Love as Method: Teaching Phillis Wheatley Peters and Honorée Fanonne Jeffers

This essay reflects on my experience teaching the poems of Phillis Wheatley Peters as part of an introductory-level literature course called "Making and Unmaking Literary Traditions" in early 2021. Drawing on Honoré Fanonne Jeffers's description of her experience researching and writing The Age of Phillis (2020), I consider how "literary tradition" and historical archives have reproduced writers like Wheatley Peters as academic property, foreclosing the possibility of their being engaged as community. A Black feminist approach that emphasizes lived feeling as knowledge, and honors the attachments and accountabilities that attend bonds of love, generates nonviolent pedagogical conditions for engaging Wheatley Peters's poetry.