Provocation: Diplomatic Negotiations in Phillis Wheatley's Ambassadorial "On Being Brought from Africa to America"

Scholars of the Black lived experience have always had a contentious relationship with the writings and poetry of Phillis Wheatley Peters. Discussions about the contemporaneous reach of her advocacy for other enslaved Africans is often muted due to her closeness to the white Wheatley family. This essay recasts Wheatley's "On Being Brought from Africa to America" as a diplomatic treatise that illustrates African Christians exclusion within the faith in colonial America. Drawing on Christianity as a point of identification, Wheatley derives her own philosophical reading from biblical myths, using her enlightened status as an ambassador arguing for the wider acceptance of African Christians within evangelical ranks. This example centers Wheatley's lived experience, her survival of the transatlantic slave trade, and her ability to capture collective grievances in her signature poem. Using both rhetorical and literary studies, this essay considers Wheatley's rhetorical experiments as necessary to the continued evolution of Black rhetoric as offering public discourse during the early national period.