From Africa to America: The Poetry of Phillis Wheatley NEW - Online

In 1761, Phillis Wheatley arrived in Boston as an enslaved girl from West Africa. As noted in her poem, “On Being Brought from Africa to America,” Wheatley was well aware of that she and other Africans were presumed inferior to whites, yet she defied assumptions by beguiling the literary world with her talent while implicitly challenging the logic of her enslavement. In this course, we examine Wheatley’s poetry and her extraordinary life in the historical context of the American Revolution and the burgeoning abolitionist movement of the late eighteenth century.