The Poetry of Phillis Wheatley in Slavery’s Recollective Economies, 1773 to the Present

Abstract

Like Claire Parfait in her essay for this volume, I will be stepping back to a point in time well before black publishing enterprises reached the advanced states of development to which most of the other essays are devoted. I am grateful to Parfait for having already done so much to help us establish that various twentieth- and twenty-first century developments - to which I myself will turn in my concluding remarks — have deep roots in black publishing enterprises of the mid-nineteenth century, such as those of Parfait’s subject, the early African American historian William Cooper Nell. My own chief endeavor has been to extend this view back to the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century — that is, to an even earlier phase of what we now often refer to as modern print culture, an era during which a new ideological emphasis on the relation of print and identity combined with the proliferation of advanced technologies of production and distribution of printed matter.