Teaching Phillis Wheatley Peters through Black Liberation Theology

Abstract

This essay argues that it is productive to teach Phillis Wheatley Peters through the framework of Black liberation theology, an exegetical tradition that understands the Bible to be a liberatory text and God as siding with the oppressed. While Dr. James Cone—inspired by theological movements in Latin America, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., and Malcolm X—named this school of thought in the late 1960s, its existence as an interpretative practice and form of life predates Cone's naming by at least two hundred years. Approaching Wheatley Peters's work from this vantage, I show, enables us to teach students how she's challenging and reordering the reining taxonomies of her era. This approach thus scaffolds students away from their most common misreadings of Wheatley as an accommodationist on the one hand, or a savvy manipulator of religious discourse on the other. Black liberation theology also helps us move students beyond their overreliance on irony/sarcasm as an explanatory framework by providing a heuristic that's grounded in late eighteenth-century racial, theological, and sociopolitical tensions.