Haverford College

Join us for a talk in the Kimberly Benston Distinguished Speaker Series, by Brigitte Fielder of the University of Wisconsin-Madison!

This will be a hybrid talk, join the Zoom here.

The now-familiar likeness of Phillis Wheatley that appeared as the frontispiece to her 1773 Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral is an image of, by, and for Black children. The iconic poet was born in the Senegambia region of West Africa and kidnapped into slavery at the age of seven or eight. Her first published poem appeared when she was a teenager, and she was no more than twenty when her volume of poetry was published in London. The volume’s engraving was itself based on the art of another young, enslaved artist, Scipio Moorhead. The “young African painter” to whom Wheatley addressed a poem in her collection was younger than she was, his inspirational portrait of the poet also the creation of an enslaved Black child. African American texts would circulate iterations of Wheatley’s image from Moorhead’s moment of its creation to the present. And the reception of this Black child figure has especially been framed for other Black children. Tracing how Wheatley has been pictured in early Black periodicals, educational materials, pageant plays, and contemporary children’s literature from the nineteenth century to the twenty-first, we see how Wheatley has been imagined  not only as Black woman writer, but specifically as a child creative – someone whose literary acumen was surprising to white adults because of the various intersectional positions of oppression she occupied. Reading these repetitions and reverberations of Wheatley’s image across time shows how picturing Wheatley became a practice for celebrating and fostering creativity among Black children. Wheatley’s (and Moorehead’s) example celebrates not only Black creativity or genius, but Black childhood. Doing so, they highlight the particular conditions of this exceptional person’s poetic production while also de-exceptionalizing Black creative gifts more generally, by employing Wheatley’s iconic image to promote, facilitate, and celebrate future Black creativity.  

Bio:

Fielder is a writer, researcher, and teacher working as an Associate Professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Throughout 2022 she was also an Idol Family Fellow at Villanova University. She studies American literature of the long nineteenth century with emphasis on Black women writers, African American literature, and children’s literature. she is an archival researcher invested in recovery of and access to primary sources, and works in concert with theories of race, species, gender, and childhood. Fielder did her Ph.D. in English at Cornell University with a minor in Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies and has been a fellow at the American Antiquarian Society.

Her published academic research includes a book, Relative Races: Genealogies of Interracial Kinship in Nineteenth-Century America (Duke University Press) and over 30 journal articles or chapters in edited collections. Fielder also writes essays for public readerships in venues including Avidly, the Los Angeles Review of Books, and the New York Times Book Review. Occasionally, she is a guest on podcasts discussing culture, history, and scholarship.

The Kimberly Benston Distinguished Speaker Series was established in 2018 by the Haverford College Board of Managers in appreciation and celebration of the dedication, effectiveness, vision, leadership, and consistently demonstrated ethical values of Kim Benston, Haverford’s 15th President.

You are invited to a Zoom webinar.

When: Apr 13, 2023 04:15 PM Eastern Time (US and Canada)

Topic: "Phillis Wheatley, Inspiring and Imagining Black Childhood" with Brigitte Fielder

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