On Being Brought from Africa to America to London: Teaching Phillis Wheatley in the Former Heart of Empire

This essay considers the transatlantic workings of different national formations of anti-Blackness and colonial whiteness across several centuries, by taking the 1773 London publication of Phillis Wheatley's Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral in relation to teaching Wheatley's poetry in London in 2019. The recognition Wheatley received and her careful negotiations with conditional white British benevolence must be understood alongside both the continual British disavowals of ongoing historical anti-Blackness and robust, widespread antiracist resistance, which are often dismissed as foreign problems imported from the United States. In this context, studying and teaching Wheatley dramatizes the threat of a dehistoricized exceptionalism that upholds a model of diasporic Blackness viewed as solely American, rather than convergent with Britishness. A conscientious pedagogy of teaching Wheatley requires attention to the shifting resilience of Blackness encountering adaptive environments of anti-Blackness that can masquerade as tolerant and civil as well as the colonial, eugenicist, bio-essentialist strain of British white feminism. Finally, the challenges of curriculum and classroom are placed into the wider setting of the hostile structures of UK higher education which still attempts to delegitimize Black intellectual traditions, to stifle the field of Black studies, and to undermine the emergence, as well as vitiate the perseverance, of Black scholars.