Foremother Love: Phillis Wheatley and Black Feminist Criticism [Paperback]

InForemother Love, Dana Murphy examines the importance of eighteenth-century poet Phillis Wheatley as a foundational figure for Black feminist criticism. Murphy establishes Phillis (as she refers to her) as a writer who wrote in response to and in conversation with other creators as well as a critic who was invested in sharing, explaining, and evaluating her own and others’ work and contexts. Indeed, Phillis played a key role in the development of what Murphy calls “foremother love”—the Black feminist depiction of the love of an unrelated feminist ancestor as a legitimate relation for the practice of inheritance, mourning, liberation, and friendship. Drawing on the work of Barbara Christian, June Jordan, Audre Lorde, Barbara Smith, and others, Murphy shows that Black feminist criticism becomes a transhistorical theorization when read in conjunction with Phillis’s labor and vision. Revealing how Phillis lives on in Black feminist criticism, Murphy contends that foremother love is an ethic of critical care that implores readers to recognize the affective labor of all those working in the field.USDana Murphy examines the importance of eighteenth-century poet Phillis Wheatley as a foundational figure for Black feminist criticism.Dana Murphy is a 2024–25 External Faculty Fellow at the Stanford Humanities Center and Assistant Professor of Black Studies and English at Caltech. “Drawing on extensive archival research spanning three centuries and a range of lively poetic reading practices,Foremother Lovemakes important contributions to the broader intellectual history of Black feminist criticism. Dana Murphy’s close readings and analyses articulate a theory of literary historical connection deeply rooted in Black feminist thought and practice to highlight Black feminism’s tools for survival, connection, and knowledge production.”Sonya Posmentier, author of,Cultivation and CatastrophelÀ