Archives: "Sister, Wasn't It Good": Archival Gestures, Mutual Witness, and the 1973 Phillis Wheatley Poetry Festival

Abstract

This essay examines how the 1973 Phillis Wheatley Poetry Festival presents its namesake as a figure meaningfully shaped by Black women's critical and creative treatments of her work. The festival draws on and enters into the long tradition of Black feminist communities forged around and through Wheatley's poetry, but its print cultural traces are un(der)documented and un(der)preserved. Following the participants' understanding of the same, this essay argues that the festival's archival impacts must be understood as a register of Black women's intimacies and mutual address documented across its participants' prose, verse, visual art, and performance. Rather than treating on the scantness of the festival's extant ephemera as a phenomenon of anti-Black misogyny alone, this essay maintains a focus on how the participants' serious attention to each other's creative lives challenges its audience to consider Wheatley archives alongside other Black women in her own time and since. In so doing the festival and its participants model a Wheatley studies in which Black women participate as writers, readers, and most critically readers of each other's work.