modes of feeling drawn from Puritan theology and piety setting forth what Clifford Geertz has called the “moods and motivations” of religion (Geertz 94–98). A shared language of sentiment allowed black writers such as Phillis Wheatley, Jupiter Hammon, and Olaudah Equiano to communicate with a white audience, in a consensual language, framing showed values. These black personae that appeared in public discourses such as execution narratives and sermons became the basis by which the first African American writers communicated with the larger world.1 Within the context of this world, white Western audiences grasped the possibility of a “black” voice whose psychology mirrored their own, and black writers formulated their own place within a white Anglo-Atlantic world. This black voice grew more important as whites had increasing reason to define themselves vis à vis a growing black population. During the first three-quarters of the eighteenth century, the numbers of the black population increased rapidly. The moral and social control of blacks as well as whites became an important goal of New England life in a white society that increasingly feared crime, independence, and anger.2 In this context, the black persona easily became a mirror image for those socially disruptive emotions and intellectual attitudes within the white public consciousness. Through such a reflection, whites observed those psychological impulses, which they wished to control in themselves. The unintended consequences of this development, however, was that blacks became humanized as emotionally, intellectually, and psychologically complex human beings. Before the actual advent of black writers ,plausibly“human”rhetoricalstancesforblackshadexisted.Inthisrespect, black writing largely emerged from the ideological dynamics of Puritanism. Dickson Bruce has persuasively argued that Anglo-American literary languages provided the rhetoric and substance of early black expression (65). An Consensual Blackness 249 examination of Phillis Wheatley’s appropriation of Puritan piety into a sentimental discourse...

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