The Intellectual World of Phillis Wheatley and the Politics of Genius

Abstract: This article examines the life and work of Phillis Wheatley and her interlocutors to consider how African-descended people conceptualized liberty and formed an intellectual community during the American Revolution. Her poetry and epistolary exchanges, shared with a range of acquaintances in the Atlantic World, reveal an intellectual universe that she created for herself and one that drew her into the political spotlight. Leaders of the founding generation began to question the intellectual possibilities for an African girl in ways that held political implications for the future of slavery. I argue that Wheatley's life and work opens critical avenues for exploring intellectualism as an aspiration of Black life in early America, and that her world of ideas sheds light on the possibilities of Black girlhood in the late eighteenth century.