"On Imagination" and Material Culture

Abstract

This article constructs a rich contextual analysis of several objects that appear in surviving records related to the lives of Phillis Wheatley Peters and her husband, and considers the multiplicity of meanings these everyday items may have conveyed. These objects—a nose ring, eight old coats, four silver spoons, and a neighborhood park in Boston—connect the Peterses to networks of global exchange as well as their local communities, and they do so in ineffable and wide-ranging ways. By considering each of these objects, their likely origins and associations, as well as their environmental contexts, scholars can enhance our understanding of the lives of Phillis Wheatley Peters and her husband, and better perceive practices of self-expression and social life that exceed textual self-expression for Black authors in the eighteenth century. These claims find methodological grounding in Wheatley-Peters's poem "On Imagination."