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The Pan-African and Puritan Dimensions of Phillis Wheatley’s Poems and Letters Babacar M’Baye Phillis Wheatley was an eighteenth-century African American writer who strongly identified with Africa’s suffering from the Atlantic slave trade and developed sustained criticisms against slavery, racism, and other injustices against blacks in America and Africa. In her poems and her extant letters, Wheatley makes strong Pan-Africanist and other nationalist references that allowed her to offset the occasional ambivalence that she expressed toward Africa. She was part of a small, elite group of Western-educated black intellectuals such as Olaudah Equiano and Ottobah Cugoano whose views on Africa did not represent those of all other black populations in the West. She received an education and eventually acquired freedom, experiences, and opportunities that were not available to most blacks in the West. Yet she utilized her elite status and individuality by linking her suffering to blacks in Africa and to the African diaspora, thereby becoming a pioneer figure of Pan-Africanism. Wheatley drew upon African oral narratives and worldviews that resonated with key ideas and rhetorics of Puritanism. She used these narratives, worldviews, ideas, and figures of speech in order to gain admissibility and recognition in America and fight for the freedom of blacks. The purpose of this comparison of Puritan and Wolof Islamic cosmogonies is not to force European values on African ones, but to give a specific African theological and cultural context to the writings of Wheatley, which have so far been examined, for the most part, in their Christian and Western contexts. Here Pan-Africanism refers to the relationships that black populations from the United States, the Caribbean, and England drew among themselves from the 1770s through the end of the twentieth century in order to resist, collectively or individually, European slavery, imperialism, colonization, and 272 Babacar M’Baye racism. My conception of Pan-Africanism is indebted to Iris Schmeisser’s interpretation of the adjective “Pan-African” as a word that “signifies a specific construction of black otherness and how ideas about black otherness functioned within the actual cultural, historical, and political contexts of their times, as they [Africans] were embedded in the specific dialogues and significations of the contemporaneous discursive order that characterized the cultural landscape of Paris in the interwar years” (117). Schmeisser’s definition of Pan-Africanism allows us to stress both continuities and transformations in the development of the movement as well as the specific contexts in which it evolved. Yet Schmeisser’s representation of Pan-Africanism as a movement that developed only in the cultural landscape of Paris during the interwar years is somewhat reductive, since it ignores the constructions of “black otherness” during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Sterling Stuckey’s major study of eighteenth-century Pan-Africanism, Slave Culture: Nationalist Theory and the Foundations of Black America (1987), argues that the Pan-African struggle in the diaspora started between 1800 and 1807 when a Pan-African consciousness was being formed in the culture of the African slaves in the Americas. Slaves in South Carolina and in the West Indies, “who had experienced the Middle Passage and had retained memories of the complexities of African culture,” were able to draw from shared experiences and cultures that influenced their political visions, religious outlook, and resistance against slavery (44). One example of a diasporan African community given by Stuckey is the ceremony of “election day” in eighteenth-century New England in which slaves chose a king who “carried himself as ruler and treated his [black] followers like subjects” and “controlled [their affairs] on behalf of others.” For Stuckey, the behavior of the black ruler and subjects during the parades of kings and governors in eighteenth-century New England reveals “the existence of elements of a Pan-African culture in New World slavery,” especially since “substantial numbers of slaves in Cuba and North America came from essentially the same areas of Africa” (79). Stuckey’s arguments demonstrate the strong and pervasive impact of African culture on the traditions that the enslaved Africans invented in the diaspora . Discussing a Senegambian tale entitled “The Hare Seeks Endowments from Allah,” the collector Emil Magel writes, “The presence of the elephant in many Wolof stories attests to its former existence in the Senegambian savannah regions. In the early years of European trade with the Senegambian people, ivory was an important cash crop. Today, Wolof people know about Pan-African and Puritan Dimensions 273 elephants only through oral narratives” (181). The Senegambians...

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