Teaching Phillis Wheatley (Peters) as a Working Artist

In recent years, the challenge of teaching the poetry of Phillis Wheatley (Peters) has been managing my students’ expectations of what constitutes “representative” African American literature and coming to a more comprehensive idea of constitutes both “political” and black art. In managing some initial confusion around Wheatley’s muted response to her enslavement I have landed on presenting Wheatley’s insistence of her work as a poet as “labour” to be the most interesting tact to take with students. For Wheatley it is the imperative of becoming a poet that allows her access to what might be seen as a more vital version of freedom, one that refuses to map onto any specific sense of identity and one that instead draws strength from both stolen moments of creativity and the belief in her work as work. As our students, specifically those pursuing English and other Humanities degrees, face a job market that increasingly devalues creative work, in this essay I will argue that for an enslaved poet such as Wheatley to pursue the work of poetry provides not just a useful teaching moment about the value of artistic labor, but an opportunity to have our students consider how the term labor itself categorically shifts our sense of what does and does not count as “real work.” Drawing on the experiences of teaching both recent work of on Wheatley by Tara Bynum, David Waldstreicher, and Wendy Raphael Roberts, and scholarship of Nicholas Brown, I will discuss the ways in which Wheatley’s position as both an enslaved woman and a working artist raises vital questions on their own future positions in the labor market.