Research Article: Wheatley, Phillis

SOURCE: Bassard, Katherine Clay. "Diaspora Subjectivity and Transatlantic Crossings: Phillis Wheatley's Poetics of Recovery." In Spiritual Interrogations: Culture, Gender, and Community in Early African American Women's Writing, pp. 28-57. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999.

In the following excerpt, Bassard focuses on Wheatley's "On Being Brought From Africa to America" as an instance of Wheatley's African American poetics.

In Between Slavery and Freedom, Bill E. Lawson writes of the "functional lexical gap" evidenced by the lack of an appropriate collective nomenclature for descendants of Africans enslaved in the Americas. Noting that "the language we use to frame a group's political and social status can have an impact on the public policy regarding that group," Lawson concludes that "our moral/political vocabulary is morally unsatisfactory and inadequate for characterizing the plight of presentday black Americans" (McGary and Lawson 72). Lawson's important observation about collective designation has its beginnings in the ritual misnamings of...
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